Blogging Around

My first response was to Kathryn’s post, “Dialectics: Self and Truth”. In it, she had explored the rationale and justifications for Neo’s pursuit of the truth in The Matrix. Along the way, she made some very interesting points about the intrinsic desire of humans and the conscience to discover the reality behind everyday illusions and whether Neo’s choice in the movie was really the right one at all.

My response:

Great post, Kathryn! Your thoughts on the reasons Neo pursued understanding and destroying the Matrix really got me thinking… what is it about the “truth” that attracts us so much? Now that I wrote that, I feel a little foolish, because it seems like it has such an obvious answer. But whenever I try to scope out that answer, it always slips out of my grasp. As you brought up, seeking the truth about the way things are seems like the right thing to do for many reasons, including the fact that it provides the capability to actually fix problems that an ignorant person would simple overlook. I agree: this seems like a justifiable cause. But, it was your second point which fascinated me… the idea that it was an intrinsic and nagging desire of Neo’s to discover the truth. Are we to believe, therefore, that the human race is inherently noble and for the greater good? This leads to bigger, more difficult questions like “What is the real goal in life?”. There are many people who tend to take the macro-level approach and theorize that as long as a person makes a difference in the world as a whole, or helps out the larger community, they did their job. Then there are those who turn to the micro-level and suggest that as long as a person achieves their own personal goals, or remains happy throughout their life, they should be satisfied. With these two camps, the premise of your post is highlighted: the dialectic between the “self” and “truth”. But, perhaps, as you say, these two are more intertwined than I am making them out to be. Perhaps one can find happiness and achieve one’s goals by helping out the greater population… or maybe it takes really heroic people like Neo to achieve that.

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My second response was to Atticus’s post, “Metacognition” in which he described the dragging and, at times, painful process of writing his short story. In the end, he came to the realization that in many situations, the “method of forgetting detail and working more freely” is extremely valuable in the creative process.

My response:

Firstly, I would like to say that I highly enjoyed both installments of "2 kittens, 1 cat, lots of meowing". Now, to address the real business, the story of the writing process of your story actually managed to wring more ideas out of a subject area I had previously thought to be exhausted. I had always given the concept of anti-perfectionism a great deal of credit, mainly because perfection is never a possibility and abandoning that notion usually leads to gladly-accepted more sleep. But, I had never really considered the possibility that not focusing on the perfection or details of a piece could actually make it closer to perfect. As counter-intuitive as that is, it does seem to make sense psychologically. We can get so caught up in the nitty-gritty intricacies of what we’re doing that we forget the big picture, and more often than not, our subconscious has the intricacies covered. Thank you, Atticus, for giving me one more reason to let go of my painfully perfectionist ways. This was a very comforting and eye-opening experience.

Dialectics: Fate and Control

Throughout our classroom premiere of The Matrix, I was overwhelmed not only by the striking and often disturbing graphics and stunts on the screen, but also by the striking and often disturbing thoughts bouncing around in my head. Amidst the lot, however, there was one which especially left a mark: how much control do we really have over our lives?

There are certain people I know who fall very precisely and cleanly into two separate categories: those who believe in fate and those who don't. My grandmother is of the belief that our future is written, so to speak, and everything we do is just a step towards a predetermined destination… somewhere out of our hands. My parents, on the other hand, think along different lines, both not buying the idea of fate. Though my mother takes a more abstract, spiritual stance when articulating her views while my father builds a persuasive scientific case for his, they both use the idea of inevitable randomness as the foundation for the nonexistence of fate.

But even they don't believe in full control over one's life.

So what exactly is at play in the shaping of our futures, and how much say do we have in the process?

In The Matrix, before being given the choice between the red pill and the blue pill, Neo had to answer a question which would shape his character for the rest of the movie.

Morpheus: "Do you believe in fate, Neo?"
Neo: "No."
Morpheus: "Why not?"
Neo: "Because I don't like the idea that I'm not in control of my life."

When I watched this scene, I subconsciously smirked because I related right away to that feeling. It is a comforting feeling… control. Having the steering wheel in your own hands. But after a little thought, it can be a little scary. The idea that the place you end up at at the end of your life is solely because of you and your own decisions is, well, it's a heck of a lot of pressure. In many cases, that's where people resign to the idea of fate, just to get that wheel out of their hands. So, in some sense, the way people perceive the potential of their future is purely based on comfort. Neo's exact word choice also reflects this: "the idea" of not being in control is what he didn't like, not the actual state of not being in control.

