lupus est homo homini

Mcfall, do you remember when Jonathan and I had the huge argument in Middle Eastern Studies about this and he told me I wasn't a Jew for saying that everybody was to blame for the mayhem.
I'm just going to leave the Jew thing alone for the moment, that's an entirely different subject.

The problem is that everyone is screaming at once, no one listening because they believe that they can have exactly what they want. But they're wrong. No one is going to happy about any way that the conflict can end. Israel fought too hard to give up their land, and they shouldn't have to, Palestinians want what they feel like hundreds of years of sweat and blood and house building has made THEIR land back.

"The reason I hate talking about Israel and Palestine is that people get so emotional that the quality of discourse is awful"

The thing is that the people who are making sense, the moderates and non-crazies, these people AREN'T TALKING, by that I mean WE aren't talking. We watch West Wing episodes and get upset, we read 'a concise history of the Middle East' with Dr Foley and get into arguments in classrooms, but then we go to starbucks and leave the dying and the screaming the blood and flying glass of Gaza behind. We stop talking.

What we should be doing is screaming louder for peace than the crazies do for war. And it's wouldn't be hard. There are more of us.

You keep telling yourself what you know...

Mal: You keep telling yourself what you know. But what do you believe? What do you feel?

Sometimes books or movies or songs change your life, because 'Cobb' is right, it is the idea that is the most indelible infection. When something, or someone, or some moment changes your perception, truly inspires wonder, it is like the entire world changes shape around you. Only it was ALWAYS just a closed circuit, a never ending staircase, you simply didn't know it yet. You didn't see it. But now you can't help but see the edges and the drop into the beginning.
(Any one else think it was interesting that the tragic hero's late love's diminutive name was the latin root for 'malus' or "bad"? I thought it was "Moll" at first, but not according to the movie sites...)
("Tainted Love" just started playing in my head. Whoa.)

But no, really, if you haven't seen it, go see it.

And there's the thing, that line I quoted up top there took me by the throat when I was watching the movie, Mcfall. Does it not so perfectly align with both Carl Jung's statements on religion and the mind as well as the conversations about faith, logic and the whole human experience of the Divine that WE have been having? I mean, seriously, Berschect, non?
Dude, I am a total girl, though. There's a part near the end where Cobb is addressing the nature of dream and reality with such heartbreak and such longing that I honestly felt tears in my eyes. I blame it on the beauty of it all, however, and not my feminine humours. :P Also, I hold the universal appeal of it to blame...
Because everyone wants to be loved like that. Everyone wants to fall into a dream world and never come back. Everyone is scared, on some level, that what they feel around them is all there ever is, all there could ever be. Everyone wants to not care where the train is going, because they are not alone - they are half of a whole. Go ahead and deny it if you want to be different, if you want to be too cool or too invulnerable to admit it. I can't blame you, I probably would if I weren't the one writing this. But I won't believe you.

Also: am I the only one who thinks it is incredible how wide spread the idea of a shared dream is in human literature or history? I mean, maybe there is something to the shared consciousness, after all. Kind of beautiful, the thought that we could share dreams, is.

*note: I have gone back over this and realized that it is not my best writing, stylistically speaking nor grammatically, but I think it transmits the feeling of frenzied thought and revelation. So I haven't edited it. Nor will I. But I will say that I know it's not the best thing ever.

The nature of intelligence

Call me old fashioned but i don't think i have to make anyone understand me to be considered intelligent. To be entirely honest it upsets me to be judged based on another person's flawed understanding of my communication rather than on what I actually say/understand. If that were the case, if intelligence were measured in ratio to how well others understood what you said, then Stephen Hawking would be judged a freaking moron.

Which he is not.

Intelligence has NOTHING to do with the ability to communicate the contents of your mind. Intelligence has everything to do with your ability to understand, to critically think, and to extrapolate.

