It's hard work pretending to be a man. You put on heavy work boots and thick work pants, pockets covering pockets which are in turn filled with more pockets, and in all the pockets there are screws, and you have a drill hanging from your belt, and you're bending down and stretching up and lifting things and carrying things and climbing ladders and screwing and hoisting and plugging and taping all the long day long.
And there are so many men, other men in work boots and work pants, their bellies hanging over their belts, thick arms and leathery hands; belching, joshing, ribbing; talking about cricket; asking you to check the transformer, like you have a clue what a transformer is, or does. And the end bit of your drill keeps falling out and you don't know how to make it stay in, you sit there trying to hide what you're doing from the view of the men as you fiddle with your drill, but you know they can see you, and your end bit falls out again, and it doesn't matter that you've read Camus or that you appreciate the abstract impressionism of Mark Rothko or that choosing between "who" and "whom" is the easiest thing in the world to you, because you can't drill with a drill, and you're not a man, and you want to give up and cry.
And you go to the toilet and there are men shitting in all the stalls. Men coughing, men shifting their weight, men playing Jewel Quest at full volume on their phones. Men shirking responsibility, men taking moments to themselves. All sat bowed, vulnerable, separate but together, communing with the gods. Plops, grunts, the unrolling of roll. The lighting harsh. The blues and the greens. The echoes of the room. And you go in a stall, and you shit, and it is good.
And the day passes. And you graft. You do everything there is to do. And after a day of grafting you get in the van and Steve drives you up the motorway, and you are empty in that glow of honest exhaustion, and you smell the sawdust in your hair, rub the blisters on your hands, feel the ache in knees and thighs, and the sun goes down, and BBC Radio 2 plays, and you are a man, in a manner of speaking, and you are fine.
Monday, 10 September 2018
Sunday, 9 September 2018
Day 135: Ascended
Much of the problem is that in a lot of contemporary stories, i.e. films and TV, the actual vital element of the quest is often hidden. In Back to the Future the quest is for Marty McFly to go… well… back to the future. He’s trapped in the past and must find a way to return home. But that’s not really the story. The story is that his ordinary world has fallen into stagnation because his father couldn’t stand up for himself, because the whole family lets life happen to them, rather than they happening to life. And Marty must journey over the threshold into a magical kingdom, a pastel-and-bubblegum 1950s, and penetrate to the heart of the cancer, and rejuvenate his teenage father, and his world.
So many of our stories are like this, hiding the true meaning in subplot, or beneath layers of imagery, and you can only fully see and understand the tropes like meeting the goddess and apotheosis by peeling back these layers.
It can also be tricky because mainstream cinema, with its three-act structure, tends to deform and contort Campbell’s perfect circle somewhat, to provide the most satisfying emotional payoff for the audience. The first act is usually the time to establish the protagonist and their ordinary world. Show them bored at work, bullied at school, trapped in routine, in an unhappy marriage, whatever is the status quo. Then comes the call to adventure, and the act ends with the crossing of the threshold. So a quarter of the journey, in a third of the film.
The second act is usually the road of trials, meeting a gang of plucky sidekicks who will help them out and villains who will try to thwart their progress. A snappy training montage.
Then the stuff at the bottom of Campbell’s circle, everything I was discussing yesterday, gets drawn out across the end of act two and much of act three. Take The Matrix. Neo meets a sort of goddess in the Oracle, roughly halfway through the film. But the truth she imparts actually takes Neo a lot of screen time to fully process and assimilate. He goes on a final trial - to rescue Morpheus - and then must face the father/power-centre in Agent Smith, and even touch defeat and death, before he reaches apotheosis, a rebirth into godhood. Then the final quarter of Campbell’s circle (which I’m going to break down in a post soon) is squashed into the very last moments of the film.
I guess the circle is the archetype, it’s every element progressing to the next with minimum effort. You’d perhaps have a dull story if you timed it out too precisely. By stretching that emotional core down at the bottom of the circle out across much of the latter half of the film, you build to a crescendo that delivers a powerful climax, floods the audience’s brains with chemicals of release, then a rapid comedown of denouement leading out to the end titles and the lights come up and the audience leaves still aglow in that post-coital wash of happy and exhausted emptiness.
OK I’ve got to go soon, I’m off for the rest of the day and all of tomorrow to help my friend with some manual labouring work - but let me just have some more of a think about The Matrix before I go…
So the Oracle is the goddess, she represents the vital energy of the Matrix’s cosmos. What Neo learns from her is that he isn’t the One, that he’s not special, that he’s close but no cigar. But really, I think, what he learns is that prophecies are bullshit. He learns that there’s no external force separate from himself that is going to imbue him with power and turn him into a hero. There’s no magic sword for him to lift that will transform him into a hero.
But he decides he’s going to go rescue Morpheus anyway. Screw all this noise. He doesn’t need a prophecy - he doesn’t need what is in fact yet more structure foisted upon him from the outside. If he wants to face what is too terrifying to face, if he wants to go on the true journey into the centre of the dark fortress (although at this stage he’s still only going in to get his friend and get back out) then he’ll damn well do it by himself.
This is a vital moment of self-discovery. That it is our own individual will that drives us. That you can feel like your ship is buffeted on the winds - either through a robot simulation that controls your very perception of reality, or a prophecy that forces you into the framework of a hero - or you can stand at the wheel sailing that ship. This is the second most important discovery Neo makes, and it is accompanied in the film by a great visualisation of him coming into this power. Guns. Trenchcoats. A hotel lobby that gets utterly, insanely, decimated.