But even after Neo chose the red pill, the pill leading to free will, albeit burdened free will, as opposed to the blue pill of blissful and oblivious compliance to a pre-constructed life, he does not abandon fate entirely. Indeed his whole motivation to fight the Matrix is almost entirely based on the Oracle's prophecy that he is the One. Here, fate and personal control interact in a fascinating way. As demonstrated by the self-fulfilling prophecy of the vase falling, the very belief in and thus pursuit of a specific course of events often leads to that course of events becoming a reality. Highly psychological.

Now, in an age where we are more in control than ever, with our fingertips dictating the movement of files and figures in the cyber world in addition to the material one, it is also very easy to get lost. Though the master of the tangible and now even intangible, the metaphysical remains out of reach.

With the unlikelihood that we are completely without a say in the course of our future, pure fate does not seem like a possibility to me. Influence is no doubt a human capability, but control remains an uncertain one. That doesn't seem to be the correct answer on its own either. But leaving aside whether one belief or the other is actually true, I've realized that the act of believing has a surprisingly tremendous impact, perhaps the biggest one of all.

No matter how random life is, the human mind is more powerful than we often give it credit for, and after all, "the body cannot live without the mind".

Metacognition: Jane Eyre Mash-Up

When this outlandish project was first introduced, to be honest, I really had no idea what to expect. I had a hard time visualizing in my mind what the end product would look or feel like and in some weird sense, that scared me. I felt like I was going to be flying blindly without understanding where my destination was.

I had heard the term “mash-up” before, but in a different context: music. When two or more distinct songs are melded together in a meaningful way… a way that enhances the depth or perspective of each song, it is called a mash-up. I realized that I could just take this same idea and apply it to this project… but I soon found out that it wouldn’t be as easy as I thought.

Instead of merely stitching together two songs, we were to create a quilt, so to speak (I don’t’ know where all these metaphors are coming from…), and make it seem as though all the fabric had been made by the same hand.

Soon, I found that my mind was being stretched in ways as outlandish and I had thought the project was. Focusing on a single theme, the ways I interpreted the different pieces of literature drastically changed. Suddenly, the melding happened in a more subconscious way. Moving from item two to item three and from item twenty-seven to twenty-eight was shockingly similar to the transition between the chorus of “Halo” by Beyonce and first verse of “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina & The Waves in the popular musical mash-up from the T.V. show, Glee.

My mind was making connections that I had previously not thought possible, finding hidden meanings in seemingly one-dimensional words, pictures and ideas. Working with my two partners also added to the experience, as they would suggest links between items which I at first dismissed as being too far of a stretch, but eventually recognized as being all the more effective.

As our ideas developed, so did our thesis. Our original subtitle, a lengthy piece of semi-contrived half-thoughts gradually transformed into a powerful, succinct concept: Independence… shouldn’t mean isolation.

Looking back on this project, I now realize the different paths my thinking traveled on. While I had been mashing different items of literature and media together to create something meaningful, I had also been mashing up different ideas thinking patterns in my head, creating insights, and an appreciation for a process I will definitely be turning back to in the future.

A Midsummer Night's Dream: Behind the Laugh

In the cushy balcony seats of the Shakespeare Theatre, I must say I laughed my—I laughed really hard. The presentation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was genuinely funny, and to be honest, that shocked me. Usually, the plays of the Bard are—to use a cheesy metaphor—just a foreign fruit where one’s main priority is simply to digest it, and maybe the aftertaste will be memorable in some way. Today, for the first time, I actually savored the flavors of the exotic fruit from the second I bit into it. Okay, this metaphor ends now.

So, I got to thinking: where in the play was that humor rooted, and what made it so universal? After all, the words were more than 400 years old and were sometimes so formal or strangely shaped as to make them practically incomprehensible. And I can hardly say that I related to the plotlines of the characters, what with all the infatuation flowers, prestigious weddings, and fairies. There had to be something invisible weaved into every scene that made the whole theater double over and tear up laughing.