And not everyone can take the EUREKA moment from thought to words immediately. For example, me. I like to think that I am pretty good at this whole communication thing, and I've been told I'm fairly bright. But trying to communicate why I believe something doesn't come immediately. I need a moment to find the right word, and the correct way to phrase the idea. I rarely reach a conclusion through a logical progression, like painting a picture one piece at a time, but instead see it as a whole. Some people are Hegel and others are Kierkegaard, and I am a Kierkegaard.

By this I mean: some people are just naturally more logical, they think in "if a, then b" and I don't. I think in parallels and webs, everything connected in some fashion or form. I tremble before G-D because He is unknowable, my belief and respect a matter of faith and not logic. Does this somehow make it less, my understanding, that I cannot immediately tell you 'why'?

The answer is 'no'.

Of course, you don't KNOW that I understand it. So you can think I'm dumb if you like, but if I were you I'd be careful about leaping to that sort of conclusion.

why so SERIOUS?!

I've been entirely too serious lately, Mcfall. The goofiness and bells in hair mood is apparently gone off elsewhere. And I don't like it.

You see, I feel like I have to be talking about something all the time. Or reading something meaningful. Or writing in full sentences as opposed to the fragments I am currently using. I feel like, and more intensely around some people more than others, I'm either smart or stupid and I hate feeling stupid. Which is ridiculous, because I'm anything but.

When did I equate serious with smart? I honestly can't tell you when I started playing roles in my everyday life, although I suspect it was La été de Douleur. No matter what the date of inception, I think it should stop now.

To this end, I think we should hang out when I come through the mountains. Or at least do lunch as some back wood hovel. Perhaps we should have some special kosher Appalachian pork products (mmm... pig )?

Hey, so I was telling some us stories earlier, and I know MY favorite, what's yours? I suspect it's either "that suit's a bit TIGHT, isn't it?" or the "why we can't be friends any more....dance..." story.

Mcfall, we need to talk.

So I was thinking, earlier, that the only good thing about blogging and the like is to be able to fully explore an idea before you are interrupted. You won't lose a train of thought in order to answer someone's tangential statement or question. And if someone misquotes your argument because they stopped listening in order to form their reply: you've got it in writing and can send them the link.

We rarely argue, in fact all of our falling-outs seem to just send us flying in opposite directions instead of arguing. But for the sake of an experiment: let's have one. On the blog.

Not like an angry argument, but like a friendly debate.


So we now have to find something we disagree on and write blog/arguments back and forth on it.

Here's your mission: think of a list of things in the name of which we can take up honestly dissimilar stances. Anyone who chooses to may also suggest subjects.

After thinking about it:

• Catholic Homosexuality- cross to bear within the confines of dogma, or a kind of union that should be included within the Church?
• Freud: The man with the plan, or the man with a hand down his pants?

• Those Horrible Phelps Nuts: necessary evil or me and Leviticus say burn 'em

I love clever titles. It's one of the few reasons I like fall out boy and Panic!

Bye-o.
Juno-hu

!!McFallyOllyOxenFree!!

The call is thus answered
:)

MCFALL! CALLING MCFALL!!!

okay seriously, there really IS a mcfall and eventually she WILL post. eventually.

The red queen told me to.

"Phoebe in wonderland" is one of the best progeny of the looking glass novels I've ever come across, and I've experienced many different takes on lewis carrol's lovely outre pipe dream.

I queued it up on netflix in a spree of cinema frenzied clicking, and watched it this afternoon because I have very little else to do. It was something, I thought, that would be on in the background while I wrote or drew or what ever came 'round. Instead Phoebe surprised me.

First I'm going to give you a quick synopsis of what I think the movie is about, and I'll try not to give too many spoilers.