But then what’s the most important discovery? It’s after Neo plucks Morpheus from the clutches of the evil that cannot be faced, gets him to safety, and then, instead of running, turns back around. The evil that cannot be faced will destroy anyone who is not ready, but Neo is ready. Agent Smith stands before him. Neo crouches into his fighting stance, crooks his finger, beckons. Bring it.
The embodiment of every dark aspect of the subconscious, everything that we fly from, and the hero who has become master of his own destiny: these two stand and spar. The flurries come too fast for us mere mortals to track. Any of us would be torn apart. But the hero remains, matches blow for blow, drives the darkness back.
He earns a respite, and now is the time to flee. These are the voices of his allies, the mere mortals, the last remnants of his ego, telling him to run. He does so, and it looks like he will escape, and then he turns a corner and there the evil stands, waiting, and pierces him through the heart.
Because here is the final and most important discovery. The hero who finds their own agency, who begins sailing their own ship, what they discover in the heart of the deepest darkness, the truth that most cannot stand to look upon, is that the ship and the ocean upon which it sails are one and the same. The hero is the darkness, and the darkness is the hero. Self is Other, and Other is Self.
Neo cannot die to Agent Smith and the forces of eternity, because Neo has realised that he himself is those forces of eternity.
He rises, the doors of perception cleansed, seeing reality as it truly is, in all its splendour (and late-90s computer graphics). He doesn’t even have to duel with Agent Smith any more, there is no fight, the thing that cannot be faced is nothing, is chaff to the wind. Forms rise and fall. All individuals die, but only as waves on a sea that is eternal. Neo is the waves, but Neo is also the sea. Death and life, these are but mutually-arising concepts signifying something greater and beyond their two extremes. Neo has touched the realm of this beyond, touched and become it. He is ascended.
So many of our stories are like this, hiding the true meaning in subplot, or beneath layers of imagery, and you can only fully see and understand the tropes like meeting the goddess and apotheosis by peeling back these layers.
It can also be tricky because mainstream cinema, with its three-act structure, tends to deform and contort Campbell’s perfect circle somewhat, to provide the most satisfying emotional payoff for the audience. The first act is usually the time to establish the protagonist and their ordinary world. Show them bored at work, bullied at school, trapped in routine, in an unhappy marriage, whatever is the status quo. Then comes the call to adventure, and the act ends with the crossing of the threshold. So a quarter of the journey, in a third of the film.
The second act is usually the road of trials, meeting a gang of plucky sidekicks who will help them out and villains who will try to thwart their progress. A snappy training montage.
Then the stuff at the bottom of Campbell’s circle, everything I was discussing yesterday, gets drawn out across the end of act two and much of act three. Take The Matrix. Neo meets a sort of goddess in the Oracle, roughly halfway through the film. But the truth she imparts actually takes Neo a lot of screen time to fully process and assimilate. He goes on a final trial - to rescue Morpheus - and then must face the father/power-centre in Agent Smith, and even touch defeat and death, before he reaches apotheosis, a rebirth into godhood. Then the final quarter of Campbell’s circle (which I’m going to break down in a post soon) is squashed into the very last moments of the film.
I guess the circle is the archetype, it’s every element progressing to the next with minimum effort. You’d perhaps have a dull story if you timed it out too precisely. By stretching that emotional core down at the bottom of the circle out across much of the latter half of the film, you build to a crescendo that delivers a powerful climax, floods the audience’s brains with chemicals of release, then a rapid comedown of denouement leading out to the end titles and the lights come up and the audience leaves still aglow in that post-coital wash of happy and exhausted emptiness.
OK I’ve got to go soon, I’m off for the rest of the day and all of tomorrow to help my friend with some manual labouring work - but let me just have some more of a think about The Matrix before I go…
So the Oracle is the goddess, she represents the vital energy of the Matrix’s cosmos. What Neo learns from her is that he isn’t the One, that he’s not special, that he’s close but no cigar. But really, I think, what he learns is that prophecies are bullshit. He learns that there’s no external force separate from himself that is going to imbue him with power and turn him into a hero. There’s no magic sword for him to lift that will transform him into a hero.
But he decides he’s going to go rescue Morpheus anyway. Screw all this noise. He doesn’t need a prophecy - he doesn’t need what is in fact yet more structure foisted upon him from the outside. If he wants to face what is too terrifying to face, if he wants to go on the true journey into the centre of the dark fortress (although at this stage he’s still only going in to get his friend and get back out) then he’ll damn well do it by himself.
This is a vital moment of self-discovery. That it is our own individual will that drives us. That you can feel like your ship is buffeted on the winds - either through a robot simulation that controls your very perception of reality, or a prophecy that forces you into the framework of a hero - or you can stand at the wheel sailing that ship. This is the second most important discovery Neo makes, and it is accompanied in the film by a great visualisation of him coming into this power. Guns. Trenchcoats. A hotel lobby that gets utterly, insanely, decimated.
But then what’s the most important discovery? It’s after Neo plucks Morpheus from the clutches of the evil that cannot be faced, gets him to safety, and then, instead of running, turns back around. The evil that cannot be faced will destroy anyone who is not ready, but Neo is ready. Agent Smith stands before him. Neo crouches into his fighting stance, crooks his finger, beckons. Bring it.
The embodiment of every dark aspect of the subconscious, everything that we fly from, and the hero who has become master of his own destiny: these two stand and spar. The flurries come too fast for us mere mortals to track. Any of us would be torn apart. But the hero remains, matches blow for blow, drives the darkness back.
He earns a respite, and now is the time to flee. These are the voices of his allies, the mere mortals, the last remnants of his ego, telling him to run. He does so, and it looks like he will escape, and then he turns a corner and there the evil stands, waiting, and pierces him through the heart.
