Category Archives: ghosts

On civil disobedience

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It is rather intimidating to write on a topic that has already been covered by the of Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Ghandi, and Martin Luther King Jr., yet the relationship between the governed and the government, however that relational metaphor works itself out, is intrinsic to most human relations at both the micro and macro levels, where few or maybe millions may be involved. Governments are most necessary so that disorganized groups of people may live in relative harmony, observe laws that uphold basic rights to life and liberty, avoid chaos and anarchy. Harmony, laws, and order are in and of themselves good things, but you cannot avoid, then, impinging on the rights of some who do not feel that laws and rules apply to them. Government makes policies, tries to implement them, screws things up, blames the wrong people, and resolves nothing in the long run. In the meantime, most citizens forgive their government for wrong-headed thinking, short-sited policies, poor social and economic plans, and a host of other mistakes which usually includes wars at some point or another. Where governments really fail miserably is when they try to legislate reproduction, the consumption of controlled substances, and marriage (on any level). Civil disobedience rears its ugly head when a large number of people, or maybe just one, decides that a government and its policies are wrong, immoral, unethical, wrong-headed, repressive, cynical, or illegal. Civil disobedience comes in many forms, shapes, sizes, levels and incarnations. Mr. King had to change the thinking of an entire country that was enjoying and constantly rebuilding an institutional form of apartheid that had split a country in two, creating an entire underclass of citizens that were suffering in unfair and unjust conditions just because of their skin color. Mr. King’s civil disobedience was to disregard both a series of social practices and the laws that upheld those practices. I would not agree with Mr. Thoreau’s thesis that the government that governs least, governs best, but he wasn’t too far from the truth. We all need some form of government, some rules that tame our anarchic ways and boundaries that keep our boundless self-interest from destroying us. When the rules are unjust and unfair, when tyrants seem to get away with things, when the people making the rules are not following them, civil disobedience may be called for. I’m not talking about a revolution or hard core violence, but protesting that which is unjust cannot be called a mistake. Mahatma Ghandi had to throw out the entire British Empire, and although he suffered mightily at the hands of the British, he never raised his hand in anger. He understood that blind obedience to his oppressors was not a solution for his nation or his people, but that a violent revolution would also cost countless lives and still risk being unsuccessful. The “civil” in civil disobedience is a double entendre referring both to society at large and to the “reasonable” application of that disobedience within the context of a larger social context. These men and their ideas about change and revolution within the practice of civil disobedience walked a fine line between social anarchy and blind collaboration, and their efforts to improve their worlds often bordered on illegality and criminal action. Yet, as Thoreau says, “I believe–“That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.” So even Thoreau knew that living without government would be a disaster, but civil disobedience was a check, nay, a balance, against unjust or unfair laws and practices.

On horror stories

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Human beings are fascinated by horror stories–obsessed, one might say. From our earliest times we have created narratives filled with monsters, ghouls, trolls, ghosts, and creatures whose only purpose seems to be threatening or killing people in out of the way places, dark houses, empty castles, lonely highways, cold mountain passes, haunted spaceships, lonely planets, and creepy little towns. The very space created within the horror narrative is menacing, ghastly, deserted, dusty, filled with cobwebs, forgotten spaces. Both attics and basements are particularly hazardous spaces, but empty jungles, strange swamps, and wind-swept mountains can also be problematic, especially if you are a scientist in an out of the way place such as Antarctica, a space ship on its way to Mars, an old freighter navigating a long way from its home port, at the bottom of the sea. All of these spaces are a long distance from a safe port and speak to the inherent danger of far away places, places that are unknown and unsafe. Strange beings–half man, half reptile–inhabit these places waiting for their next meal to come along. Most of these narratives begin innocently enough with calm seas and smooth sailing, blue skies and light winds, before things start to go wrong. A crisis ensues, a problem arises, a computer goes haywire, a storm blows up, somebody ignores a warning, and the bottom falls out–a ship sinks, a monster gets loose, communications break down, an earthquake occurs, a volcano erupts, a typhoon strikes, and the characters start to die in horrible and miserable ways. In the middle of these narratives, a hero arises who must fight to overcome the obstacles, monsters, and spaces that lie between him/her and safety. We consume these stories as if there were no tomorrow. They seem to reflect some of our darkest fears of abandonment, of the unknown, of the dark, of technology, of power, of the future, of change. We fear that we are poisoning our world, that technology is moving ahead too fast, that space is a dangerous place, that there are unexplainable supernatural things that are not dreamt of in our philosophy. The archetypal ghost stories seems to be a paradigm inherent in any serious discussion of the genre–a strange place, a vengeful ghost, isolation, mayhem. Perhaps horror stories haunt our collective psyche because the raise existential questions of the highest order: who are we, what is our purpose in life, what does all of this (life) mean? So we let the vampires, werewolves, and mummies run through our nightmares, hoping against hope that they will stay there.