At the outset you meet Phoebe, a nine year old girl with a younger sister and their mother and father. Phoebe has a disregard from the rules from the very beginning, and quite frankly this is a theme that is the first of many parallels to the immortal Alice, so when the new drama teacher comes into the room quoting Carrol's sensible nonsense the connections are almost too easy. Soon you find that both her parents are academics, her mother is working on her dissertation (big surprise: is about the looking glass land novels and 'perversion') while balancing being a full time mother, obviously she doesn't have much time to do either occupation fully. The father is also writing full time as a professor of we-don't-know-what.

We see phoebe's rituals and how it affects her relationships both with adults and her peers, her sister and her friends, setting her apart and she longs for Wonderland with the fervor that comes with being bright, sensitive, and nine. This duality, the rituals and disregard for rules becomes a theme. Especially when Phoebe's only friend tells her that to have something she wants she has to "do something you hate, so that God will know you deserve it."

Now I don't think I can write much more about the plot without giving it away, and as thrilled as I am with the experience of this movie I don't want to ruin it for anyone else. So, just watch it.

Let's talk, instead, about the names of the characters, before we go into themes and specifics, because names are the first symbols we are given to understand characters both as people and as the larger symbols they become. Phoebe, for instance, shares her name with the Greek goddess of he moon. But i don't think this was the namesake of this character. Because Phoebe's sister's name is Hilary, an Anglicization of "Hilaeria" or the other sister born of Leucippus and Philodice. Theses sisters were priestesses of the moon who were stolen away to another land.

Another land, wait... you mean like wonderland?
yes. Yes I do.

And the moon, like lunacy?
Hey, you're catching on! Well done.

So now we get to themes, of which there are many, and I'm just going to not talk about the cliched "just be yourself" motif except to say the following. This film doesn't make it saccharine, it acknowledges that being one's self is to be vulnerable to scorn and derision but, and I have to quote here because it's the best line if not the best delivered one, in the entire screen play:

"at a certain point in your life, probably when too much of it has gone by, you will open your eyes and see yourself for who you really are. Especially for all the things that made you so different from all the awful normals. And you will say to yourself: but I am this person. And in that statement, that correction there will be a kind of love."

I don't know about you, but I got goose bumps from that when I saw it for the first time. It's beautiful and honest, and cuts to the quick those of us who grew up being different, longing for Wonderland.

But that longing for a place that doesn't exist can be a dangerous thing. Want it so desperately can make you believe it is true for just a moment, at the wrong moment.

So let me say this: who ever did the casting was absolutely brilliant. I've never seen felicity huffman do a better job. Ellie fanning is incredible. I believed her, every line was delivered not like a very talented child actor but as the character herself. The panic in the rituals, the desperate need for hope, the night and day change between the wonderland scenes and the real world scenes was just impeccable.

But the real triumph in her acting was this line: "I can see myself wrecking and ruining and I can't stop myself." It's heart wrenching.

Pullman did a great job, too. But it's not his best work.

So go watch it. It's worth the hour and a half.

The Title, The Theme, and pretty much the Everything

The title of this blog comes from Vladimir Nabokov's novel "Ada": 'and reality withdrew the quotes it wore like claws'.
I think it's one of Nabokov's best lines, in the E.E. Cummings sort of sense, in that it takes an entire career to write one true thing, one beautiful thing. Obviously I am not saying that this alone is the pinnacle of the great lepidopterist's work, but it's still passingly lovely.

So I think this blog shouldn't have a theme. Mcfall, I just think that we're so varied that to give us only one subject is kind of sad. So I say there is no theme, we are themeless. Resign yourself to themelessness. And like it.

Yeah.

But if I were to suggest a beginning, I say we review some books and shit. I call dibs on "the crimson petal and the white" by Faber and that one I'm reading about alchemy in Harry Potter. I suggest that at some point we review a piece of the other's work and hide it amongst other works.
Also, I think we should have challenges. Just to keep it interesting. Mostly 'cause I don't want this to fall as flat as The World Citizen Project (we should still do that, I think. Just saying, it's pretty boss.) did.

Aber die Liebe scheidet alle Dinge vom der Seele.
-Meister Eckhart