Lyric and Emotional Sincerity

Everyone, I hope it can be safely assumed, has strong, deeply felt emotions that they occasionally feel an intense desire to share with someone else. They can be feelings of love, hope, anger, despair; which exactly doesn’t really matter. But they must be overpowering. They have to make you want to announce to the world, “I love ___!” or “I believe in God!” or “I have been wronged!” or “I feel so alone!”

The thing about emotions like this is: usually, you can’t tell anyone about them. Unless you’re amazingly good friends with someone, going up to him and saying “I feel so alone” will just result in a moment of extreme awkwardness. This is where poetry comes in.

Poetry (among many other things it does) takes those emotions and captures them in language that by will make the reader feel those emotions, rather than just intellectually realize that the writer felt them at one point. Take an example from the life of (you guessed it) Gerard Manley Hopkins. In 1884, he wrote in a letter to his friend Robert Bridges “WHAT DOES ANYTHING AT ALL MATTER?”. So: what is the reaction of the reader to this? Perhaps pity that someone could be so distressed at life, but probably no more than that.

But look at a one of the “Sonnets of Desolation” that he wrote around that time. I’ll pick “No worst”, as that’s one of my favorites.

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing—
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked ‘No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief’.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

For me at least, these lines do not just convey the idea that Hopkins felt great despair at this point in his life; they force my entire consciousness to, for a few moments, try to take on the emotion that Hopkins felt when he wrote them. The last two lines, especially, echo powerfully in my mind; they express the emotion, one that I have had myself occasionally, better than I ever could.

That brings me to something that I find somewhat odd about poetry, and which I haven’t really formulated an opinion on yet. Namely, the emotional power of the poem is based on how well-written the poem is. More broadly, we demand that what a person says be well-crafted before we will believe what they say. Or perhaps “believe” is the wrong word – “care”, maybe. We don’t care about other people unless they can express their feelings in powerful poetic language. Does this not strike anyone else as odd?

Book Review: The Brothers Karamazov

So, this last week and a half (starting basically when I no longer had to do a bunch of work for Junior Poet) I sat down and read The Brothers Karamazov.

Verdict: It’s amazing, but I just don’t get it.

That is all.

Difference and Indifference

I’ve become aware of an interesting phenomenon over the past month or so regarding the reading of argumentative non-fiction. It’s probably because of the JPo project, in which we read a bunch of literary criticism about our focal poet, but I’ve experienced it regarding other subjects as well, including philosophy and politics.

What I’m talking about without naming is essentially an experience that I’ve had multiple times, in different forms: I read a book. I disagree with the argument of the book, and “officially” declare that to be my response to the book. I go about my life. Days, weeks, or months later, I encounter something related in some way to the argument the book made. I then approach the new situation in the light of the book I previously read, whether explicitly or implicitly, and treat it as providing me a unique insight into the new situation, regardless of the fact that I completely disagree with the book when I originally read it.

I have a theory as to why this happens. Essentially, I think, when I read something, I’ve invested several hours, perhaps days, into reading and thinking about what it is I’ve read; that time spent has created an emotional bond with the material. I may disagree with what it says, but I disagree with it; I don’t just vaguely not like that way of approaching the subject, I have grappled with a particular person’s argument and formed an emotional bond with it – perhaps negative, but still, an emotional.

After writing that last sentence, it occured to me that this seems related to something I’ve written before, I don’t remember where, about interpersonal relationships. To dislike someone is still to have an emotional connection to someone. To actively dislike someone – rather than simply ignoring them – is to have a closer bond with someone than to just vaguely not mind their being around.

Also, I think, a strong enmity is more likely to turn into a strong friendship than into nothing at all; and, in fact, I think it is more likely to turn into a strong friendship than is a weak friendship, by which I mean one where the two people are not good friends not because they don’t know each other well, but because they just don’t particularly like each other, even if they don’t particularly dislike each other. The former case, after all, is just one of changing the type of emotion felt; the latter is one of changing the intensity of emotion, a more difficult proposition.

Movie Review: Sunshine

Yesterday I watched the movie Sunshine (2007). The basic premise is that the sun is dying (and that in only the year 2057! Though apparently there’s an unstated backstory that makes it slightly more plausible, though it’s still scientifically inaccurate), and humanity has to to try restart it. There was a failed attempt seven years ago to deliver a giant fusion bomb to the sun which would somehow fix it, but the spaceship Icarus I mysteriously disappeared, and now they’re launching the Icarus II to try again.

