God in Ruins

Spout

Alright. I'm sorry that I've been neglecting my peeps. I thought I could be a hero and manage two blogs at the same time. It's not working out like I had hoped. God in Ruins is not gone. Just posting a little more sporradically. But if you want to read me you can catch a helluva eyeful at my other place of blogging:

http://spout.com

Put it on your blogroll. Between there and here you'll catch me posting something just about every day.

True Confessions

True Confession #1:  I have to admit that I get really excited when somebody I've never met takes a step beyond commenting to reach out via email.  So I was grinning when I got an email from ACM regarding my post Still Wrestling.  I was simply going to reply with another email, but ol' ACM got me ponderin' on an area I felt was post-worthy.  Hopefully, he (I'm taking a leap hear to assume Andy, in this instance, is a name attributed to a male) doesn't mind me posting an excerpt from his email:

"Thanks for the reply and the erudite discussions held on your blog.

I see your point about how fictional voyeurism may cross over into our real-world consciousness, and I agree that the thought is troubling. I know that the public likes to scoff at the notion that certain modes of fiction, like violent movies and raucous music, have something to do with real world violence – school shootings, etc. – but I do believe that personal responsibility can only be partially accountable for violence and the like.

Education, continuous education, is really one of few means of shaping someone’s personal responsibility in the first place. If their sense of ethics is not well formed by education from parents, school teachers, etc., than violent yet successful fictional characters like Tony Soprano may serve as a model of success for some people (adults included).

I am not sure if that is exactly what makes you sensitive to the showings of the Sopranos, but I believe it is a point to be considered nonetheless. I will still watch the show, not because I support the violence or laundering, but because I am firm in my convictions that I the Sopranos are purely fictional family, and if they were not just fictional, than a family to be reprimanded and prosecuted quickly. (I also watch the show because it has a good story line and a sneering sense of humor.)"

Hear, hear, Andy.  True Confession #2:  I had to look up "erudite" in the dictionary.   The definition I found for "erudite" is "learned."  I thought that was funny.  How erudite am I if I had to look up what the word means?  Another definition which I thought might be more appropriate was  "...Erudite meaning “learned” is supposed to have become rare except in sarcastic use during the latter part of the 19th century..."

True Confession #3:  The Sopranos has long been a guilty pleasure (or just a pleasure) of mine.  It is rare for a show to use so much subtext, and therefore treat me like I'm intelligent.  I also agree, education is more the measure of how we as an audience relate to a show rather than simply what is simply put on the screen.  I do not subscribe to the point of view that somehow TV and school shootings are directly linked.  I feel that kind of  propaganda has a serious 1950's era denial that says, "If we don't see insanity, then there is no insanity."  Some people believe that restoring morality means closing the curtains on viewing immorality.  I believe that kind of  approach is akin to trying to kill bacteria by leaving it in a dark, wet place.

But thinking about "continuous education" reminded me of something a man once said, "Children learn nothing from what their parents say, but everything from what they do."  I am young enough to have grown up in an education system that was trying to teach me on the no-win consequences of violence, but where my thoughts on this have really begun to take shape has been entirely outside of the classroom.  I have a friend who has what I am tempted to describe as an allergic reaction to violence.  Together we have watched all kinds of films from different eras and I've seen him wince at the most muted violence from older films that would, today, receive a G rating.  His behavior for a long time puzzled me.   Then, around the time my daughter was born, for reasons I can't begin to articulate I started to develop my own allergy toward violence.  I started to see the characters on-screen more directly as human beings.  I think John Cassavetes saw his characters this way and I was watching his films quite a bit at the time.

True Confession #4:  Then a really strange thing happened.  It became harder and harder for me to look at people in real life as characters.  For example, there's The Homeless Guy or The Prostitute.  These are more character types of people that I relate to rather than human beings.  I found myself feeling compassion toward perfect strangers.  It became more difficult for me to scoff at what I consider to be the Other.  Rather, I was feeling pity or anger or both, but all the while wondering how this person came to be who they are.  Maybe I have begun thinking this way because I have a baby at home and, on some level, everyone I see started off just like her.

So I've started to connect the characters I see on-screen as real human beings, the same way I'm seeing characters in my life more as human beings.  Thus I've been exploring this rabbit-hole question of can we differentiate between characters in our life and characters we see on-screen as cleanly as we think we can?  I mean, wouldn't most actors say their craft is ultimately about becoming that human being they portray when the camera is rolling?  So that, momentarily, the line between performance and real life is erased?  Purely based on my experience it seems that, on some deep and murky level, maybe we do crossover how we view people on-screen with how we view people off-screen, at least just a little bit.

