Summers And Sunsets

What a terrible power is bestowed upon he who can, and does, smash a smile that is untethered by the foolish concerns of a stringent society. It is a power derived from the self-righteous inspiration of self-discipline, so sharp in contrast to the airy smile whose only discipline is desire. The jealousy of such an undisciplined freedom is that which drives the hard word and the judgmental gaze. Cruel ironies rise from the attacker's seething surface when he realizes that the very thing that his self-imposed rigidity had hoped to cultivate was that which was, instead, banished from his presence.



There's a sunny bench in front of a convenience store that holds a girl in a light dress, barely covering her legs, that is, yet, heavier than the spirit it contains. Just heavy enough to keep her from floating off on the breeze in a laugh. The bounce with which she moves reveals her ethereal composition and the resulting, airy frame is so free of sharp angles that nothing undesired, nothing not willingly adhered to, can stick. Her ungrounded appearance sets her apart from the downtrodden eyes of all the others who pass in and out of the drugstore, all checking off items on their list of errands. Without a definable purpose, she is more purposefully driven than any of these people who vainly scribble personal functions onto a list in lieu of truly understanding what they need.



She is wondering how to react to the boy in the car who's pulled up alongside. She's wondering what brought him around for a second hello. He's still trying to figure out what sort of emotional entity he's going to see this time. Is it the cautious personality that quietly divulged secret drink contents on a red trolley? Is it the lonely and heartbroken character that cried on a curb in the midst of a post-festival throng? Or is it going to be the one he is hoping for, she whose eyes lit up, redirected, when a barely familiar face asked her what she was doing on the ground, so far below the faces of those passing around her? He's wondering how anyone can find redeeming happiness in something so small as himself, and how anyone can experience extremes of emotion in such rapid succession. He hasn't yet realized that, like all who dance even when there are no dance floors, she is the primal emotion that dismisses pure reason and all other constrictors of unbridled reactions to one's surroundings. It will be later that he will come to understand that he didn't just want her, he wanted her in him, to steal some of the spirit that his society taught him to wash himself of. For a second, her bubble of influence overwhelms the old thought process and he kisses her from the driver's seat, she in the passenger, without any of the courtship ritual that he has been taught is proper. The emotion takes over, impulsively and naturally, if but for the instant, while the bright San Diego sun bears down on the inside of the car.



Days pass and he can hide his darker influences in a shroud of worldly intellectuality, preaching about the ills of American society and its international influence, and she likes him because, on the outside, he seems like she is on the inside. He can hide it for the short time he has to and before she leaves he imbibes the essence of agenda-less exploration of new things, flitting from place to place, seeing things via her eyes in his hometown that, before, seemed never even to have been there at all. He can't connect the dots. Its all too close, too present, to understand. He can't comprehend how, on the brink of ecstasy, he can't perform, and years later he reflects on the subconscious fear of combining his structured self with another that is unchained from the rules by which he has led his life. Deep inside, some fear of losing an identity that has defined him sabotages the very thing that his structured personality has, via its rules and strictures, endeavored to aspire to. He takes her home on her last day in town and drives away as he sees her return to a curbside, watching, and waiting, it seems, for him to leave before she starts crying again. Its a scene he's seen, but he can't stop to pick her up and kiss her again from across the car cabin. Like some ill-gotten immune system, his internal self has hardened itself against this wonderful, emotional freedom that she has so readily put on display. His hand is a little shaky on the wheel, betraying the remainder of the struggle that is being ground into the past that each turn of the tires is creating, and the hand slowly steadies.



