"Putty Hill" and Whether Anything Has to Happen Before We Can Have Fun

Walking out of the Charles Theatre after having seen Matt Porterfield's "Putty Hill" for a second time in a week, I was delighted, sort of, to hear a woman behind me ask what many of us had on our minds: "What just happened? Did anything happen?" A lot of things happen in the frame: paintballs spatter against weathered 2x4 walls in the green light of a forest, a gangly tween describes the vampire novel he's working on, four girls walking along a stream are told by police that someone has been shot in a robbery nearby and that the shooter is still at large, a girl returns to the bare room where her brother overdosed. A lot of these scenes are interesting on their own. But that's not what the woman behind me meant, of course.

There's a feeling that I associate with certain "art films" (I'm not quite sure what those are and don't like the term) that is neither quite frustration, nor quite exhilaration but has in it something of each. It's also related to the feeling of waking up alone after a nap, when the waking is gentle and the room is comfortable and still. You lie there, and look around with no urgency, and almost everything seems quite specific and satisfactory, even beautiful. You feel disinclined to move your eyes. Maybe because to move your eyes leads almost immediately to the cataloging of things around you, and that leads to making plans for those things and yourself. You are, for a few seconds or minutes, blessedly free of plans.

I love this feeling very much. I wonder what it is, exactly, and why it is built into the list of states of which the mind is capable.

The difference when you're watching a film is that you've paid money, you're with other people around whom you don't want to feel stupid, and you didn't, ideally, just wake up. So something had damned well better happen or what was the point of that ten bucks and those two hours? When you leave a film that hasn't given up some sort of narrative thread--hasn't culminated in the release of energy, hasn't satisfied or disappointed some gathering expectation--don't you feel, unless the film has worked some other sort of magic on you, that you've missed something? That maybe you're dumb? Although lots of people are willing to stand in front of a Rothko canvas and not know what they're meant to "get", most of us can't listen to words without needing them to make sense. It would be odd to let a quickie mart cashier's directions back to the highway wash over you aesthetically and just squint and nod and say groovy, man. You could die out here. And movies have words, and people acting more or less purposively. So if you can't suss out what their purpose is, it's troubling. Or boring.

So how is it that the experience of waking is so different? So unboring?

I want to write more about this: part of the reason for the particular form of the film has to do with the fact that Portfield is documenting poverty but without wishing to examine the economics of poverty--merely to take the lives of those without much money or much sense of forward momentum seriously-- as one, very common, form that life takes.

And I admit this is where I lost energy for this idea. Because, maybe, it's all pretty obvious. Or because spring is driving me crazy and I want only to drink coffee, grow my beard, and cozy up to the warming sunshine and brace for some recrudescence of Eros.

In Which I spend $1,100 in One Afternoon in "Mediation" with My Ex-Wife, Who Hates Me

Three years ago, in a mind-state I can hardly reconstruct, I agreed to pay much more money than the State required.  I needed to be generous to prove that she was wrong about me, and I needed to disdain the State's pigfuck mandates.  Also, I had a lousy lawyer, and I was heartsick, and I was making huge amounts of money.  A nearly lethal combination, turns out.  I've been busting my mule ever since trying to keep her off my back.

I am so fucking autistic.  I really thought M would be grateful for my generosity.  I didn't want her back.  I wanted her to have to admit that I'm not the asshole she said I was when she ended the marriage.  But I am the only person who's surprised she took my generosity for granted.  Something like that.  Or maybe she saw it as stupidity or weakness, the way victors do.  She and her attorney won a fight I wasn't even in.  I never even raised my gloves.  When I saw her attorney's smug piggy face today I had to close my eyes and sink down into that place I didn't know about before all this, where the moments are cut so thin there is no suffering.  When I surface from that place I believe I could take a knife in the forehead and remain impassive, and I think he saw that because he seemed scared of me.  But that could be theatrical imagination, or that M now describes me as a violent and heartless monster.

We didn't reach any resolution.  Attorneys and mediators have no incentive to solve problems because their income depends on drawing out problems as long as possible.  $325/hr.

When the love is gone, you better go.  The only way to be fully human is to be around people who love you enough to not mind your foibles much.  Because as soon as they want to lay down the law, all kindness is impossible.  I can't tell you how violating it feels to have the State, illegitimate in my opinion, rake through the minutia of my life, and question my conduct, and ask how much I spend on movie rentals, and demand third-party verification of my working hours, and question the food I serve my children.  Mute, ineffectual rage is unbecoming in a man, and is not the natural fruit of democracy.

