Two days off in a row is a rare boon, almost a vacation, considering the breakneck schedule I’ve been running on as of late, averaging about 80 hours a week. The downside is that I have to work 12 days in a row, which basically just really sucks. Around day 10 I start getting extremely cranky, and by day 11 I’m ready to bite people. But I can’t do anything about it except call in sick, which is, at times, tempting.
I think perhaps that I have been eating very poorly lately. Which is not to say that I haven’t been eating—to the contrary, I’ve been eating quite a bit of junk food. But I think that’s the thing. The empty calories are starting to get to me. I decided to take a vitamin pill today and felt tons better. Maybe it’s just placebo effect, but I’m beginning to suspect that my steady diet of hospital cafeteria food and drive-through cuisine is quite low on essential nutrients.
I felt like my brain was working a lot better this evening. Like my third eye opened or something. (Yes, that was a cryptic Gnostic reference to Philip K Dick’s VALIS trilogy, but I won’t elaborate on that here.) Ideas flowed a lot better. I’m not as anxious as I’ve been (although I guess I’m still anxious.)
I watched “Pan’s Labyrinth” this afternoon, which was actually quite perfect, if a touch violent. Well, war is violent, and in the end, this is a war movie, set in the waning days of World War II in Spain, with the victorious fascist army mopping up the communists. But it melds the personal with the political and with the fantastic quite marvelously.
What it actually reminded me a lot of is “Mirrormask” which similarly involves a little girl who discovers that she may be a princess (or is at least the döppleganger of a princess) and it occurs to me, how many little girls dream of being princesses? (I think of my sister and her current aspiration of being a revolutionary, and find it fitting into my train of thought, but I digress.) Although the fantasy in “Mirrormask” is an allegory entirely of the personal, whereas in “Pan’s Labyrinth”, it melds together the political and the personal.
In any case, I’ve tangentially touched upon China Miéville’s reworking of the fantasy genre in order to use it as a vehicle for speculative politics. I really dug how he infused New Crobuzon with the gritty political corruption of capitalism and with Marxist sensibilities of impending, although flawed, revolution. Del Toro realizes something similar in “Pan’s Labyrinth” and I don’t think you can dig the movie without fully appreciating the specific political aspect of it. (More of this line of thought is better elucidated by this blog post that summarizes essays regarding Miéville’s Iron Council as well as Miéville’s own responses to these essays.)
The story of the rose and its poisonous thorns appears to represent humanity’s quest for utopia, perhaps even romanticizing Marxism—Marx’s eschatology is supposed to lead to sustainable economies that don’t require exploitation to maintain—the metaphoric eternal life that the rose offers. But instead, no doubt because of human nature, all we get are the thorns—Stalinism, the Cold War, and the sad inability to wean ourselves from the tit of fossil fuel.
But like all fantasy, all myth, we eventually have to ask ourself, is it true? The rose may not give eternal life, after all, although it doesn’t help that we’ve stopped trying for it.
Del Toro seems to point in that direction, though, that it’s not real at all, it’s just the crazed imaginings of a twelve-year old girl who finds herself in the hellish midst of all-out war. But like the Spanish communists fighting Franco’s fascists, the myth keeps us alive, allows us to frame ourselves in terms of nobility and ignominy. This comes out, paradoxically, in the character of General Vidal, who seems to be living with the burden of a family mythology—his father, the perfect soldier who died in battle. Whatever his sadistic impulses, and never mind that he is a fascistic thug, he feels compelled to uphold this mythology, fixated on leaving his son a similar legacy—the broken watch with the time of his death, and his name. And we perhaps gain an inkling that the only way to extirpate the evil created by these kinds of obsessive, impossible, fantastic myths is to destroy the myth entirely, and cut the cord of transmission.
And in the midst of our current dire conflict, with the possibility of conflagarating into World War III as Israel asks for airspace permission in case they need to bomb Iran, and as the wardrums beat ever loudly here in the U.S. despite our populace’s growing disgust for this seemingly meaningless debacle, I can’t help think how fitting these ideas are.
Here we are, some 1400 years since the time of Muhammed, and presumably two millenia since the time of Yesua the Nazarean, and like all myths, there are good parts and bad parts, and it seems that this never-ending war is based solely on the bad parts. Never mind that the majority of Muslims and of Christians actually read their respective sacred scriptures and realize that God finds hatred deplorable. How can you mistake something like “Thou shalt not kill”? There are no exception for self-defense or times of war in the book of Exodus, at least not in the copy that I’ve read.
And it seems like the only way to rid ourselves of this never-ending evil is to obliterate the myth.