Such is the situation at the start of the movie. We see the eight crew members of the Icarus II, their differing personalities, and what it’s like for them to live isolated on a spaceship for over sixteen months with the fate of humanity resting on their shoulders. So far, so good. This is probably the best part of the movie, actually.

Then our heroes receive a distress beacon from the Icarus I, which has apparently not been destroyed, it’s just sitting out in space somewhere between Mercury’s orbit and the Sun. How this is possible, given that the sun has gravity and would suck the Icarus I right in unless it were in orbit, in which case they’d have really no way of pinpointing the location of the Icarus I in the first place. I might add here that apparently they plan (at first, anyway) to return alive from this mission, after going to the very surface of the sun. It doesn’t make much scientific sense – thus the merit of the movie is determined by whether the psychological insights it has are enough to excuse its scientific inanities.

Anyway, they then try to reach the Icarus I, stuff goes wrong, someone dies due to mistakes in calculations, they they reach the Icarus I but find nothing useful. They do, however, discover that the original reason the Icarus I failed was not machine or human error, but rather sabotage.

The movie goes downhill from here; the man who sabotaged the Icarus I (because he thought it was against the will of God) sneaks on board the Icarus II, kills some people, and tries to sabotage it, barely failing, and the entire crew burns to death as the Icarus II manages to restart the sun.

The most interesting thing about this second half is how scientific progress – restarting the sun – is contrasted with the crazy captain’s religious belief that God wants the sun to die, and it would be hubristic of mankind to try to restart it anyway. Specifically, I found interesting how it contrasts with the dying sun in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. There, religious belief is in fact centered on the idea that some day, the Conciliator will return and bring the New Sun, healing the world in the process, and this hopeful attitude is in contrast to the attitude of the established powers, who don’t want the New Sun to come because it will destroy the current order and bring chaos  – the new sun, when it finally arrives, raises the ocean levels greatly and thus drowns a great part of humanity.

Why would restarting the sun be opposed by religion in one of these worlds and supported by religion in another? The answer, I think, is in how the sun began to die in the first place. In the Book of the New Sun, the dying sun is a result of the natural decay of the star – the book takes place millions of years in the future, and the sun has been in its current state of decay for as long as anyone can remember. Sunshine, in contrast, is set in 2057; the sun would have been in full health as recently as 50 years ago, and its apparent death is brought about by a somewhat incomprehensible force. It is not a natural occurence, and religious believers might view it as an act of God, and thus something not to be fought.

So in a world where the sun dies naturally, in a fully predictable way, there is a religious desire for a rebirth, something that will break the natural order  of things. (The coming of the New Sun, in the BotNS, is often spoken of the same way we speak of Judgment Day). But in a world where the sun is destroyed by something unnatural, it is seen as an act of God, and fighting it is an act of blasphemy.

That’s an interesting idea, I think. It’s a pity Sunshine didn’t emphasize it more; the reasons behind the crazy captain’s religious belief was never fully explained, and that bugged me more than perhaps any other aspect of the movie.

As is, it’s a fun movie to watch, but certainly not the “best movie of 2007″ as I heard some people call it. (I’d probably give that distinction to No Country for Old Men.) It’s just an entertaining movie that attempts more than it actually manages.

The Messianic Secret

So let’s say you have a piece of personal, private news that needs, for whatever reason, to become public. Obviously you have to tell people about it, or it will never become public; how do you go about doing this?

Firstly, what do about those people who ought to know, but you’re not really friends with them – do you tell them directly? No. But what about the people are are friends with? You can’t have the people you should tell directly learn about it from others just because you told someone else first.

So what do you do? You tell the people you need to tell about it, and you say that it’s a secret. Then, since humans are bad at keeping secrets, the information will slowly become public – but slowly enough that everyone who needs to be told directly, can be.

This reminds me, strangely, of the Messianic Secret – that oddity in the New Testament whereby Jesus tells everyone to keep his performing of miracles and general Messiah-ship a secret, when doing so makes little sense. There’s different theological debates about the meaning of this, but what’s always struck me as odd about it is that he explicitly says to keep it a secret, but it doesn’t seem like the people who don’t keep it a secret are doing anything wrong. Why is that?

Well, it’s because there’s certain times when telling people something is a secret, and not to tell anyone, doesn’t actually mean they’re not allowed to tell anyone. It means the news is important, and people need to be told in the right way, but doesn’t mean it is literally a secret that only a select few will ever know about. It seems to me that Jesus neither expected nor desired for the people he told to keep it a secret to actually do so.