True Confession #5:  Without going into details over the how and why, last night I found myself watching Finding Nemo and at one point I was crying real life tears over computer generated, talking fish.  I'm not proud of it, but it's true.

To take this discussion one step further, I'll refer to an observation made by David Brooks in On Paradise Drive (I should be receiving a percentage on the sales considering how much I write about this book).  It's no little known fact that relationships on college campuses are going more the way of packs, where in everybody is friends and those friends come with benefits (hooking up, blowjobs, sex, what have you) but it is purely an economical form of pleasure with no emotional attachment to get messy with.  In this instance, the women are far more sexually liberated than they were in previous generations, but ironically the men are acting even more chauvinistic than in previous generations (ref:  Girls Gone Wild Vol. 1 - ∞).  Brooks has witnessed (and so have I) that chauvinism seems okay because the guys play it off with irony, like their just playing a character.  It's not real.  But the blowjobs are real, and the fact that they aren't cultivating intimacy is real, and the decision to hook up based not on a person but purely on physical appetite is real.  All of those things lend themselves to the idea of male chauvinism, but the guys are just fooling around.  All of that bitches and hos and show-me-your-tits talk is just funny and ironic.  They are just guys playing a type of fictional character in real life which, coincidentally, falls in line with their real life lack of intimate relationships.  It's all just an entertaining coincidence. 

The line between a fictional character and a real human being is crystal clear.  It's simple.  One is real and one is fake.  Obviously.

George and Me

In the recent dialogue I had with agirlandagun (See Previous Post), I began to wonder if it was serendipitous that our bandying of thoughts and opinions came on the heels of my reading David Brooks' book On Paradise Drive.  I enjoy George's blog and, upon reflection, I was well positioned for a sound academic rebuke which I feel I am the better for.  By the way, thanks George for taking the time to share your passion.  In any case, I'm glad I was able to incite that passion and I'm glad you're reading.  I think it is safe to say that George and I are from two different generations.  When these generations clash (which is most common in a university setting but, gleefully for me, recently happened in the blogosphere) I think we both come out sharper and stronger.

One of many observations David Brooks' makes in On Paradise Drive is that this current generation of college grads is the most achievement oriented and, perhaps, praiseworthy generation in recent history, but this generation has a real aversion to having a strong opinion about anything.  Heated debates that used to take place in the classroom are dwindling because the mindset that "college is a place I go to be formed" has been replaced by "college is a place I go to reach the next level of achievement."  Heated, cross-generational debate is counterintuitive to making the grade and moving on to the next level.  Let me use David Brooks' own words to help bring clarity.  In the following passage, although he writes of professors and students, I think a larger generational gap can also be extracted.

"The faculty at most schools is significantly to the left of the students.  The students know this and accept it as part of the inevitable structure of the universe.  They know who the radical professors are and regard their radicalism as an endearing blemish, the way a professor's absent-mindedness would have been regarded in an earlier generation.  The weird thing is that while most students don't share the radical ideologies, they do find them convenient.

Truth is indeterminate, the (once) cutting edge literary critics argued.  Texts can be deconstructed in an infinitude of ways, and words are signifiers open to a diversity of meanings.  Every point of view deserves respect.  The enlightened person should be open to everything--opinions, lifestyles, and ideologies--and closed to nothing.  One should never judge The Other harshly, but should respect minority or multicultural alternatives.  These notions may have been promulgated by people who thought of themselves as radicals--they were French deconstructionists, tenured revolutionaries, or transgressive countercultural provocateurs.

But these ideas are perfectly suited to the ethos of the achievement-oriented capitalist.  After all, why should the achiever want to make enemies or waste time in angry conflict?...  Easy going tolerance is energy efficient....  In other words, the radical ideas that were first espoused in fits of protest and anger--ideas that were meant to tear down reactionary hierarchies and question the foundations of truth--now seem like convenient intellectual habits for people of mild disposition and strategizing minds."

In my personal perception (and I'm making a point to disclose that now, thanks George) there is a hazy look of  confusion that often passes between George's generation and my generation.  Now I know George was rebuffing me on historical context around Bresson's film and the such, but I'm widening the lens out here to view the interaction as a whole.  You see, in the previous generation radical ideas of tolerance were a holy grail to dedicate one's life to fighting for.  But, for the most part, tolerance has been adapted into the mainstream of my generation's thought.  It has maybe in some ways been commercialized.  It's more economic for everybody to get along.  Getting along saves time and energy.