(But would we be more content knowing that such a rose exists, even if it nearly impossible to attain, or would we be better off just aiming a missile at the mountain upon which it sits, removing it entirely from all possibility?)
And I think of Vidal’s doomed soldiers, trying to contain a populace full of rebels, where you can’t at all tell who is your ally and who is your enemy, and I immediately think of our soldiers in harms way in the Desert, commanded by blundering idiots who either have no conception of the intricacies of myth, or are perhaps too inured in their embryonic myth of the New American Century.
(Interestingly, one can imagine that the reason why Vidal fails to see the faun is not because he is not really there, but because he is too caught up in his own fascist mythology and can’t help but disbelieve. Similarly, perhaps the reason why W and Cheney continue to fail miserably in this ridiculous imperial war is that their mythologic beliefs disable them too acutely.)
But myth and fantasy is all about one thing, and that is hope. I find it poetic that, despite all the reactionary and unenlightened elements that many leftist critics deplore in Tolkien, his main theme is nonetheless quite relevant, perhaps the last piece of mythology that has survived the backlash against the 1960’s. And it is indeed quite fantastic: that a single individual, faced with the overwhelming power of mastery— enough to rule the entire world—that this individual would seek to sacrifice himself in order that such power may be destroyed, instead of claiming it for himself and making the world in his own image. That this individual would rather that the world moved along its own trajectory, neither defiled by great evil nor reshaped by what interested parties might wrongly call “good.” This is a fantasy, a myth, that is worth carrying on from generation to generation, even though it may never in a million years happen.
I’ve prattled on and on and on about things I barely understand, but perhaps that’s all that moment of epiphany was: the coming together of a hundred million little thoughts into this confused half-formed concept of the intersection of myth, fantasy, and politics. We are, I suppose, at the crux of something big, the consequences of which we can’t even hope to predict.
As I headed south on the 805, “Sit Down, Stand Up (Snakes and Ladders)” by Radiohead started playing on my iPod, and when it got to the part that goes “the raindrops, the raindrops, the raindrops, the raindrops…” it actually started sprinkling, and it stopped exactly when the song did.
I suppose I’m still in a phase of mental regression. For the past five weeks or so, ever since my cousin died and I went on vacation, I’ve found myself trying to recreate my childhood. Playing video games. Obsessing about fantasy worlds. Re-exploring Middle Earth. Even screwing around with emulators, trying to play old-school cRPGs from way-back-when. The Bard’s Tale. The Shard of Spring. Final Fantasy I.
I have always fantasized about breaking out of this material plane. Reality has never really done it for me, and I’ve always dreamed about wallowing in fantastic landscapes where magic actually worked, unicorns and dragons existed, and a nobody like me could actually make or break the world. Call it quixoticism. Call it mental illness. Who knows?
But, as always, my thoughts turn to the master himself, good ol’ J.R.R. Tolkien, who mined the mythologies of England, Germany, and Scandanivia and wonderfully synthesized it all to create a new mythology for a post-modern world.
It is said that Tolkien created Middle Earth because he felt that the modern English state had no authentic indigenous mythology, because the modern English state was really a hodge-podge culmination of the various waves of cultures that had come and conquered England and then in turn were conquered themselves. The Celts. The Romans. The Anglo-Saxons. The Vikings. The Normans.
In college I found myself yearning for a similar synthesis of for a Filipino mythology, or, I suppose, more accurately, a Filipino-American mythology. In the same way, Filipino culture is a palimpest of waves of colonization. The Ati. The Igorot. The Malay. The Arabs. The Spanish. The Americans. The Japanese. And in a way that is dissimilar to England (perhaps), it exists in a semi-fragmented state. The Philippines is an abstract colonial construct made real only through revolution, one that has never been allowed to completely succeed (and despite political independence, the Philippines still retains a client relationship to the American Empire.) And so the disparate tribal territories almost seem like more natural divisions. The Tagalogs. The Visayans. The Ilocanos. The Igorot. The Moro.
And it was a revelation when I came to understand that the Austronesian people of South East Asia share a common culture, and a common mythology. In the same way that England, Germany, and Scandinavia are connected, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, the aborigines of Taiwan, the Micronesians, and the Polynesians are also connected.
I also owe an intellectual debt of gratitude to Ursula K. Le Guin, whose work seems to have taken root in my subconscious. Is it mere coincidence that Earthsea is an archipelago, populated by brown-skinned people whose way of life revolves around the forces of nature and the balance of energy? Ged is necessarily my favorite archmage.