For me, not having read the actual play, I concluded that this invisible factor came from the way the actors performed their roles… the way they projected Shakespeare’s time-worn lines. None of it was slapstick or overdone. In fact, most of the funny bits were slight and small, slipped-in in such a way that one could have missed it with an ill-timed blink. The mischievous look on Puck’s face as he wagged his head behind the mighty, scornful Oberon. The brief moment when stout Peter Quince’s feet left the floor as he was twirled around by the bumbling Nick Bottom. The “chink” in the “wall”. These were the moments which built up the hilarity of the whole play, and I’m afraid I would have skimmed over and lost them if I had just been reading the play on my couch at home.

In the middle of the second act, I suddenly remembered that Shakespeare wrote plays. It seems like such a simple-minded, ignorant revelation to have in the midst of watching a Shakespeare play… but in a sense, it dawned on me that this is the way that the great Will intended for his works to be experienced: surrounded by the overwhelming life of moving, singing, living actors. Somewhere along the long months of struggling to digest the Bard’s words on paper, I had forgotten that.

So, after watching this outstanding production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I would like to say that I truly respect those actors, and I would like to thank them… for bridging the gap between my 21^st century worldview and William Shakespeare’s 16^th century masterpiece. And for making me laugh harder than I have for a while.

Metacognition: The Long Journey of the Short Story

Entering the realm of the short story, I was extremely excited. It seemed like a soft cube of clay in front of me that was waiting for me to mold it into something beautiful, something meaningful. But, when I actually took the plunge and attempted to start writing, I scowled at my previous idealistic views. Truth is, the process was much more difficult than I had thought, and as I soon discovered, the way my story transformed revealed a lot about my own thinking.

Everything started with the quest to find a ripe idea, and even this was more difficult than I had anticipated. I’ve always prided myself in the fact that creativity comes relatively easily to me, but I started to draw from the creative ideas I had accumulated in the back of my mind, I was surprised to find that most of them, when placed in the role of a story, were painfully cliché. I remembered the words of advice we had been given at the get-go: “don’t make everything perfect for your character”. I decided it would be wiser and more fruitful to pursue a story idea which made me feel uncomfortable to some degree and thus begged some serious questions. Immediately, I fell upon the image of an ailing old man… a man with Alzheimer’s—an image which had always resurfaced in my thoughts and made me cringe. To be so innately and permanently disconnected from the people one loves was the saddest thought I could imagine.

With this platform, I pulled wisps of substance from here and there to try to build the skeleton of my story. I found myself with a clear vision of the story’s eventual meaning: I wanted it to have to do with understanding and listening to someone, even when the mere words they speak are unintelligible.

My first draft was submitted with this goal in mind, and it seemed like it was somewhat on the right path, but the characters, dialogue, and even the fundamental structure of it (it was told from the point of view of the Alzheimer’s patient who thought intelligently, but spoke unintelligibly) felt fabricated and fake. And that deep, warm satisfaction which I usually feel when I turn in a piece of writing just didn’t come. For the first time in a very long time, I longed to continue writing, to keep kneading the clay.

However, my initial changes to this draft were very conservative. As much as we were told to let go of our “weak” material, I couldn’t help feeling that there was a reason that I put that material there in the first place, and taking it out would leave my story with more holes rather than strengthening it.

It wasn’t until I was forced to shoot holes into my story that I finally recognized the potential value of such a step in the process. We had already completed four steps when this push to dramatically reshape came. Apparently, I had been working with no clear main character. Somewhere in the far corners of my mind, I had been whispering reassuring words to myself, trying to make myself believe that I would make it work somehow. I soon found, however, that it was this blind faith of mine that I would somehow make it out of the dense fog surrounding my story which was holding me back.

So… after highlighting approximately 1700 words and pressing ‘delete’, I started from scratch. And this time, I planned it out first. Now, my steps 2-4 had not been a complete waste… in fact, they played more into my final story than I had thought they would. Although my focus character shifted, and the tone of the story was altered, my initial question-igniting plotline became the glue which held it together. The result was shocking. Even through seemingly heartbreaking amounts of ‘delete’-key-pressing, the core questions my story was meant to bring up didn’t change, but the way those questions were posed was transformed. And, along with that, my view of the process of writing transformed as well. I experienced for the first time the feeling of deleting something yet not losing it. And, when I finally stapled all my drafts together, with my final one on top, I was relieved to feel that warm satisfaction once again.

Change of Mind: Unorthodox Love

Now, I’m not saying that I’m shallow… because I’d like to think I’m not. But, before watching the film Once, I had never spent enough time thinking about all the different types of unorthodox love to realize the deep impacts they can have on a person’s life. The idea that love could be unromantic, but still pure and heartfelt was not something I had previously considered.