On horror stories

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Human beings are fascinated by horror stories–obsessed, one might say. From our earliest times we have created narratives filled with monsters, ghouls, trolls, ghosts, and creatures whose only purpose seems to be threatening or killing people in out of the way places, dark houses, empty castles, lonely highways, cold mountain passes, haunted spaceships, lonely planets, and creepy little towns. The very space created within the horror narrative is menacing, ghastly, deserted, dusty, filled with cobwebs, forgotten spaces. Both attics and basements are particularly hazardous spaces, but empty jungles, strange swamps, and wind-swept mountains can also be problematic, especially if you are a scientist in an out of the way place such as Antarctica, a space ship on its way to Mars, an old freighter navigating a long way from its home port, at the bottom of the sea. All of these spaces are a long distance from a safe port and speak to the inherent danger of far away places, places that are unknown and unsafe. Strange beings–half man, half reptile–inhabit these places waiting for their next meal to come along. Most of these narratives begin innocently enough with calm seas and smooth sailing, blue skies and light winds, before things start to go wrong. A crisis ensues, a problem arises, a computer goes haywire, a storm blows up, somebody ignores a warning, and the bottom falls out–a ship sinks, a monster gets loose, communications break down, an earthquake occurs, a volcano erupts, a typhoon strikes, and the characters start to die in horrible and miserable ways. In the middle of these narratives, a hero arises who must fight to overcome the obstacles, monsters, and spaces that lie between him/her and safety. We consume these stories as if there were no tomorrow. They seem to reflect some of our darkest fears of abandonment, of the unknown, of the dark, of technology, of power, of the future, of change. We fear that we are poisoning our world, that technology is moving ahead too fast, that space is a dangerous place, that there are unexplainable supernatural things that are not dreamt of in our philosophy. The archetypal ghost stories seems to be a paradigm inherent in any serious discussion of the genre–a strange place, a vengeful ghost, isolation, mayhem. Perhaps horror stories haunt our collective psyche because the raise existential questions of the highest order: who are we, what is our purpose in life, what does all of this (life) mean? So we let the vampires, werewolves, and mummies run through our nightmares, hoping against hope that they will stay there.

On Avatar (the movie and 1,000 blog entry)