So I'm watching Bresson wondering, "what is this guy fighting for?"  It is not a given for me as it was in previous generations that there exists a hierarchy and it must be defied.   It is not embedded in my generation's DNA to take on radical ideas for the sake of discovering the depths of truth.  It is more embedded in me to take on radical ideas for the sake of creating a deeper economy, like the Google guys did.  They fought for the better Search Engine and won, and they did it their way; wearing vintage T-shirts and riding Segways.

What excites me about the dialogue with George is that maybe in some ways we were bridging the gap.  His passion for Bresson and the radical ideas of his day mingled and got messy with me, a guy coming of age as part of a generation with very little radicalism infused into it.  Like I said before, I think I'm the better for it.

I say all of this to say that I'm thankful for George and I'm glad we wasted some time to fight over a piece of art and how it should be seen.  Hopefully we've come to a greater understanding around what we believe is that which is imprisons us and that which should be defied until the last, raspy death-rattle.  No matter what our age may be.

Boys II Men

I'm struck by something Joseph Campbell once called "The Father Search."  It's a theme that appears in myths of every culture.  Often it is heard described as a "coming of age story,"  but I think that definition is too narrow.  Coming of Age indicates some sort of threshhold crossed over into maturity.  This happens usually in the early twenties sometime.  The Father Search allows for a birth-like transition that can take place at any time in a person's life.

The Father Search is a term coined from the myth of Telemachus' search for his father, Oddysseus.  Telemachus leaves as a boy and returns a man, basically.  A popular reference of this story would be Luke Skywalker.  He sets out into his life beyond his mother's home where trials then start to draw him from the shapeless boy indentified as Odysseus' son into the man identified as Telemachus.  Of course, he needs help along the way and Athena joins him as a mentor.  This is where things get interesting for me.

Myths are defined as myths and not stories because they have elements that collectively resonate with all of human experience.  Frodo needs Gandalf, Luke needs Obiwan, Arthur needs Merlin, Elisha needs Elijah, and Telemachus needs Athena.  Today we have something that a lot of young twenty-somethings are suffering through which has been called, "The Quarter Life Crisis."  It's the questioning of purpose and vocation that has struck starting with Generation X.  Of course, The Quarter Life Crisis isn't a recent phenomena, it's The Father Search.  Maybe where it starts to feel more like a crisis and not a search is when our shapeless boy can not find a mentor to guide him into becoming a hero.

As a boy standing on the precipice of becoming a man, my first instinct is to run to my father.  Father will take care of everything.  However, like most boys, my father is not around.  So I need a Helper.  Really, the Helper is far better suited for the journey I have to go on than the Father.  Fathers have an unfortunate instinct that tells them to fix their kid's problems.  That makes for a pretty crappy guide into adulthood.  It is only fitting that I set out on my journey to find my father who has the power to fix everything, only to discover through the trials along the way that I have become the man and, if anything, father needs me to take care of him.

But The Father Search can take place at any time.  Most men say they secretly feel like boys trapped in a man's body.  Their Father Search may have been truncated early on because they didn't find their Helper.  So there are grown men, parents now, who have yet to go on their Father Search.  They can be spotted with a little looking.  In a nutshell, in all sorts of different scenarios you'll see them running away.  I have a friend who's dad drives each Saturday from Chicago to Wisconsin to fill up his gas tank.  He claims he does it because gas is cheaper in Wisconsin.  It doesn't matter that he burned through a tank of gas just to reach the cheaper gas prices.  He's running away from Saturday mornings, intimidated by the emotional needs of a wife and three kids.  Monday through Friday he's a false hero at work.  He's a 55 year old man who needs to go on his Father Search.

Then there is his son.  He is starting who is own Father Search which is to say, he is looking for the thing to take care for him and in that looking, with some help, he will hopefully find that he is the strong one who is here to take care of others.  The boy will die along the way and be replaced with the man.  Another way of looking at it is that the thoughts and heart of a boy will be put to death.  In their place will be the thoughts and heart of a man.  Which brings me to my controversial question:  When I consider the recent "phenomena" of the Quarter Life Crisis and the parallel phenomena that Sony now sells more video games to adult males than children, how many men really bother to go on their Father Search anymore?