A year passes and the stage is, beyond his imagination, set again as it was. The play begins again and, as he sits in the car with her in a new lot, he fails to notice the darkness of night that has descended on their parking spot. The moonlight shines through the glass panes on the roof and it won't be long before both players realize that the play will unfold differently than it did before. A year has been spent in contemplation of and exile from his native women, all of whom seem devoid of freedom, and in the cruelest of ironic reactions, his rigidity has stiffened itself further, seeking to force upon itself the emotional freedom that was formerly in its grasp and slipped through its fingers. The year has been spent in fortification of this manner of thinking, and the walls are redoubled in strength. This time the subconscious is not satisfied with merely sabotaging the coupling of freedom and authority, and it now employs a hidden drive that is as surprising to he as it will be to she, who, unknowingly, approaches with a smile whose potency has diminished in no way since their first meeting. Weapons too long unused are shouldered and fired at a minor physical weakness in her, the most miniscule of unhappy byproducts of an otherwise joy-filled existence. Like well-trained soldiers under the thumb of their military taskmasters, the marksmen of his subconscious train their sights with unfailing accuracy, putting to use all of their linguistic training to hit their target with biting words. She's shocked and he realizes that the tears he alleviated at the fairgrounds have returned, now of his own making. She leaves for home again, crying, but not this time out of desire to stay, but rather to leave. The smile is smashed and the brightness of its reflection, once willingly shined on him, is turned instead away from him. The primacy of his rule-based existence is confirmed as it lords over the kiss of a year ago, reminding him that even then, she sat in her seat and he in his, divided by the console in between that is empty but for the imagined and constructed wall that he has embodied it with.



The fallout of the horrible, full circle that the play and its sequel have formed is the revelation of time to come, when the fallacy of the structured machine will be revealed in the self-replicating damnation that it is when the veil, so long carried to fool the host into thinking that happiness could be forged from within it, is torn free. In the extremity of hindsight it can be seen that the two actors in these dramas were complete in their internal opposition, and that regardless of his need to develop freedom out of structure, only by the utter breaking of that order could the smile that is bred of disorder be experienced, not only via another, externally, but also internally. Self-created, it seeks others like itself, not to keep its own fire burning, for freed of the opposing structure it is inextinguishable, but instead for the joy experienced by the exponential reflections of smiles that are created by the absence of a bereft and absorbing antithesis to them. Suddenly, the simple and intoxicating rhythm becomes understood, replacing the undanceable complexity of the overlaid rhythms and melodies that the cold, calculating, and structured mind demanded as intellectual entertainment. Suddenly, time spent lying in a sunstream is not unproductive, but, in fact, the productive requirement that puts the air in the dress and the breeze on the smile. Bucket seats are thrown out in favor of couches and division and isolation joins the change between the cracks of their cushions. How does one make up for having doused and denied the world, if even for a moment, the brightly burning smile that is the essence of that which our forlorn species finds desirable? Only in the erasure of the influence that drove her away is the real redemption found, for it gone, a thousand sources that once frowned begin too to smile and the multiplication of the effect, optimism born of pessimism, overrules all.

Me And You And Everyone We Know Should Take A Cue From The Movie And Be Sleeping Together Like Babies

I have friends who have friends who watch movies, and sometimes those movies land in my P.O. Box. Me And You And Everyone We Know is one of these.



The movie as a whole, encompassing the different, intertwining plot lines that make it up, endeavors to remedy the psychological and physical isolation that is pervasive for all of the characters. It is a purely sentimental movie, however, failing to address the modern, social causes of this isolation, even if it does expose them in the art museum which showcases representations of human interaction in the "digital age." The beauty of the art show is that it mirrors the relationships that exist throughout the majority of the film that are, in fact, merely representations of real interactions. Two people strolling down a sidewalk, for instance, create a scene that is, via their conversation, symbolic of the phases of a real relationship that may, or may not, come to pass. The happy ending, of course, is that it does come together, but only for the central couple of the film. The other characters are, for the most part, left disconnected, often with the realization that their personal, imagined representations of relationships were incongruous with reality.