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What can one really say about this strange movie about conquest, conquistadors, and a native population that fights back? James Cameron’s 2009 film is about intertextuality and dialogues directly with the ghosts of Christopher Columbus, Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, and Ferdinand Magellan as they conquer and subdue the native population of the New World. The premise of the film is simple: the Earth is dying from mistreatment and overpopulation and the Earthlings are on the war path to find a rare element “unobtanium” (get it?) which they might then use to refuel their own burned out planet. They know that this element is on a moon called Pandora (another dialogue). The problem is that people are living on top of this element, and unless you move the people, you can’t get to the element. The conflict of the film the mirrors all stories of conquest and diaspora which are economically driven, giving rise to military invasions and crusades that litter human history with death, destruction, chaos, mayhem, and tragedy. Whether it was the Christian conquest of Jerusalem during the crusades, the Spanish expulsion of the Jews in 1492, or the conquest of the Americas, military might has been employed to displace the weak, eliminate less developed cultures, and persecute religious minorities. Watching a couple of the battle scenes I thought the movie was eerily reminiscent of the jungles of Vietnam in which American troops labored in vain to fight off the Communist threat in Southeast Asia. The problem that the American/Earth forces face in Avatar is that they not only don’t understand who the enemy is, they underestimate the complexity of their opponent’s strength by imagining that the “other” is inferior because they live in harmony with nature and not at odds with it. The “natives” live outdoors with few or no structures, they wear almost no clothing, and their society is not mechanized at all. The invaders imagine, then, that the natives are barbarians who will be easy to defeat. Guns and bullets have always solved everything, so why shouldn’t that be the case this time as well. The movie strongly criticizes the military option as barbaric, inhuman, ruthless, and stupid. Again, the movie dialogues with all wars, invasions, police actions and military occupations as it criticizes the use of brute force to displace an already settled population, creating an intertextuality with the displacement of native Americans in both North and South America. Military action is justified against these people because the invaders ironically place themselves in the role of the culturally superior, rationalizing the death and violence they will use to subjugate another group of humans. The invaders have no idea, in the end, that the people they are killing enjoy a rich, complex life which is only different, essentially, in one way–window dressing. In this fable, the natives drive off and defeat the invaders, which is a fairy tale ending, but it is also highly satisfying. The subplot of the paraplegic marine who gets to experience life as the “other” is a quirky anti-war commentary about the soldier who is “humanized” and meets the enemy. Here he gets the chance to be the enemy, to experience the world first hand as they would experience the world–a curious tip-of-the-hat to Borges’ short story, “The Ethnographer.” In the end, the cannibals are not natives living in the trees, but instead are the gun-toting goons that have been sent to rid the planet of a humanoid infestation. A final note: Sigourney Weaver of Alien fame plays a misplaced scientist in charge of the Avatar project, which in turn dialogues with the entire Alien series, a cautionary tale about messing with things you don’t know about and can’t understand. You can’t always reach out and take just anything you want. Ethnocentrism can be a very bad thing. As an epilogue, I am sure that the damage done by the invading forces is irreversible and that permanent damage has been done–the locals, as it were, have been thrust from Eden never to return, and this is the great tragedy of Avatar.

On sadness

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Perhaps it is because we are all pursuing happiness with such great abandon and fervor that we often don’t stop for those around us who are feeling sad. Or perhaps we are sad ourselves and no one has noticed or stopped by to ask. It has been a tough spring in central Texas for colleagues and friends who are facing transitions because change has been forced on them by the inevitability of death or the capriciousness of life. We would always want things to stay the same: same job, same family, same friends, same house, same stuff, same car, same pets. Yet, we know that the only thing that does not change is change itself. Even death and taxes change–they may be inevitable, but they do change. So a grandparent dies, or a church member, or people take a new job and move, a business closes and you’re out of job, a car accident suddenly ends the life of a young one. I should be more callous and just call it “life.” After fifty-three years you would think I would be a little less emotional, more unfeeling, harder, cynical, and in many ways I am: I understand the serendipitous nature of chance, the independence of the event, and the unpredictability of real life. We live under the illusion that life is one huge continuous thread of events, that continuity exists, and that we can live that single, unbroken thread of verisimilitude which is our mundane existence. Life is more like a mirror that has fallen out of its frame and shattered into a million little discontinuous fragments, which, as we stare into them, reflect back just a tiny piece of our image. Life is not linear; it is discontinuous, fragmented, broken, and unfinished. The result of this existential angst is often times a profound sadness about the changing world, over which we have no control. Perhaps that is our greatest failing as humans: we think that we control our destinies, have a perfect life, perfect family, perfect house, perfect car, perfect children, never suffer a loss. Yet, nowhere is it written that real life has anything to do with the pursuit of happiness, that we can control anything, that there is meaning where there really is none, that we can shield ourselves against loss. Perhaps only the nihilists say such nonsense, but I would postulate that most unhappiness is the direct result of the dark surprises that life is constantly throwing at the players in this drama-tragedy-absurd-satire-parody of life. We are unhappy because of change, because our expectations for our lives are not being met, because our needs are not being met. At some point I should use the word “fair,” but it wouldn’t be appropriate in this context. Life is always what you make of it–sad, happy, or indifferent, but we are never in control.