Because here is the final and most important discovery. The hero who finds their own agency, who begins sailing their own ship, what they discover in the heart of the deepest darkness, the truth that most cannot stand to look upon, is that the ship and the ocean upon which it sails are one and the same. The hero is the darkness, and the darkness is the hero. Self is Other, and Other is Self.
Neo cannot die to Agent Smith and the forces of eternity, because Neo has realised that he himself is those forces of eternity.
He rises, the doors of perception cleansed, seeing reality as it truly is, in all its splendour (and late-90s computer graphics). He doesn’t even have to duel with Agent Smith any more, there is no fight, the thing that cannot be faced is nothing, is chaff to the wind. Forms rise and fall. All individuals die, but only as waves on a sea that is eternal. Neo is the waves, but Neo is also the sea. Death and life, these are but mutually-arising concepts signifying something greater and beyond their two extremes. Neo has touched the realm of this beyond, touched and become it. He is ascended.
Right. And on that note I'm gonna post this bad boy up, and go ascend to the role of lifter of heavy objects. See ya!
Day 134: Story Structure Notes # 3
[Part one]
[Part two]
OK let's do this. We're talking story structure. The hero's journey and the monomyth. So I've looked at how stories are a descent from an ordinary world into a magical realm of subconscious imagery and chaos, to attain some goal, and then a journey back, bringing something of the darkness up into the light, integrating it into the status quo, using it to heal the wounds of the ordinary world and set a new normal.
After the Call to Adventure and the Crossing of the Threshold, after a succession of challenges faced along the Road of Trials, the hero finally reaches the deepest, most mystical point of their quest.
This is the stage, at the bottom of the circle, that Joseph Campbell refers to as the Meeting with the Goddess, and the Atonement with the Father.
The hero, representing the striving of the discrete, impermanent Self, has journeyed to the beating heart of the cosmos, and here touches something everlasting and boundless, and learns that they and it are one and the same. This universal energy, growing from the tree of life, flowing from the spring of life, is symbolised in the Goddess, an archetype of all that is desired and blissful and nourishing. In meeting with her, possibly joining with her, the hero discovers that her grace is also their grace, her lifeforce their lifeforce, whether they be lowly pig farmer, downtrodden beat cop, or nerdy high-school kid.
After, or instead of, this meeting, the hero may face whatever represents the highest power structure of their story's universe. This power is symbolised in the father - in the ogre terrorising the village, the sorcerer atop the black tower, the head terrorist, the main bully, the T-Rex, the director of the CIA, or the uber-macho cyborg Terminator sent back from a hellish future on a mission to erase the hero from existence.
The hero faces this, and reconciles with it - through peace and understanding, or sticks of C-4 and a hydraulic press. But either way, the old power is dissolved, and the hero takes up the new.
It should be noted that the goddess doesn't have to be a woman, and the father doesn't have to be a man. These symbols have been used because our stories have grown out of sexist, or at least patriarchal, societies, and for straight men nothing represents nourishment like motherly goddesses, desire like nubile goddesses, and existing power like father-gods. But it doesn't have to be that way.
The point is that in the inner sanctum the hero finds either (or both) the opposite of everything that was stagnant at the outset of the journey, or the centre of the rigid structure that was causing the stagnancy. The first is flowing, living, chaotic. The second is firm, unyielding, ossified. A fountain, or a dragon guarding a fountain. And in this space, having shattered the old world order, the hero floats, weightless.
In Garden State, Zach Braff's character Andrew Largeman begins the film trapped in stasis. Bored, failing at adult life, numbed by antidepressants, it takes a literal call to adventure, on his telephone, informing him of the death of his mother, for Andrew to begin a journey to break apart that stasis. Returning home for the funeral, he stops taking his medication, and enters a world of shifting symbols and uncertainty and adventure. He encounters allies, and is tested in the trials of navigating the road into adulthood. He meets a woman, Sam, played by Natalie Portman, who in some ways functions as an ally, but in her romantic relationship with Andrew also represents the goddess, the selfless loving aspect of the universe that Andrew has been denying himself since as a child he caused the accident that paralysed his mother, which paralysis would ultimately lead to her death.
So Andrew and Sam and some old school friends sit around a fire at the heart of the movie's narrative. It's late at night. Andrew has been stripped of the trappings of his ego through his trials, and stripped of his literal clothes through some impromptu pool partying. He sits by the flickering fire, wrapped in a blanket, and when someone asks just what happened to his mother all those years ago, anyway, he finds he is finally ready to talk.
He tells the story of the horrendous mistake he made as a kid, a little kid, too young and innocent to be held accountable, he now sees - and the power structure of guilt and regret and a pain too hot to go near is finally and fully melted, crumbled apart, and Andrew and Sam are left, as the other friends conveniently slip away, to commune with the universal in the most tried and tested way a man and a woman have yet found.
Later, when Andrew confronts his father, standing up to him, forgiving him for the fact he could never forgive Andrew for his childhood mistake, it is mostly a formality. The atonement has already occurred within Andrew, and this is but a playing out.
In Clueless, which is the best teen comedy ever made, fyi, the protagonist Cher's meeting and atonement comes when she faces the fact that it is she herself who has been "clueless", that she has been focused on her own petty needs and ego rather than on the people closest to her, and that scuzzy, annoying, awkward-dancing Paul Rudd is the man her heart has desired all along. These truths were always there, underneath all else, waiting to be discovered - but it took Cher a long road of trials to prepare herself for finding them.
The next steps of the hero's journey, again related, again not necessarily separate, are termed by Campbell as Apotheosis and the Ultimate Boon.
Apotheosis is the hero's transcendence into immortality. Touching the living energy of the universe, recognising the truth of Being, the hero comes to embody the very power they sought. Whether through a meeting with the glory of the goddess, or a smashing of the structure of the father, the hero ascends to become not a ship tossed on the seas of life, but the tumult of the ocean itself.