In our society, the idea of “love” carries a lot of baggage. Just saying the word out loud immediately brings pictures of hearts, chocolates, kisses, embraces, and every hue of pink and red to mind. That is to say, in mainstream culture, “love” is pretty much synonymous with “romance”. And, this is the kind of love that is always represented in the blockbusters—that true love that breaks down all obstacles. It is interesting to note here, too, that this love almost always involves some sort of physical contact as well. Holding hands, a peck on the lips, cuddling, and many times, much more. That one passionate kiss at the end of the movie is what seals the deal, makes you look at the person next to you and sigh, and leave the theatre with a satisfied, warm heaviness in your chest. Right?

That’s why I was surprised when I found myself having that same feeling when the credits started rolling for Once. Not once in that film did the man and woman ever have a moment of profound realization and then declare their love for one another, and there was definitely no passionate kiss. But it was a love story. They meant a lot to each other. But, was their love not quite “true”?

Of course I had heard of different kinds of love in the past, and the many ways it could shape one’s life. Just last year, while reading Shakespeare’s iconic tragedy Romeo and Juliet, we identified more than a dozen different forms of love, ranging from maternal and familial love to “carnal” love. But in the end, nobody mourns the loss of the maternal love between Juliet and her mother or her nurse… everyone cries because the “star-crossed lovers”, the romantic lovers, can never be together.

So, what was the deal with Once? According to this standard of “true”, romantic love, everything about the relationship between the guy and the girl and the ending of the movie should have prompted me to stand up and shake my fist at the projector, cursing the movie for lying to us by saying that this was a love story. But I didn’t. And that was because, by the time I had reached that point, I was convinced that they did love each other, but I was confused as to what that meant.

They had touched each other, without actually touching each other. That sounds so cliché, but that’s the best way to describe it. They opened each other’s minds up to new possibilities in their lives and shared an intimacy through their music that no one else could have experienced with them. To me, nothing about this is cliché.

The very fact that the type of love the guy and girl shared is hard to put into words tells us that it is not something most people consider to be love. But after this film, I would argue that this is the truest form of love because they each gave a little bit of themself to the other person in order to allow that person to do what he or she really wanted to do, what was best for them. And neither of them expected anything in return. Perhaps their relationship ended up being unorthodox, and maybe some dissatisfied viewers may accuse it of not being love at all, but now I’ve come to believe it was a million times more heartfelt than that blockbuster kiss.

What If?: Pushed Over the Edge

As profound and powerful as Heart of Darkness was, there were also some painful, gritty truths weaved into it. There was one in particular which struck me when it surfaced in our class discussion one day: If one is pushed too far, one may start to lose his/her ethics or identity.

            Of course, the primary example of this phenomenon in the novella is Mr. Kurtz, who, after spending so much time as a commander of a trading post in the Congo, became an insane tyrant ruling over the natives. In essence, we concluded, Kurtz had been pushed so far beyond his limits and humanity, that he had lost his previous aspirations and even morality.

            But… the first time I heard this, I was confused. It contradicted what I had been told ever since the first time I skinned my knee: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Time and time again, I’ve heard quotes like “You never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have,” and so on. These describe situations which are so hopeless, that the way you react reveals a lot about your character and identity. So what is the difference between this “push over the edge” which actually makes you “grow” and the one Kurtz experienced?

            Perhaps it depends on the “push”. Are some trials and tribulations more likely to make one weaker than others? Maybe a skinned knee and the depths and dangers of the African wilderness cannot be compared because the vast gap in severity between them. Or perhaps it depends on the person being pushed. Could it be that every person just has his or her own set of limits? But, if this is the case, how does one know what they are?

            I don’t know if it is even possible to tell. After all, unlike reading a novel or watching a movie, in this case we do not constitute a third person perspective… we are actually inside the character we are analyzing: our own self. As we discussed about the Stanford Prison Experiment, it often takes an outside person to alert one to the ways he or she has changed. And even then, the waters can be very muddy, and the mind can be very hard to read.

            I am thankful that Heart of Darkness became the devil’s advocate to my previous notions of the near indestructibility of the human spirit and mind. Don’t get me wrong, it is much stronger and resilient than we often give it credit for, but there is a hidden fragility among it all. Looking into pressure points and that “edge” could be very valuable because, in the end, our identity is all we really have.