March 31, 2005
It's All the Communist Blanket.
I love it when life comes together and makes sense.
I'm watching a documentary on Hitler and Stalin, mostly because I'm reading about Shostakovich right now who had to deal with Stalin quite a bit and they had a strange relationship and all that.... But the point is that things that I learned from the Shostakoich books line up, reinforce, and add to what i'm watching on TV. Not only that, but I can now extend the connection to the video "Frida" about artist Frida Kahlo, because her and her husband (artist Diego Rivera) harbored philosopher Trotsky for a while, who was was running from Stalin. Stalin's assasination attempt eventuallyl prevailed.
I can now connect shostakovich to frida kahlo. Amazing.
But wait, there's more. This all gives me a much better frame to put George Orwell's "1984" into. Stalin was an obsessive micro-manager. He took personal control over almost all aspects of Soviet life. He would dictate the arts, literature, the economy, the government, the people's lives (and deaths), and he would even control history. Varius figures (like Trotsky) were photo-retouched out of photographs, newspapers, posters... People's lives were erased, people's pasts were erased, people themselves were erased as they were sent to the Gulag. They were simply passed into the memory hole.
And so we come to the idea that has been dominating my mind an consciousness for the past few months - Forgetfulness. The existential kind. As i've said before, It will be a sad day when, long after your death, the last record of your existence is wiped from the planet, probably represented as a particular configuration of small pieces of magnetized metal in a hard drive that contains a database with your name and email used to send you emails advertising for canadian viagra. When that hard drive crashes and is thrown out, your life and all that you felt was important will be forgotten. With how the wonderful internet works, I sometimes get brainwashed to believe that every detail about life is accessible somewhere and you just need to know the right search term to get it. But the real world is not like that. You can be forgotten. Correction: you will be forgotten.
Some philosophers will say that this is a result of that ever-present, very real, but seldom-defined entity in all of us that we term "existential angst." Perhaps, but whatever this is has been in mankind since cavemen first put the realities of their existence onto a rock wall with blood and stone. (Incedentally, maybe science just confirmed what we knew all along, that something fundamental about our existence is in blood. If you are shouting to an unhearing world that you ARE, what better medium than blood?)
If anyone should be in charge of preserving my history, the events of my life, the thoughts in my head, it should be me. But I can't remember but a few isolated events from my childhood. An out of body image of my mother putting me to bed. Running up the white mounds of the badlands on vacation. Balancing on a limb of a tree in the forest behind my house. Playing a board game with my family and accidentally swearing and how deathly quiet it got. I can't remember the way I thought in freshmen year of high school. I've had to half-rember, half-fabricate the thoughts I had when i first met Kristin. I am a benign Stalin, reinventing my own past to suit the whims of the present.
And so I post blogs. And so I have a black book to write down my days in. And so I write songs, personal songs, that I desire to be heard by many people. And so I desire, like everyone else, to go out and "make something of myself," which is really just code for "do something that will allow me to be remembered for slightly longer than most."
Ooh man I think I could really get into the X-files. Back-to-back episodes. I was never allowed to watch them... If anyone loves me a rediculous amount, they should buy me the DVDs of these. Cuz they rule. Episode 2 Update: Shoot there's 5 minutes left and its pretty unresolved... They can't do TWO "to be continued"'s in a row, can they?? Oh the HUMANITY!! UPDATE #2: oh life is good. These shows are an hour, not a half. Peachy keen.
I've made a lot of connections to and from seemingly unrelated entities in this entry. I've put a lot of history and lives into a specific context. Only connections can transform history into people's lives. With all this forgetfulness going on, there are definite limits to how much we can know, to what we can understand about the past and consequently, the present. Oh schoot. This is where my info-freak nature really doesn't jive well with the world. I do not reaching the end of the line when it comes to what can be known. Of course i could never know everything that there is to know in this world, limited as that may be. But I can easily think of questions that can never be answered. These are the personal ones. The kind that may some day my great grandson will be able to answer about me, should he care to ask. And that's what this thought is about.
And on an unrelated (I think) note: I hate the term "coming-of-age" when applied to a work of art, i.e. a coming of age novel. It presents a false dualism, since almost all personal works of art relate to trying to explore some part of themselves - all personal art is "coming of age" so the label is useless, so stop selectively using it. /Rant
Oh and another thing. There's an awful lot of commercials these days that feature a guy-girl couple that have some sort of problem to solve (buy a new car, get over the intolerable boredom of broadcast television, etc...) and the men are the dullards and the smart sassy self-righteous women have already solved the problem. I guess this is payback for all the beautiful women on TV who have been paired up with ugly men, ala King of Queens. Can't we all just get along? /Rant2
Posted by pedalboy at March 31, 2005 1:37 AM
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Matt,
Rant # 1: Women are finally getting some respect around here! All-be-it, TV may not be the best place to explain that women can have the answers too, but hey, whatever works.
Rant # 2: X-Files is freakin' awesome. I'm glad you're into them. I only watched up until David Duchovny left the show because then it all turned to crap. My mom has every season on DVD. Maybe, if you're nice, I'll bring a set back to college for you to watch...