If the hero is in an action film, now is when they force themselves up from a major beating and go kick ass - think Neo reborn and dodging Agent Smith's blows with ease at the end of The Matrix. If they're Luke Skywalker they turn off their targeting computer and discover they know when to fire their missile through oneness with the Force. In Hook the apotheosis is the moment the miserly lawyer, who had been repressing his childlike joy and sense of wonder, finally finds how to fly, and becomes Peter Pan. It's the point the hero steps into the role they were always born to take, the mantle they were born to wear, when every false garment of ego has been shed and they stand bright and shimmering and coursing with eternal life.
And this is great for them, but the hero's journey is not about getting to be a badass, but healing the ills of the world. The Ultimate Boon refers to some element of the state of weightless power that may be snapped off and brought back across the barrier from the depths of the magical realm and into the ordinary world. It is the pearls of wisdom, the elixir of life, the golden fleece. If the hero's journey was a search for a missing princess, then the boon is the princess herself - because sadly women are often relegated in stories to an embodiment of everything that was vibrant and living in a kingdom that has been lost. The princess is a symbol, she lacks agency, she is not a human but a pointer for, I don't know, a branch aflame with the graceful fire of the chaos world that must be brought back to light the darkness of the home, let's say. And there's nothing wrong with being a symbol, now and again, but if all I ever saw of my gender in thousands of years of stories was as a stand-in for a magical twig, I'd be pretty pissed off as well.
Anyway, the Ultimate Boon is about completing the hero's cycle. As in the Taoist symbol of yin and yang, the hero must return or smuggle back from the depths some spoonful of darkness into the light. The healthy light world contains a dash of darkness, the healthy life a touch of death. In a gorgeous parallel, the hero is the single fleck of the ordinary that may penetrate the inner sanctum of magic, and in return a single fleck of the magical - the Ultimate Boon - may be brought back into the ordinary. And in such a way balance may be restored, and the truth remembered that beneath the illusion of the separateness of all things, whether order and chaos, life and death, or Self and Other, everything is in fact one.
But bringing this boon back is easier said than done. Next time I'll finish this series off by looking at the Journey Home...
[Part two]
OK let's do this. We're talking story structure. The hero's journey and the monomyth. So I've looked at how stories are a descent from an ordinary world into a magical realm of subconscious imagery and chaos, to attain some goal, and then a journey back, bringing something of the darkness up into the light, integrating it into the status quo, using it to heal the wounds of the ordinary world and set a new normal.
After the Call to Adventure and the Crossing of the Threshold, after a succession of challenges faced along the Road of Trials, the hero finally reaches the deepest, most mystical point of their quest.
This is the stage, at the bottom of the circle, that Joseph Campbell refers to as the Meeting with the Goddess, and the Atonement with the Father.
The hero, representing the striving of the discrete, impermanent Self, has journeyed to the beating heart of the cosmos, and here touches something everlasting and boundless, and learns that they and it are one and the same. This universal energy, growing from the tree of life, flowing from the spring of life, is symbolised in the Goddess, an archetype of all that is desired and blissful and nourishing. In meeting with her, possibly joining with her, the hero discovers that her grace is also their grace, her lifeforce their lifeforce, whether they be lowly pig farmer, downtrodden beat cop, or nerdy high-school kid.
After, or instead of, this meeting, the hero may face whatever represents the highest power structure of their story's universe. This power is symbolised in the father - in the ogre terrorising the village, the sorcerer atop the black tower, the head terrorist, the main bully, the T-Rex, the director of the CIA, or the uber-macho cyborg Terminator sent back from a hellish future on a mission to erase the hero from existence.
The hero faces this, and reconciles with it - through peace and understanding, or sticks of C-4 and a hydraulic press. But either way, the old power is dissolved, and the hero takes up the new.
It should be noted that the goddess doesn't have to be a woman, and the father doesn't have to be a man. These symbols have been used because our stories have grown out of sexist, or at least patriarchal, societies, and for straight men nothing represents nourishment like motherly goddesses, desire like nubile goddesses, and existing power like father-gods. But it doesn't have to be that way.
The point is that in the inner sanctum the hero finds either (or both) the opposite of everything that was stagnant at the outset of the journey, or the centre of the rigid structure that was causing the stagnancy. The first is flowing, living, chaotic. The second is firm, unyielding, ossified. A fountain, or a dragon guarding a fountain. And in this space, having shattered the old world order, the hero floats, weightless.
In Garden State, Zach Braff's character Andrew Largeman begins the film trapped in stasis. Bored, failing at adult life, numbed by antidepressants, it takes a literal call to adventure, on his telephone, informing him of the death of his mother, for Andrew to begin a journey to break apart that stasis. Returning home for the funeral, he stops taking his medication, and enters a world of shifting symbols and uncertainty and adventure. He encounters allies, and is tested in the trials of navigating the road into adulthood. He meets a woman, Sam, played by Natalie Portman, who in some ways functions as an ally, but in her romantic relationship with Andrew also represents the goddess, the selfless loving aspect of the universe that Andrew has been denying himself since as a child he caused the accident that paralysed his mother, which paralysis would ultimately lead to her death.
So Andrew and Sam and some old school friends sit around a fire at the heart of the movie's narrative. It's late at night. Andrew has been stripped of the trappings of his ego through his trials, and stripped of his literal clothes through some impromptu pool partying. He sits by the flickering fire, wrapped in a blanket, and when someone asks just what happened to his mother all those years ago, anyway, he finds he is finally ready to talk.