But I find myself struggling to make manifest this new world that lives in the inside of my head, using it to make the various aspects of my life, my history manifest in a way such that mere description would be lacking. I realize the Tolkien disliked allegory. Le Guin is more free with adding a touch of politics to her work. Nonetheless, their first aim seems to always have been to tell a good story, and I’m not sure if I could assemble a plot even if pre-fabricated pieces were given to me with IKEA-like instructions.
What I have, mostly, is a map. And maybe a fragmented history, and a nebulous creation mythology. And I suppose there is this temptation to try to peg my time and space into this phantasmagoria, and try to make it “representative” of my life as a brown male born into a country that I can’t feel is completely my own, with an entirely different world tugging at my heartstrings, making me dream of ancestral roots in the “homeland.”
I can only make it represent me, and I guess that’s ultimately what it’s about. Telling my story, letting you see the world as I see it, refactored and reamalgamated. In this post-modern world everything that is worth doing has been done already, and all we can do is rearrange the pieces, and maybe incrementally mutate things here and there. I suppose there is always the magical realization that the sum is always greater than its parts. Despite Tolkien being more of a classicist and a throwback to a bygone age, his creation of Middle Earth nonetheless echoes a post-modern methodology and aesthetic, without which I’m not sure it would’ve flourished as well as it has. (Various critics will call him reactionary, but I think that is an overly facile reading.)
All this mental masturbation leads me to something that I found extremely interesting about Tolkien’s unfinished works. I was flipping through The Lost Road at the Borders the other day and read about one of Tolkien’s first ideas about the fall of Númenor and the breaking of the world. The part that he kept was that the Blessed Realm of Aman was rent from the earth and lifted into the upper sky, so that it was impossible to journey to it by sea. And despite this intervention by the Eru, the exiled Númenorians continued to try to reach Aman by constructing flying ships, still failing.
I realize that flight had been invented already by the time Tolkien had written all this, but I can’t help but think about the mythical airships that are iconic of the Final Fantasy series, and while Tolkien eventually axed most of this from his cannonical mythology, he did keep the Vingelot and Eärendil’s flight into the skies.
Which leads me to the curious coincidence (or is it?) found in Hayao Miyazaki’s excellent animated film “Laputa: Castle in the Sky.” The heroine of the film is from a place called Gondoa. When I watched Disney’s English dub version of the film, I kept thinking that the characters were saying Gondor.
Middle Earth and airships. I dig it.
If it’s the last thing I do, I will at least finish a Tolkien-clone novel. Screw being a famous writer. Hell, screw being an artist. If the best thing I ever finish is mere fanfic, so be it.
A lot of random little things have happened in the past month and a half that have really sent my brain reeling. In some ways, it feels like Christmas was just a little while ago, when I was wallowing in an irrational, meaningless episode of depression, and ever since it’s been an emotional rollercoaster.
I feel like a spectator in my own life. Most of the events of the past six weeks or so have had their greatest impact not on me, but on those around me. In some ways, I feel like I’m a supporting character on a sitcom, or maybe an unnamed crew member on a Star Trek episode. Most of my life is lived vicariously through other people’s triumphs and defeats. In the meantime, I’m just kind of chugging along and putting in my time.
Believe it or not, this has made me feel quite sorry for myself. While it is inevitable that things will change (for better or for worse), I just feel…I dunno. Stuck, I guess. Sisyphus rolling up that stone.
Part of this is probably because, ultimately, I worry too much, and I can’t seem to stay well anchored in the moment. If I could just stay focused on the here and now, and tend to my garden, I think I would be (mostly) O.K.
Never you mind that I suppose my health is going to shit, but that’s another sad rant entirely, and who wants to live forever anyway?
But. Where do we begin?
What really spun my head around was that my cousin D died a little more than a month ago. She was only 29, married, although no kids. It turns out that she had an underlying medical condition of which I was completely ignorant of, although I’m not entirely sure that it necessarily contributed to her death. Nothing sucks worse than getting a phone call in the early morning telling you that someone you know has died completely unexpectedly. I suppose it troubles me that I’ve been on the other end of the phone, letting people know that their loved ones have just died.
It is, I admit, an irrational guilt.
Then there is the notion that, had I known of her illness, given my particular profession, maybe I could’ve given her some advice. But we all know that that’s a fantasy, and there are just some things that you can’t control.
I suppose this is tied in to my lack of concern about my state of health. I am extremely overweight and am a newly diagnosed hypertensive with an HDL that is dangerously under the target level with a first-degree relative who recently had an MI. I also seem to have depression. (As an aside, statistics say that I am probably more likely to die from suicide than from a heart attack at this rate, but, you know what they say about statistics.)