On Dark Shadows star Jonathan Frid/Barnabas Collins

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Jonathan Frid, the Canadian actor who played the melancholy vampire of the ultimately campy and strange soap opera, Dark Shadows, died Friday in Hamilton, Ontario. He was 87. The production values were low, the dialogues were melodramatic, and the special effects were horrific, but not because the show was scary. For an eight-year-old, the show was incredibly spooky, frightening, and creepy. I guess the production values for a daily soap opera lent themselves to a campy, gothic, soap opera about witches, werewolves, vampires, ghosts, curses, the undead, and general supernatural salad that probably invented a few new ghouls and goblins. The best part of this outrageous production was watching all the actors play their roles straight as if they believed every word. One often did not know whether to scream in terror or laugh because it was so funny. The show was a parody, a complicated riff as it were, on the whole idea of soap operas: people fall in love, they fall out of love, they are greedy, they fall in love with the wrong person, violence ensues, people disappear, they reappear, somebody gets their arm cut off, there is a fire, a monster lurks somewhere in this dark old house, at least one character turns into a werewolf, somebody lets the vampire out of his coffin, someone gets pregnant, another fire ensues, and so on. Soap operas are played with no specific end in mind. They are continuous, which is particularly interesting if you are a 175 year-old vampire who is looking for a lost love who has been reincarnated, conveniently, in the ravishing 21 year-old daughter of the creaky (creepy) mansion’s patriarch, the great-great-great grandnephew of said vampire. So now we can add incest to the list of creepy behaviors crawling through this soap. Frid fell into this role and became an instant pop icon of the period. In an era before video-taping, people would stay home to watch the soap, which was filmed and shot in a very tantalizing way: never show the monsters or the blood, unless it’s the Friday episode and you want to leave people hanging. The show would be immersed in the most inane dialogues about ghosts and witches and such and the thing would never really progress. Show me the monster! Yet it would progress just enough to keep it interesting, a kind of soap opera striptease. Frid played the role of the melancholy, misunderstood, but blood-thirsty vampire probably better than he ever wanted to. Fangs, cane, strange bangs, ruddy cheeks, he oozed vampire from every pore, and of course, the women watching from home could only guess what those fangs might feel like on their own throats. The show was a campy romp through repressed Victorian sexuality that played quite well on television, and Frid starred in more than six hundred episodes before it finally burned itself out, which is the only logical end for a soap opera this strange. Tip-of-the-hat to a great actor who turned into a pop icon vampire, and only ever flashed a smile when he knew lunch was about to be served. He never drank…wine.

On typewriters

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I learned to type on a typewriter. Keyboarding, unlike surfboarding, had not yet been invented. I am old-school. Typewriters went the way of the Edsel and became paperweights about fifteen years ago. I did own a small portable typewriter when I was in high school, and I took great pleasure in writing my own papers. My typewriter was completely mechanical, and you had to strike the keys with a certain violence in order to make each letter of each word. If I ever learned a practical skill in high school, it was typewriting. Yet, if you type, you also make mistakes, and I had my share of whiteout and small strips of corrective tape. It was horribly laborious to type anything, and even one simple page could take an hour. Even after it was done I dreaded going back and proofing my work because I knew I would find a letter missing, or oh horror, an entire word. Putting the page back in the typewriter and fixing the mistake was tougher than brain surgery and never really worked as well as you wished it did. Computers have so thoroughly replaced the typewriter that one might be hard-pressed to actually find a real typewriter. I’m sure a few people have kept them as curiosities. They were a highly ingenious piece of engineering and design. Typewriters enjoyed a certain aesthetic in the repetition of shapes and the layout of the keys. They also made a characteristic striking noise that almost anyone (old enough, that is) would recognize. Today’s keyboards are better and faster, but they are also only a ghost of typewriters past. The typewriter seemed, at least to me, to be a part of the creative process, rolling the blank sheet of paper into the machine, indenting the first paragraph, and away you went, hunting and pecking away at those mechanical keys. The writer was physically involved in the work of typing and creative a new text. Today’s keyboards take almost no effort at all. My nostalgic feelings for typewriter, however, would not induce me to go back to that strange machine. I lost many a night’s sleep retyping pages that had too many errors. Yet as I wrote about Sir Gawain, or Marie de France, or Chaucer or Dante or Boccaccio or Fernando de Rojas, my physical and mental strength were involved in creation. As my fingers fly over the keyboard today, they look back wistfully at a simpler time when you could type without plugging anything in and it was just you, the blank sheet of paper and the machine.