He tells the story of the horrendous mistake he made as a kid, a little kid, too young and innocent to be held accountable, he now sees - and the power structure of guilt and regret and a pain too hot to go near is finally and fully melted, crumbled apart, and Andrew and Sam are left, as the other friends conveniently slip away, to commune with the universal in the most tried and tested way a man and a woman have yet found.
Later, when Andrew confronts his father, standing up to him, forgiving him for the fact he could never forgive Andrew for his childhood mistake, it is mostly a formality. The atonement has already occurred within Andrew, and this is but a playing out.
In Clueless, which is the best teen comedy ever made, fyi, the protagonist Cher's meeting and atonement comes when she faces the fact that it is she herself who has been "clueless", that she has been focused on her own petty needs and ego rather than on the people closest to her, and that scuzzy, annoying, awkward-dancing Paul Rudd is the man her heart has desired all along. These truths were always there, underneath all else, waiting to be discovered - but it took Cher a long road of trials to prepare herself for finding them.
The next steps of the hero's journey, again related, again not necessarily separate, are termed by Campbell as Apotheosis and the Ultimate Boon.
Apotheosis is the hero's transcendence into immortality. Touching the living energy of the universe, recognising the truth of Being, the hero comes to embody the very power they sought. Whether through a meeting with the glory of the goddess, or a smashing of the structure of the father, the hero ascends to become not a ship tossed on the seas of life, but the tumult of the ocean itself.
If the hero is in an action film, now is when they force themselves up from a major beating and go kick ass - think Neo reborn and dodging Agent Smith's blows with ease at the end of The Matrix. If they're Luke Skywalker they turn off their targeting computer and discover they know when to fire their missile through oneness with the Force. In Hook the apotheosis is the moment the miserly lawyer, who had been repressing his childlike joy and sense of wonder, finally finds how to fly, and becomes Peter Pan. It's the point the hero steps into the role they were always born to take, the mantle they were born to wear, when every false garment of ego has been shed and they stand bright and shimmering and coursing with eternal life.
And this is great for them, but the hero's journey is not about getting to be a badass, but healing the ills of the world. The Ultimate Boon refers to some element of the state of weightless power that may be snapped off and brought back across the barrier from the depths of the magical realm and into the ordinary world. It is the pearls of wisdom, the elixir of life, the golden fleece. If the hero's journey was a search for a missing princess, then the boon is the princess herself - because sadly women are often relegated in stories to an embodiment of everything that was vibrant and living in a kingdom that has been lost. The princess is a symbol, she lacks agency, she is not a human but a pointer for, I don't know, a branch aflame with the graceful fire of the chaos world that must be brought back to light the darkness of the home, let's say. And there's nothing wrong with being a symbol, now and again, but if all I ever saw of my gender in thousands of years of stories was as a stand-in for a magical twig, I'd be pretty pissed off as well.
But bringing this boon back is easier said than done. Next time I'll finish this series off by looking at the Journey Home...
Saturday, 8 September 2018
Day 133: Sleep is for the sheep
Well, I fell asleep. Home from work, wanted to sit at my desk with a mug of Earl Grey, ambient music playing, and settle into some writing, not knowing where it would take me, go on an adventure, get done early and have the rest of the evening to relax. But then I fell asleep, and napped through until now.
I think I’m coming to see that the way I live is not healthy for me. Like, obviously. But specifically my sleeping patterns. Pretty much since being a teenager I’ve turned myself into a night owl, but I don’t think underneath I naturally am a night owl. Just by accident I've listened to a few podcasts recently that have discussed sleep, and they’ve all said that people fall into categories of when they should sleep. Some people thrive off going to bed at 10pm and getting up at 5am. Some people work better late at night, and should go to bed at 2am and get up at 10pm. We are not all the same, and there isn’t one perfect sleep schedule that suits us all.
I stay up ridiculously late, then sleep as long as I can the next day. Partly from working in bars for years, but I was doing it before then as well. I’m not naturally productive at night, but I can force myself to be. I’ve written many posts at 3am, eyes bloodshot, the house around me silent.
But as a child I’d wake up very early, 5 or 6 in the morning. I never had a problem getting up for school, I didn’t use an alarm and would rise quickly and get into the bathroom without internal strife. As a teenager I loved sleep, and would stay in bed all day if I could, but this wasn’t because I couldn’t get up, more just that it was so lovely being warm and safe under the covers.
But then I started drinking regularly, and at uni I had few 9am lectures, and I got into the habit of staying up later and later. There were plenty of drug-fuelled all-nighters, bleary days rising at the crack of dusk. I went through a period educating myself on classic films, reading Roger Ebert’s list of important movies, buying stacks of them on DVD from Play.com - and I’d watch them by myself with a joint and a bottle of bourbon, starting late in the evening, ploughing through a couple a night in a magical liquid realm where the edges of things blurred and the world was my own and Tartovsky and Scorsese showed me what cinema could do. It was like the mirror of my six-year-old self getting up at dawn to watch cartoons by himself.
... I want to write quickly here because it’s past midnight now and the point of this post was supposed to be that I’m going to try going to bed earlier and rising earlier and seeing if it makes a difference - but this sleep schedule seems to me indicative of a larger movement in my life: away from my natural tendencies and purposefully towards a crafted persona as someone edgier, cooler, less utterly lame, than I saw my younger self as being, looking back as a teenager.
And I know why. I was bullied for a long time in secondary school, for being wet, weak, nerdy, for being a mummy’s boy, for reading The Lord of the Rings and wearing Debenham’s own-brand clothes and being axiomatically, unfeasibly clueless.
And I think so much of what I did in my later teens and early twenties was an attempt to reforge myself as my peers (I felt) thought guys should be. I started skateboarding, listening to punk music, smoking weed, turning away from all responsibility. And I think staying up all night and sleeping all day was at least partially tied to that.