But then there are some things that actually do need to be kept secret. As in, um, things that most people ought not to know, because they’re embarassing or whatever. Which means there’s no one behavior that is requested by saying “keep this a secret”. So there are two ways to err in the treatment of someone else’s secret; to misinterpret the latter kind as the former, and to misinterpret the former kind as the latter.

The latter form of misinterpretation (i.e. not telling anyone when it’s acutally OK to do so, for those of you who lost track of my latter-former usage) seems clearly the less egregious of the two. Giving away secrets when you ought not to is much worse. But both seem to involve an error of some sort, one that ought to be corrected. I tend more towards not talking rather than talking too much; perhaps I ought to try to be more loose-lipped.

Empathic Aspies

A radical new autism theory

This is a fascinating article, for me at least. I have a brother with Asperger’s Syndrome (a mild form of autism), and this explanation makes a lot of sense to me based on my observations of his behavior.

Anyway, it’s currently finals week, so no long rants about life, the universe, and everything; I’ll get back to our regularly scheduled programming at some point after Wednesday night.

Polite Dishonesty

I’ve noticed something interesting about people recently. It seems obvious, once you think about it, but it’s worth thinking consciously about, even if it is obvious. That thing is: people are more comfortable being dishonest when it means they’re being polite, even when the person they’re talking to is begging them to be honest.

I’ll give an example to show what I mean: A friend of mine recently got the DVDs of a BBC Sherlock Holmes series. We had been planning to hang out on a certain night, and he proposed to me and one other person that we should watch an episode of this show that night while hanging out. Neither of us thought this was a good idea, but… we didn’t say so. We said stuff like, “well, maybe”, “I don’t know”, “perhaps”, etc. Even when the friend said something (I don’t remember exactly what) along the lines of “really, guys, tell me the truth, I don’t care either way”, we continued to hedge, instead of just saying “no, not tonight”.

Now, both me and this particular friend are not very polite people, in fact we the opposite, but the fact that someone was asking us a direct question to which we knew what answer he wanted was enough to make us really hesitant to answer it contrary to his desires. What this says about humanity is obvious. Put simply, we don’t want to disappoint people.

Now for what this too-obvious-to-state-clearly fact, stated clearly, reveals: It’s cruel and usually fruitless to ask people their “honest opinion” when it is clear what answer you want. Cruel, because it puts them in an uncomfortable situation – if the answer was “yes” (say it’s a y/n question and “yes” is the answer you wanted), they would have said something like that anyway, and if it was “no”, it forces them to find a way to say it so that it won’t upset you while still being “honest”. Fruitless, because if they answer “yes”, you’ll have no way of knowing they’re actually being honest, and if they answer “no”, well, the fact that you were asking for an “honest opinion” means you suspected their answer was “no” in the first place, and so you were probably going to act as if the answer was “no” regardless.

The reason we make such demands for honesty, I think, is that we have a desire for omniscience. In certain situations, we tell ourselves we would rather know the answer, even if it’s “no” when we want “yes”, than go forward with our lives without knowing. The problem is merely demanding certainty does not provide it for us, and we have to live our lives anyway.

Now, the DVD-watching example was a fairly trivial one, but I’m sure you can think of more serious ones. They’ll probably have to do with romantic entanglements of some kind or another. Those are one of the things people take most seriously in their lives and demand the most certainty about, even though those are the very situations where it is most impossible, I suspect, to have that certainty; at least, certainty is possible, but if you’re in a situation where you feel the need to demand it, it’s probably not possible in that situation.

Movie Review: The Cube

Several years ago, my parents and I watched a movie called Cube. It’s a “psychological thriller/horror/science fiction movie” from 1997 about seven people trapped in a giant grid of cubes, 14ft in each direction, with hatches on each face (including top and bottom) that lead to identical cubes (though each cube is colored, some red, some green, some blue, some white). They’re trying to find their way to the edge of the grid so they can escape, but some of the cubes have traps that kill you.

For some reason when I first saw the movie it made a huge impression on me. I actually made a model cube out of K’NEX, with hatches and everything, that could connect to identical cubes (though I think I only made one… maybe I made two, I don’t remember).

Anyway, I saw it again recently, so I think I can now give a good account of what struck me about it when I first saw it. It was the basic premise. It’s a perfect example of the microcosms I find so fascinating. The world is made up of hundreds of connected cubes, some of which are trapped; there are people trapped inside the cube, who have to escape before they die of dehydration; this is the world. Sure, the characters were originally from the “real world”, they did have backstories, but those aren’t important; in fact, the characters’ discussions with each other are mostly about whether or not the characters’ backstories are meaningful, and the movie ends up arguing that they’re not.