In addition to this, there is a motif of age displacement running through the length of the film in which children attempt to act like adults and adults end up acting like children (occasionally even admitting this themselves in dialogue). The resulting blur of age distinction tends to lump the characters of the film together as a whole, contributing to its feel of social togetherness that is exemplified in the ASCII art that Peter produces in the scene where he speaks the movie's title. A sense of unity between the otherwise disparate characters is thus created from which the viewer is left to wonder what is causing the painful disconnections between the individuals, a question that the movie fails to deliver an answer to.



The film feels like it is on the fringe of grabbing at an answer, but sadly, it ends up being what I consider a "lament." These are the books and films, most especially of the artistic genre, that identify and illuminate ills in our society, most specifically emotional ones, and then simply seem to lay down and accept them. Often, they close with a suggestion that all you need is love, which, to anyone in touch with classical pop music, is a popular and readily digested tune. This is not to say that I disagree with it, because I think John was right when he penned those endearing words, as right as this film is when it puts human hand into hand in its next-to-final moments. What I feel forced to inquire about, however, is the fate of the others who aren’t as lucky as our aspiring artist and her confused shoe salesman. What about a middle-aged man who sits at home on his couch every night and is forced, in lieu of real human interaction, to put up sexual slogans on his window? What about a museum director whose only avenue of personal expression ends up being with a 5 year old? Where is the movie that protests the machine that causes the human disconnections that this film is awash in? Again, the film hints at the cause of the widespread social estrangement but seems unwilling to rebel against it (but for the personal moment between the couple at the end when such an act of defiance is condoned, and thus, is no longer a rebellion at all).



The moment where our outrage should be sparked occurs early on, where the teeth of the machine make themselves outwardly known, in the scene where the shoe salesman fails to put the outlandishly blue sneakers on the old man. He will not touch his feet. He may not, in fact, touch his feet. The man must put on the shoes himself. Company policy. What is company policy but social code? This is our society: Touch in private, but not in public. It is the world that Humbert Humbert already has exposed to us, where all of his perverse desires are bred from an unfulfilled TOUCH as a boy that, though harmless (and wonderful, really), was denied by the society that raised he and his first, his true, Lolita. The girl that he kidnaps, that he ruins, as she ruins him, is merely a representation, and here again, an erroneous one that fails to live up to the promises that it makes in its fantasy form.



What sort of a diseased society is this? What sort of world do we create where we build walkways of gravel and stone that are abhorrent to the naked, touching foot, forcing upon our feet sheaths to separate us from our most basic and daily form of sensation? Where cold, electronic chatrooms, filled with characters who state that they are touching themselves, substitute for the physical heat of bonfires and the psychological heat emanating from sexually charged movements of the eyes and hands? Where we are forced to live out the majority of our lives in work environments and taught that relationships with those whom we see the most must be left strictly "professional"? Where a coworker of mine, a school teacher during the academic year, felt guilty for taking a student kayaking during the summer, a trip taken at the student's request? What sort of society takes an act of genuine mentorship and personal, assembly-line-free interaction and imbues it with feelings of impropriety? Where is the challenge to this society that takes all of our native happiness, built of our most innate and simple physical desires, and pours isolation and unhappiness over it, setting in generational concrete a standard of physical and sexual condemnation? A limb could be hacked from a body, a bullet sent into a head, and such material would garner only an “R" rating; sex, touch, by the standards of our community, is the more forbidden fruit.



I have heard it said that artists are those among us who are the best able to represent our emotions and desires, and I agree with this, but what are representations? Are they not just images and sounds and words that substitute for the authentic sensation? Should we admire the person who writes about her smile, who paints her perfect lips into imperfect recreation, or should we burn our books and tear our canvases and have the kiss instead, back and forth, forever? Where is the art that asks why we need art, that asks why we suffer and are forced to create mere representations? We should do more than simply lament. We should smash the mirror. We should touch everything, everyone, we see.




Where are the prophets, where are the

visionaries, where are the poets

To breach the dawn of the sentimental mercenary?



Fish

“Fugazi” - Fugazi (1984)