And, yeah, probably that is the story of every teenager ever. I guess what I’m thinking now is that I never really found my way through that. I never went too far in a few wrong directions, got lost, and then discovered an equilibrium and a place that I was comfortable being me. I’m still looking.
But then, maybe that’s also more common than I assume.
But anyway, I think much of what I’ve been doing recently has been reappraisal. Returning to long forgotten modes of being and reevaluating them now as an adult. I’ve been drinking all my adult life, drinking too much, and basing much of my identity around alcohol. To a lesser extent also with marijuana, other recreational drugs. So I’m experimenting with stopping completely. I spent so many years hiding my love of nerdy things, the less macho aspects of myself, hiding the things I thought people wouldn’t like. So now I’m trying to be more open about all that, even as it makes me itch with embarrassment. I never used to talk about the struggles with acne I’ve had since I was fifteen, so I’m forcing myself, slowly, to write about that.
And I think a good next step is to try going to bed early and getting up early, see if that works better for me. Just to be curious.
I think I’m coming to see that the way I live is not healthy for me. Like, obviously. But specifically my sleeping patterns. Pretty much since being a teenager I’ve turned myself into a night owl, but I don’t think underneath I naturally am a night owl. Just by accident I've listened to a few podcasts recently that have discussed sleep, and they’ve all said that people fall into categories of when they should sleep. Some people thrive off going to bed at 10pm and getting up at 5am. Some people work better late at night, and should go to bed at 2am and get up at 10pm. We are not all the same, and there isn’t one perfect sleep schedule that suits us all.
I stay up ridiculously late, then sleep as long as I can the next day. Partly from working in bars for years, but I was doing it before then as well. I’m not naturally productive at night, but I can force myself to be. I’ve written many posts at 3am, eyes bloodshot, the house around me silent.
But as a child I’d wake up very early, 5 or 6 in the morning. I never had a problem getting up for school, I didn’t use an alarm and would rise quickly and get into the bathroom without internal strife. As a teenager I loved sleep, and would stay in bed all day if I could, but this wasn’t because I couldn’t get up, more just that it was so lovely being warm and safe under the covers.
But then I started drinking regularly, and at uni I had few 9am lectures, and I got into the habit of staying up later and later. There were plenty of drug-fuelled all-nighters, bleary days rising at the crack of dusk. I went through a period educating myself on classic films, reading Roger Ebert’s list of important movies, buying stacks of them on DVD from Play.com - and I’d watch them by myself with a joint and a bottle of bourbon, starting late in the evening, ploughing through a couple a night in a magical liquid realm where the edges of things blurred and the world was my own and Tartovsky and Scorsese showed me what cinema could do. It was like the mirror of my six-year-old self getting up at dawn to watch cartoons by himself.
... I want to write quickly here because it’s past midnight now and the point of this post was supposed to be that I’m going to try going to bed earlier and rising earlier and seeing if it makes a difference - but this sleep schedule seems to me indicative of a larger movement in my life: away from my natural tendencies and purposefully towards a crafted persona as someone edgier, cooler, less utterly lame, than I saw my younger self as being, looking back as a teenager.
And I know why. I was bullied for a long time in secondary school, for being wet, weak, nerdy, for being a mummy’s boy, for reading The Lord of the Rings and wearing Debenham’s own-brand clothes and being axiomatically, unfeasibly clueless.
And I think so much of what I did in my later teens and early twenties was an attempt to reforge myself as my peers (I felt) thought guys should be. I started skateboarding, listening to punk music, smoking weed, turning away from all responsibility. And I think staying up all night and sleeping all day was at least partially tied to that.
And, yeah, probably that is the story of every teenager ever. I guess what I’m thinking now is that I never really found my way through that. I never went too far in a few wrong directions, got lost, and then discovered an equilibrium and a place that I was comfortable being me. I’m still looking.
But then, maybe that’s also more common than I assume.
But anyway, I think much of what I’ve been doing recently has been reappraisal. Returning to long forgotten modes of being and reevaluating them now as an adult. I’ve been drinking all my adult life, drinking too much, and basing much of my identity around alcohol. To a lesser extent also with marijuana, other recreational drugs. So I’m experimenting with stopping completely. I spent so many years hiding my love of nerdy things, the less macho aspects of myself, hiding the things I thought people wouldn’t like. So now I’m trying to be more open about all that, even as it makes me itch with embarrassment. I never used to talk about the struggles with acne I’ve had since I was fifteen, so I’m forcing myself, slowly, to write about that.
And I think a good next step is to try going to bed early and getting up early, see if that works better for me. Just to be curious.
Maybe I'll find with all these things that I was happy where I was (though I doubt that). Maybe I was made to drink beer and stay up all night, and be a weird mix of intellectual and stoner and dropout and pansy and nerd. Who knows? I sure as hell don’t. But it’s worth getting curious about it, I think, shaking it all up, seeing what happens.
So, yeah, all of which means: I'm going to bed right this second. Good night.
So, yeah, all of which means: I'm going to bed right this second. Good night.
Friday, 7 September 2018
Day 132: BlacKkKlansman
Released to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the fascist rally in Charlottesville - during which a white supremacist rammed his car into counter-protesters, murdering one, and then Donald Trump made snivelling, sycophantic excuses for the neo-Nazis - the film, detailing the true story of a black cop infiltrating the KKK, leaves no question as to the parallels it draws between then and now, nor of whom it blames.