On monsters (III)

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My first essay on monsters was an attempt at describing monsters, but it said nothing about where monsters come from, and I don’t mean from under the bed or from the depths of a pond or from a dark closet. I think that any given society creates its own monsters out of the irrational fears that it harbors. In the fifties there were radioactive blobs trying to kill overly hormonal teenagers that were fleeing creepy scarred old guys. The Cold War was only too kind to share is manias, fears and irrational assassination plots with the rest of the world in the form of giant ants, fire-breathing dinosaurs and scaly green lizard men. Our contemporary society is so messed up with paranoia, conspiracy theories, and crop circles that monsters even got their own movie. They had become so commonplace that they had become comedy and not tragedy. But our obsession for monsters from outer-space, the depths of the ocean or the depths of our minds continues to grow. It’s hard to know if monsters are a sign of mental health or lack thereof. Slasher monsters don’t interest me because they grow out of a fear of random violence and general paranoia, which is just sadistic and uninteresting. Other monsters tend to be the outgrowth of our own hubris and pride, such as Frankenstein’s monster. Werewolves and vampires are just the result of pent up and repressed sexuality–nothing new there. When we start looking for ghosts and spirits, however, things start to get a little out of whack. Guilt seems to be the greenhouse for monsters, where they first take shape, take their first steps before bursting out into the nightmare world of your own dreams. Monsters don’t have to be ugly, but they do have to be menacing. Monsters are monsters because they want to hurt you, take away your stuff, scare you. Monsters hide in dark corners, in black alleys and empty cars. They are in the basement or up in the attic. They lurk well after midnight and make scuffling noises before they go dead silent. Monsters have no pity, are invincible and fast, do not worry about ethics, are unafraid, don’t care if they hurt you. Some of us handle the monsters better than others. I found that as a child, the monsters were everywhere and out to get me, but as an adult I am pretty good at keeping Grendel’s mother at bay. Nor do I harbor ghosts, spirits, sprites or genies. So if you hear a little scuffling in the dark corner of your closet, ask yourself this: what am I really afraid of and why is my conscience bothering me? Well, what’s the worst thing you ever did? Now, check for monsters.

On throwing away old papers

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Do you keep every odd bit of paper that floats into your life? Do you have random piles of junk mail, old receipts, antique bank statements, odd scraps of paper with strange or cryptic messages? “Call Charles–cat caught in disposal–need plumber or animal control?” But you not only don’t recognize the writing, you don’t recognize the message either? Tonight I tackled a random pile of such papers and made three piles: shred, recycle, does anyone know what this is? I can throw things out. I am not one of those poor hoarders that has been caught in the lights of a television reality show. I truly do not understand what makes hoarding interesting enough for television. Those poor devils have an obsessive compulsive disorder and they need help, not national television exposure. So I tackled a random stack of old receipts, scrap papers and what have you. And I threw it all away–some to shredding, but it all goes to recycling. Most of this stuff was from about 2005. Either I wasn’t throwing anything away that year or these papers have been in hiding. I didn’t find any old treasures (or old treasure maps), nothing that had been lost many years, nothing that needed finding. So I ask myself, “Self, why didn’t you throw all of this away ages ago?” It’s just been sitting around gathering dust and grit for seven years. Yes, there are times when it pays to stack and not throw out. Very infrequently will I find some scrap of something that will remind me of another time, of an old writing project, of a person I haven’t seen in a long time, of a debt that was paid, an object that was bought, a dinner that was enjoyed, but all of these relics remind me of how fast the clock moves, how quickly we forget even when we swear we will always remember, an already forgotten unforgettable afternoon in a distant past that has sunk into the shadows of history. I throw away things so that those who come after me will not be burdened with the effort of having to do it themselves. I’ve seen others given the task of throwing out old papers, and it is a horrible task–going through the life of another person. Me, hopefully when it is my turn to go, everything will already be on its way to recycling.