Rant # 3: I've been thinking about what you called "being remembered" a lot lately. Probably due to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance... anyway, that's not the point. The point is, I think it's all just a bunch of egoism. Who are humans to say that we want to be remembered by all the other humans in the world for generations to come? I'm not sure I want to be remembered. All that matters is my life and how it effects others NOW. If, on my death-bed, I can say that I wasn't a bitch to anyone, I would think my life fulfilled. Excuse the swear, I thought it was appropriate... Anyway, I'll develop this idea further and talk to you about it. Right now it's kind of just floating around in my brain...
I've thought of the whole being remembered thing too alot over the past few years, which has been depressing due to the fact that I do not see my life heading in any direction in which I'll make a difference. But I can say is that it is the natural way of life, we live to immortilize ourselves. At the most basic sense, every animal on the planet lives to immortilize themselves through reproduction, passing their seed. This is evident in humans too, in the stereotypical parents with a single 30 year old offspring who they never stop nagging about getting married and giving them grandchildren.
However, historically, many (though not all) humans have taken immortality to a new level. They’d rather pass on their memory than their genes (in the movie Troy, Achilles is given the option of children or glory…he chooses glory).
Some people take this to an even worse level, and that is where human nature becomes dangerous. When they realize there is no good they can do to be remembered, and do something horrendous. Suicide cults. Mass murders. Anything they can do to ensure their place in the human consciousness for years to come. In the end, what’s the difference between fame and infamy if all you care about is immortality?
And since I spent so much time quoting the book Diary by Chuck Palahniuk in the last post, I’ll leave you with another one that I found appropriate for this post:
"We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will."
(Sorry, Diary is the first book I've read in a while...and your posts are so on topic with what I just read. If you make your next post about inspiration or enlightenment, or essenic jews or jain buddhism, I will be freaked out)
Yeah, I kind of hear you on the whole forgetting stuff thing. I remember a lot more than some people, but its always the really random things. Sometime's they are really cool memories, like my friends my freshman year in college bursting into "Lean on me" in the hallway when I'd had a bad day.
The only other thing that worries me about this topic though, is my tendency to write only when I'm feeling bad/sad about things. While sometimes I write stuff that's slightly more open, I usually write as a form of therapy. Sometimes when I go back over and read my journal it seems like my life must have been one big angry torture session. Buts its not, those are just the days I feel like writing the most.
I've been doing somewhat better with this with just writing stories and thoughts into my blog, but yeah.
And the x-files do rock. So who knows what you're going to find on your lawn sometime this summer...
Yeah, I kind of hear you on the whole forgetting stuff thing. I remember a lot more than some people, but its always the really random things. Sometime's they are really cool memories, like my friends my freshman year in college bursting into "Lean on me" in the hallway when I'd had a bad day.
The only other thing that worries me about this topic though, is my tendency to write only when I'm feeling bad/sad about things. While sometimes I write stuff that's slightly more open, I usually write as a form of therapy. Sometimes when I go back over and read my journal it seems like my life must have been one big angry torture session. Buts its not, those are just the days I feel like writing the most.
I've been doing somewhat better with this with just writing stories and thoughts into my blog, but yeah.
And the x-files do rock. So who knows what you're going to find on your lawn sometime this summer...
Katie, for someone who is supposedly as deeply connected to community as you are, I'm surprised to hear you say that being remembered doesn't matter. I'm not necessarily talking about fame and imfamy here, but a connection to your past. Wouldn't you want your great great grandkids to be able to know who you were a little bit? To make a personal connection to you even after you are long dead? Oh go listen to andrew osenga. he'll set you right.
Allison, you are SO dead-on. I write as therapy too. I write a lot of songs about depressing, meloncholy stuff. Even my love songs are depressing. Sometimes I think i feel depressed more deeply than happy. And it is REALLY hard to write a profoundly happy song. Oh believe me, I've tried. Maybe I don't understand the good like I understand the bad in life.
Schoot dang Allison, I love you. You rock.
weird, i just read a poem by keats about being remembered, it was strangely comforting--and he was never recognized while alive and died barely reaching 26 which i think adds to it.
WHEN I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love! - then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
and thought of another one by shelley who also died young, but it's really ironic and cynical.
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
skaught you freakin' rule. I can't really follow that up very well but to say that death is the great equalizer.
I am definitely more in line with the keats poem. I was talking to katie g today and we decided that it isn't about fame and infamy for us. We want to be remembered in our family and friends etc... I don't REALLY feel a need to be in a history book. That isn't really what i'm going for. I don't need a monument and a great city. I am more afraid of losing my own memories through the imperfections of my mind. Definitely the first poem, though it sounds more like the protagonist there is almost more afraid of not living his life to the fullest, rather than forgetting what has been lived. Or something.
However, I find it disturbing that you didn't have anything to say about the MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THE WHOLE ENTRY: the X-Files... j/k. But seriously... Becoming a fan. Not like I actually have time to watch.
how could i forget! i LOVE the x-files, it was more of a response to the responses-
i used to watch it all the time when i was younger and still watched tv. my favorite one, although i love the serious stuff, was...(ok i just looked it up cause i'm a loser) s 3 ep 20, jose chung's "from outer space". one of the funniest and best written things i've seen.