A number of Klan members make reference to the need to "make America great" again. During a scene where the protagonist derides as implausible the thought of a lying racist buffoon becoming president, Lee could only be more on the nose if he walked out from behind the camera and winked at the audience. And the ending of the film dissolves into real footage from Charlottesville, and Trump's cowardly response, with such force that it left me gasping back tears. BlacKkKlansman is not playing. It sees the problem, and it's making damn sure that you see it, too.
But it's an odd film. The subject matter is shocking, yet the storytelling itself is safe, even formulaic. John David Washington (son of Denzel) plays Ron Stallworth, an undercover cop who bags an invitation to the Colorado Springs chapter of the KKK, using fellow officer Adam Driver as his white stand-in during face-to-face meetings.
What follows are the plot beats of every cop movie you've ever seen. The outsider rookie having to earn his place in the department. The disapproving commanding officer. The tense first undercover meeting. The moment it seems like the subterfuge is blown. The distraction at the last moment. The one member of the gang who has his suspicions... And so on, right up to the neat yet expected climax.
There's a love interest, played with nerve and verve and strength and cool by Laura Harrier, but it's a depressingly traditional role, and she ends up with little to do. In a film so concerned with equality, it's a shame that there's not more parity between the male and female characters. Passing the Bechdel test would have been a good start.
So the main thrust of the script is familiar, deploying a successful but well-worn version of the Hollywood structure, even if Lee's energetic, playful direction, and the excellent performances, elevate the material.
Yet in a way it feels like this is the point. The comfortable plot is really only a delivery method for the film's message. Lee is raging, and he wants you to rage, too. The bright, cartoony world of BlacKkKlansman, where good guys are heroic and bad guys get their comeuppance, makes a number of stand-out, tonally different scenes all the more shocking for their incongruity. You enjoy the story, you settle in, and then Lee reminds you that, hey, black people have been being shot and burned and hanged and raped and mutilated and run the fuck over by obscene, white-man-driven muscle cars for as long as we all can remember, and the recent surge in popularity of the far-right is only the intrusion into quiet middle-class life of an ugliness that has never once disappeared for people of colour.
The film is an appeal to emotion, a piece of rhetoric, and it is unapologetic about that. It uses storytelling and filmmaking techniques to make you empathise with its characters, to care about them and hope they win out, and even as the fictional narrative sees them succeed, the real world, messy and complicated and terrifying, comes rushing in, mocking you for enjoying such an easy ride.
There's a black power speech that Stallworth attends early on where Lee films rapt black faces singled out in the spotlight, staring up contemplating the struggles each of them has faced for no reason other than that they were born black in a white America, and it's like a stinging slap to the audience, with the accompanying shock of tears.
Later on Harry Belafonte has a cameo as an ageing civil rights activist who relates the true life story of the lynching of Jesse Washington, horrifying, repugnant, and he's as good as talking directly to us. He discusses social feelings of the time, the release of The Birth of a Nation, holds up real photographs of the crime. Once again we're skewered in our seats, given zero room to wiggle free. We were in the safety of a predictable story, but suddenly this is all too real.
And then there is the ending, and the final documentary footage, and all the neatness of what has come before is upended, and we are left paralysed, shocked, and broken.
In BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee uses the main weave of the film - solid and structurally sound and, yes, hilarious - to lay a comforting blanket for us to rest upon, and then he yanks it out from under us. "Liked these people, did you?" he asks. "Well this is what America has in store for them."
And the credits play, and you walk out of the cinema blinking in the late afternoon sun, and you feel sick, you feel dizzy. But most of all, you feel angry.
Thursday, 6 September 2018
Day 131: Untangled
Woke up hating myself this morning. All the usual reasons. I'd overslept; rather than seizing the day I'd rolled over and spent the last two hours feeling pinned to the bed, thinking how the healthy decision would have been to get up, but feeling unable to do so. And I was thinking about my writing, how I'm not pushing myself enough, how disappointing it all is, how simple and safe and boring. How I'm not making any progress. I'm trapped in stasis. How I've been eating ready meals and oven pizzas most nights again, and averaging one piece of fruit every other day. How I haven't been shopping at Unwrapped. How I never follow through on plans. The moment things get difficult I give up. How I'm a worthless waste of space, a pathetic ugly moronic loser.
Like I said, all the usual reasons.
And then I got up and stood in the shower. I got out of the shower and dried myself with my towel. I did my teeth, did my beard. Put on clothes. I took a bag for life and an empty Kilner jar and walked to Unwrapped, and then to the greengrocer's on the corner. I ate breakfast - cornflakes with milk, satsumas, an apple, a banana, a croissant - washed up, made a large pot of coffee.
I paid my rent, checked some dates on the calendar, did some other sorting work. I briefly felt awful that I still don't really get the next part of the story-structure stuff I've been putting off for weeks - but then I watched an episode of Community and made notes about the hero's journey, made notes about Bourne Identity, read up on story circles online... And by the time I had to get ready for work I felt like I had a better grasp on the subject than ever before.
And, OK, I know all that is not very impressive. It's pretty much the bare minimum that an adult should be achieving. But for me it was a big deal. This self-loathing I feel every day is such a weight on me. It is self-sustaining. It perpetuates itself. You feel worthless and that saps you of all energy, which makes it impossible to do the things you know you should be doing, which makes you feel all the more worthless.
I have had so many mornings waking up like this morning and letting that weight of negative thoughts crush me. Churning over in my head all the reasons I'm a failure, each reason leading to ten more reasons, which each lead to ten more, spreading outwards, forming strands between what were disparate incidents - the social failure last Thursday, the sense of loneliness in the corner of the party last month, not buying enough fruit yesterday, classmates laughing at me decades ago - the strands solidifying into a thick web that encompasses my entire consciousness, with me enmeshed in the centre, trapped and tiny and helpless, unable even to struggle, unable to move even a finger.