Also interesting is the mathematical aspect of it. Without ruining the plot, numbers play a big role in the cube – each cube has an ID number, and they keep trying to find some sort of system based on them to know where they are in the cube and avoid the traps – but, if you know much math and pay attention to the numbers given, the math doesn’t make sense. I suspect this was intentional on the writer’s part, just trying to mess with our heads. I found this really interesting, though perhaps in the end inexplicable and without explanation.

The final reason I liked the movie was that one of the seven characters, named Kazan, was an autistic man – not just Asperger’s or something, but severely autistic. He was also the only sympathetic character in the movie, in my opinion. And his reaction to being in the Cube is fascinating. My favorite quotation from the movie is: “This room is… green. I want to go back to the blue room.”

Now, given what I’ve just said about why I like it… is it really worth seeing? Well, yes, as long as you’re not expecting anything beyond what I’ve explained above. The acting and writing aren’t that good, the characters except for Kazan are rather dislikeable, and the special effects suck; but the movie’s only an hour and a half long, it has an interesting premise, and I would say, yes, it’s worth seeing. It’s certainly enjoyable. So watch it. If you don’t mind illegally downloading things you can probably find a torrent of it fairly easily. Otherwise, I dunno, find it on Amazon or something… though I’m not sure it’s worth paying $14 to buy a copy.

Triangles

Earlier this month, I saw something on a blog I read about triangles and squares, of the literary variety. It’s an interesting idea; odd numbers are tragic, even numbers are comic. I don’t know if I agree with it. The Holy Trinity is odd, after all, but the Christian universe is comic.

But what I find interesting about triangles is how many possibilities
such a simple shape offers. Take your standard tragic love triangle. You have three people – normally, two male and one female, or two female and one male – and each of their personalities. Then you have the different relationships between each of them. For example, Mr. X likes Mrs. Y; Mrs. Y likes Mr. Z; Mr. Z is friends with Mrs. X. Then you have the relationship each of them has to the interactions between the other two. In the given example – Mr. X would probably be upset that Mrs. Y liked Mr. Z and not him. Mrs. Y, perhaps, would not want to get in the way of Mr. X and Mr. Z’s friendship. Mr. Z (who, let’s say, is not interested in Mrs. Y) would
support Mr. X’s ambitions and try to get Mrs. Y to change her mind. And what would never happen is all three of them get together and just talk out their situation. Three is too complicated.

Two is easy. You get two people together, they talk to each other, they work out whatever problems they might have. But with three, people find it hard to be completely honest. They can’t say something to one person without worrying about what the other will think about what was said. This doesn’t make them dishonest, but it makes them not completely honest. Three is too complicated.

I’m reminded of something I read once about Dante’s Divine Comedy. It takes him a long time before he can figure out how to have a scene involving – really involving – three people at once. He had the problem of it seeming like a series of two-way dialogues. Or the part of Perelandra where the Green Lady can’t talk to both Ransom and demon-Weston at once – she keeps going back and forth, but can’t actually have a three-way conversation. Three is too complicated.

On Friendship

I often joke that I have too have friends – my facebook account (yes, I have one of those, unfortunately) claims that I have 168 of them. This is obviously not entirely serious, but, really… isn’t it possible to have too many? I’m not talking about facebook friends, but about the real kind. Can you have too many?

One way of looking at it is, you only have so many hours a day to put into each friendship you have. If you’re not willing to put enough effort into keeping a certain person as your friend, and they’re not willing to spend enough effort to keep you as their friend… well, then you won’t end up as friends. Even if you don’t want to say that you need to dedicate X hours a week to each friend, I think there’s a certain level of emotional involvement you need for each friendship – otherwise it’s not a real friendship – and you can only have that with so many people. I don’t want to say that you only have so much love to go around and you have to ration it, or that once you give a certain amount to one person, you can’t give it to someone else, but it does seem obviously true that you can only do one thing at a time. Much as you might like to (and I wouldn’t like to), you can’t have everyone as your friend.

As I write this, I am thinking of someone I know who wants to be friends with everyone she meets. People find it really cute and endearing and all that how she is really nice to everyone no matter what and tries to be friends with them… but it is also somewhat sad, I think… because I know that most of these people will not take her seriously; they will (and do) see her as just this strange girl who is unreasonably nice, not be inclined to really be friends with her at a less than extremely superficial level, and she will end up having no more close friends than I, the unnaturally antisocial one, do.

I suppose, of course, that much of what I’m saying here depends on your precise definition of friendship… how is friendship to be defined, anyway? Should it be defined in such a way that this girl I speak of has many friends, or very few?