The fact of the matter is that I feel like I’ve fucked my body up too much to even bother doing anything about it. I kind of hope that there is such a thing as reincarnation and then I can just start all over with a new life and maybe actually eat right and exercise.
When in truth, I know that there’s no such thing as too late. As long as I’m alive (and ambulatory) I suppose I can put some kind of effort into my survival.
It is touching to know that my family worries that I will die prematurely. I’ve harbored this strange fantasy that whatever I do, I’m going to die young, and probably won’t get very far past 50. (Meaning that I am well past half-way with my life as it is.) I don’t know how I came to this conclusion, but I wouldn’t be surprised, especially at the rate I’m going.
In any case (and I realize that this is getting increasingly incoherent), I’ve been thinking quite heavily about mortality these days. In this somewhat twisted frame of mind, I embarked on my vacation, and found myself wallowing in childhood fantasies, immersing myself in video games. I spent the greater part of my vacation hiding in the land of Ivalice and finishing Final Fantasy XII, to the exclusion of all social interaction with the outside world. It came to the point where I didn’t bother showering for three days in a row.
It’s clear to me now that there is something wrong with me.
While my parents were in and out going to and coming back from work, my brother was with his girlfriend visiting San Diego, and it was really just me and the dog. I haven’t felt that lonely and abandoned in a really long time.
Eventually I pulled my head out of my asshole and decided to go on a trip to the Bay Area, which I haven’t visited since 2005. I realize that I miss my friends dearly, and I still go back and forth over whether or not I should move out there when I finish with residency. I also realized that San Diego really isn’t my kind of town. I’m not as much of an outdoor person as I thought I would be, and I really miss the culture of a big city. I hate having to drive two hours to L.A. to find something both entertaining and intellectually stimulating. I figure if it’s not L.A. (which I have my own misgivings about), then it’ll be S.F.
I spent one of the days up there hanging out with A and E and their kids at the S.F. Zoo. I still wonder if my life is simply not supposed to go in that direction—you know, the whole finding-someone-to-love-and-start-a-family-with rigamarole. God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, I suppose.
And then it’s back to work, work, work. Don’t get me wrong, there is a smidgen of free time here and there, but I find myself mostly sleeping my days away when I’m not working. There is something of a touch of quiet, resigned despair in my life these days. It’s not that I don’t like what I’m doing, but clearly there are a lot more fun, a lot less stressful things to do with my life. If money were no object.
But we’ve all got to pay the bills, and I suppose a lot of life is simply choosing the lesser of evils. If I have to work, this isn’t the worst thing in the world to be doing.
But somedays I’m just sick of making decisions.
Loneliness. Is it really so bad? There are days where I think I’m just drinking too much of society’s Kool-Aid and buying into the whole single-people-are-fucked-up meme. But then there are definitely days where I sit paralyzed and hopeless, feeling completely abandoned and friendless. This whole me-against-the-world business is tiring and, frankly, just plain sucks, and it would be nice to have someone else in my corner, not just cheering me on, but actually tagging in once in a while to save my ass from utmost defeat.
If it’s not meant to be, it’s just not meant to be.
I woke up yesterday with this random sense of urgency because of a demented dream I had. I dreamt that my ex-girlfriend N who is now married had had her first kid and wanted to come visit me and, I don’t know, let me know how happy she was or something, and I remember being kind of depressed about how in many ways my life hasn’t changed in the past 12 years or so. I also found it strange that A was in my dream (and as a little background, I had the most hopeless crush on A back in college before she hooked up with E and eventually married him) and just her presence there gave me a little courage about facing N.
Hearkening to R’s advice once-upon-a-time, I suppose I should be thankful. I’m not in jail. I’m not being tortured and sodomized in some secret CIA prison. I can get food pretty easily. I’m not being shot at. I have shelter. I’m a (theoretically) functioning, contributing member of society. I’ve got family friends who will help me out when I’m truly and utterly screwed.
What more can a human being really ask for, right?
Validation and a sense of self-worth are, when you get right down to it, luxuries that not all of us are lucky to attain, I suppose.
Here’s to impossible dreams, and forever chasing starlight.
Oh man, now I’m sick. Fevers. Chills. The whole nine yards. It’s probably viral, so all I can do is wait it out. Meanwhile, I’ve been sleeping about 16 hours a day. I’ve still been going to work, so that means that as soon as I get home, I crash out, only to wake up again and drag myself out of bed to go back to work. Fun times.
Feh. Enough whining. For now.