And once that process starts spinning up it's so difficult to halt, it carries its own energy and the energy builds as it goes, and often I'm not conscious it's begun, and then suddenly it is everywhere. And struggling only tangles me worse, the energy to fight back can so easily just go into energising the self-loathing, and then I get frustrated, and then feel helpless, and then suffer more.
So to feel the beginnings of that happening this morning, but then to gently, lightly climb over the first of the webs, to walk away and get on with the mundane work of my day, well for me that is huge. I'm going to recognise that that is huge. I'm going to feel good about it.
I'm going to give myself that.
Like I said, all the usual reasons.
And then I got up and stood in the shower. I got out of the shower and dried myself with my towel. I did my teeth, did my beard. Put on clothes. I took a bag for life and an empty Kilner jar and walked to Unwrapped, and then to the greengrocer's on the corner. I ate breakfast - cornflakes with milk, satsumas, an apple, a banana, a croissant - washed up, made a large pot of coffee.
I paid my rent, checked some dates on the calendar, did some other sorting work. I briefly felt awful that I still don't really get the next part of the story-structure stuff I've been putting off for weeks - but then I watched an episode of Community and made notes about the hero's journey, made notes about Bourne Identity, read up on story circles online... And by the time I had to get ready for work I felt like I had a better grasp on the subject than ever before.
And, OK, I know all that is not very impressive. It's pretty much the bare minimum that an adult should be achieving. But for me it was a big deal. This self-loathing I feel every day is such a weight on me. It is self-sustaining. It perpetuates itself. You feel worthless and that saps you of all energy, which makes it impossible to do the things you know you should be doing, which makes you feel all the more worthless.
I have had so many mornings waking up like this morning and letting that weight of negative thoughts crush me. Churning over in my head all the reasons I'm a failure, each reason leading to ten more reasons, which each lead to ten more, spreading outwards, forming strands between what were disparate incidents - the social failure last Thursday, the sense of loneliness in the corner of the party last month, not buying enough fruit yesterday, classmates laughing at me decades ago - the strands solidifying into a thick web that encompasses my entire consciousness, with me enmeshed in the centre, trapped and tiny and helpless, unable even to struggle, unable to move even a finger.
And once that process starts spinning up it's so difficult to halt, it carries its own energy and the energy builds as it goes, and often I'm not conscious it's begun, and then suddenly it is everywhere. And struggling only tangles me worse, the energy to fight back can so easily just go into energising the self-loathing, and then I get frustrated, and then feel helpless, and then suffer more.
So to feel the beginnings of that happening this morning, but then to gently, lightly climb over the first of the webs, to walk away and get on with the mundane work of my day, well for me that is huge. I'm going to recognise that that is huge. I'm going to feel good about it.
I'm going to give myself that.
Wednesday, 5 September 2018
Day 130: Junk food
Ohhhh buddy. I have been wiped out today. I don’t even know why. I’ve just got so little energy of late. I had a good day yesterday and used up my energy, and today I had none left. I played Zelda in bed. I roamed through quiet snowfields and over desolate mountains, I found ruins of temples, I cooked potions, I crept around monster camps and battled the monsters and picked up the doo-dads they dropped.
I watched a few episodes of Orange is the New Black, which show I’ve never got round to watching before. I thought it was good. I liked the world building of the prison as an environment, I liked the characters. The balance of cynicism and positivity, of feel-good comedy and sense of peril, is not easy to get right, and it looks like they have done here, mostly.
Umm. I read some Naomi Klein. I watched a video on game design by a guy I like on YouTube. The algorithms on YouTube incentivise video makers to put out continuous low quality content, to splurge out list features and clickbait nonsense about why x franchise has failed and y piece of media will not live up to the hype, and it’s just so much white noise, so much shite, clogging our ears and eyes and brains, everyone yelling louder to make themselves heard over the din, which increases the din, so everyone yells even louder…
And so when you find people putting out difficult, complex, reasoned stuff on YouTube, and you know they’re not making much money but they’re doing it anyway, it’s such a breath of fresh air. Videos that takes months to create, say something worth saying, and yet get a fraction of the views of the crap that everyone else is tossing off twice a day. That stuff is precious. It’s worth celebrating, worth being grateful for, because there are so many factors encouraging the creators to not do it that way.
I watched a few episodes of Orange is the New Black, which show I’ve never got round to watching before. I thought it was good. I liked the world building of the prison as an environment, I liked the characters. The balance of cynicism and positivity, of feel-good comedy and sense of peril, is not easy to get right, and it looks like they have done here, mostly.
Umm. I read some Naomi Klein. I watched a video on game design by a guy I like on YouTube. The algorithms on YouTube incentivise video makers to put out continuous low quality content, to splurge out list features and clickbait nonsense about why x franchise has failed and y piece of media will not live up to the hype, and it’s just so much white noise, so much shite, clogging our ears and eyes and brains, everyone yelling louder to make themselves heard over the din, which increases the din, so everyone yells even louder…
And so when you find people putting out difficult, complex, reasoned stuff on YouTube, and you know they’re not making much money but they’re doing it anyway, it’s such a breath of fresh air. Videos that takes months to create, say something worth saying, and yet get a fraction of the views of the crap that everyone else is tossing off twice a day. That stuff is precious. It’s worth celebrating, worth being grateful for, because there are so many factors encouraging the creators to not do it that way.
It’s like everyone within that sphere is saying how you can get rich by selling ultra-processed junk food, how that's the only viable way to make money, yet a few people would still rather stay poor yet cook meals that are worth eating. And that is good. People like that are good.
OK, I'm done, I'm gonna go pass out. Noight noight.
OK, I'm done, I'm gonna go pass out. Noight noight.
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