Autobiography at the End of the White Era

I and a few others, born pale, were run out at the head of the Nile,
Walked north and stoked our resentment every time the wind blew cold.
I put on the first shoes to circle the stony shore beyond the fabled world,
And I dressed in pelts to cross the mountains.
I was the first wolf to become dog, taking scraps at the edge of firelight.
I cut sod to close the cave's mouth against the snow
And I took in the whelps and they protected me.
In my ten thousandth year I entered the valley of the brutes,
And with the others I routed them, sent them to the hills,
Tore down their crude shrines, and camped along their rivers.
I organized the great clan into farmers and builders, mothers and warriors,
Potters and weavers, and we thrived and made art.
Later I was a slave captured by the great clan and forced into labor hauling boulders
To raise up rows and rows of tombs.
And I was the captured dark man from the south who carved
Volutes of herbs on the lintels.
I raided the coast of Africa in a fleet of skiffs, and we made off with
Lapis and cotton and olives.  I returned to my valley with stories of
Red and gold, and oranges and dates.
In the winter I told and retold these stories, and in the spring, nearly dead from hunger,
The young men launched their skiffs and made war.
I was buried in cut stone atop a hill above the valley.
I had lived in the city of Romulus just four hundred years when I bowed to the Greeks
And began to write history.
And with my vellum unrolled I saw room for my armies to gather an empire.
I saw Europe spread out before me like a set table, and my stomach grumbled.
After the feasting
I slept a thousand years with the ancients and woke to nausea and headache.
I walked the tax-roads to Athens, then to Paestum and Rome.  I unearthed the
Graceful columns and righted them, and traced the Latin inscriptions and dreamed of empire.
I was the Architect of London after the fire, and I brought to the muddy, sooty, diseased wreckage
The stark white of southern marble, and its light and order.
I was born into rags in Bristol, but saved my silver and built a fast ship,
Took American cotton to Lagos, and black men to Jamaica,
And rum to Portsmouth, and I earned a Lordship.
I lived twenty years in a neat brick house on Long Island, at the apex of democracy. 
Even then, we knew this was our attainment.  Our comfort assured us
We had arrived, even as our women grew restless.
I sent my firstborn to die in Cambodia.
My second gawked as the towers shook and fell, and lost a friend.
You may know me as the blogger who tallied the hypocrisies of the Senator from
South Carolina.  I shouted into the din, but none heard.
I am the last humanist.  I have read all the books in the canon, but I can't remember.
I man the Humvee here at the edge of Har-e-Khut, and I swallow the steel
Of the clever-made I.E.D. and I sleep a thousand years.

Thinking About Leslie Marmon Silko

I read Ceremony first and totally missed the point until I spoke with K and he contrasted her deadpan delivery and weirdly aimless characters with what I expected, which was a Western heroic story in Western heroic language.  What I mean is that I had more or less written off the book because I found its language uninteresting, almost slack, until K asked me to read it differently, as the product of a tradition that used/s stories to explain relationships and communities, rather than the exploits of individuals that are the main thrust of the Western Classical and Romantic traditions, as well as the modern bildungsroman, etc.  This helped a great deal, and I ended up actually coming to appreciate the book.  I read the last few chapters in funny Native American mental accent.  That really helped.  I ended up seeing the book as a radical proposal: the same Western obsession with narrowly-understood causality, the engineer's bias, that gets us into all these hopeless wars cannot be the same bias that cures the surviving soldiers of the psycho-spiritual damage they suffer in acting as war machines.  What will cure them is a return to a holistic view, in which all people, even Japs, and all systems, even the most high-tech, are inter-connected in one big whole.  So when Mr. Protagonist hallucinates his uncle's voice coming from the dead Japanese soldier, he enters a period of insanity inaccessible to the Western doctors who try to cure him, because his insanity is actually an overwhelmingly intense moment of realization that in killing a stranger, he has killed his most beloved family.  His way out of the near-death this realization induces is to awaken, through a kind of meandering ceremonial odyssey that defies causal explanations, into a new understanding of universal oneness, in which all violence results in universal tragedy.

Almanac of the Dead, however, seems to dwell in the insanity itself, and offers no curative realizations or ceremonial healing.  Maybe LMS proposes that all damage is universal, but all healing is individual?  Because each damaged being needs to start inside the insane illusion of isolation and individuality?  I don't know much about Native religion or practice or concepts of mental health, etc, so I may be misapplying the language of Buddhism [in its concern with oneness] here.  Almanac feels more and more like a litany of depravity.  Each character is described as occupying some point along a continuum of moral hollowness, in which the demands of each isolated id displace what I think LMS believes is the original Native wisdom, in which all is one and individual being is an illusion.  So, the great sin of the West that so oppresses Native people is our narrowly causal tendency to get what we want by extracting it from the Earth and from poor, mostly brown, people.  Ingenuity and force replace wisdom and elegance, more or less, and the people who fail to apply their minds to novel solutions and their strength to extractive industry get clobbered, and become marginalized in a culture that fails to understand or value their accumulated wisdom.  I find myself wishing her illustrations of hollowness and depravity had been rendered with a ton more humor and gentleness.  Her white characters are caricatures of vacuity, turpitude, and selfishness.  Do we really need extreme examples to understand the fall of the West?  Torture and snuff videos?  Bestiality?  Tucson?  I don't think so.  Emptiness is a spiritual condition that creeps up on most people, the natural result of a life spent grasping for what is not freely given, using specialized forms of ingenuity to force what we want from the world.  It is not a blanket condition that blinds all eyes to all kinds of goodness.  I think LMS has a point to make, and I think I more or less agree with it, if I understand her correctly [hard to say], but I think she makes a fatal rhetorical mistake: the extremity of her examples allows us corrupt Western readers, or white readers, to see the problem narrowly: evil people are doing this to us.  A more helpful narrative might suggest that all of us, even those of us too bland to keep Basset hounds as sex slaves and too unimaginative to find amputation videos titillating are complicit, in our ignorance, in an unsustainable extractive economy.  This is, after all, an economic condition we're talking about, and foisting the blame onto a [hopefully] small population of degenerates seems to me to make LMS guilty of what she's ranting at us about: too-narrow conceptions of causality, simplistic good-vs.-evil narratives, and a bizarrely glib undergraduate African-American Studies- type demonization of the "snow people" undermine her argument and alienate me, her white, only-moderately complicit reader.