Leah asked about this, so I thought I'd post it here instead of burying it in the comments. With my discussions of movies, I will stick to what seems to be industry-standard spoiler policy: avoid giving away major plot points, especially things that occur near the end, but talk freely about general trends of action, or specific details of scenes that don't give away major plot points.
I'm always torn when faced with a review of movie I haven't seen. It's so rare to go into a movie clean-- knowing nothing more about it than you saw from posters and previews. This is pretty much how I watched Punch-Drunk Love, and I think it was a better experience because of it. But if you're going to do that, you have to either see movies as soon as they come out, or strenuously avoid reading and listening to lots of things you'd like to be reading and listening to. (Or, as happened with me and Punch-Drunk Love, wait so many years before seeing it that you've forgotten everything you'd heard about it.) Is it worth it? The consensus seems to be no, unless it's a movie where a surprise is an important part of the whole experience.
Which brings me to a tangent: what about those classic movies with a major spoiler, like Psycho and Citizen Kane? I haven't seen either, but I know the surprise in both, from numerous sources. There seems to be a point at which spoilers pass into the public domain, as it were, and it's no longer a social crime to reveal them. My real question is, when does this occur? When will it be okay to talk freely about the surprise in The Sixth Sense? It's not, yet, but there's a sense that the restriction is slackening. As fast as our culture moves, I expect it won't be many more years before the movie attains "classic" status, at least in that sense.
This gives rise to a number of interesting speculations for me... defining "classic," the pace of culture, reasons spoilers pass into the public domain, unwritten social contracts... but it's Thanksgiving, and I'm in charge of potatoes, both sweet and white. So I'll leave the discussion to be picked up by any of you who are interested.
Thursday, November 23, 2006
Monday, November 20, 2006
love in context: a double feature
-The movies: Punch-Drunk Love (2002) and Monsoon Wedding (2001)
-The link: They're both love stories. I didn't say the link had to be terribly specific.
-The comestibles: Gouda cheese, Clementines, and the leftover Shiraz from when Leah was here. I have no idea how these things are going to go together, or how they'll go with the movies, but they're what I had on hand, and tonight was kind of an afterthought. Plus, the wine really needs to be drunk.
-Thoughts and expectations: Monsoon Wedding is one of my favorite movies. Punch-Drunk Love is a movie I've wanted to see for a long time. Pretty much I walked into Blockbuster looking for a movie I that I hadn't seen, wanted to see, and could make a plausible pairing with Monsoon Wedding. I did say tonight was something of an afterthought. It'll be interesting to see what happens.
Now, for the movies.
***
Wow. What an interesting combination. I'd really love to write a separate blog entry on each one, but I don't have time. So we'll stick with a brief overview, with a particular eye to how they comment on each other.
I knew they were both love stories, and I had a hunch I'd be able to make the link more specific, but I didn't know enough about Punch-Drunk Love to be sure. Now, though, I can say that they're both love stories deeply embedded in a cultural context. The romance itself in each takes up a fairly small amount of screen time (in Monsoon Wedding, of course, there are several romances, as well as other storylines.) So you have a love story with lots of other stuff going on around it.
I'm struggling to define the culture that Punch-Drunk Love lives in. It's contemporary American, obviously, but it's more specific than that. It's a culture that hasn't been named, as far as I know, but it's very familiar to us. I might even say it's the default culture of Americans: if you don't have a group-- family, ethnic, religious, activist-- then you probably live in this culture. It's the culture of isolation and alienation. Its hallmarks are a craving for intimacy and a profound distrust of people and institutions alike. There is a desperate need to be heard, to be understood, to connect with someone, anyone, but the knowledge of how dangerous it is to reach out for that is crippling. And it's not paranoid: they really are out to get us... if not to crush us maliciously, at least to use whatever we give them for our own ends.
Punch-Drunk Love is not subtle on this point. Twice, early in the movie, Barry Egan tries to break out of his isolation. He knows the dangers. In both interactions he voices, repeatedly, his worries about what the other person might do with the information he is giving them. They assure him he's safe, protected, that this is confidential. They lie.
And this is the culture the movie lives in. How do you have a love story in this kind of world? The movie skirts this question, simply allowing, almost miraculously, that Barry meets a woman who does love him, protect him, and forgive him. He can't possibly reach out for her: the avenues he attempted earlier to break out of his isolation were both much more clinical, professional. He was looking for closeness, but a distant kind of closeness. The idea of actually looking for a woman, an intimate companion, was inconceivable to him. He did everything he could to avoid it. She found him, she pursued him, she made it safe for him to come to her.
So the hope-- I might even say the daydream-- is that a Lena Leonard will someday appear in our lives, and like us enough to persist through our weirdness until we can bear to trust her. Then we will no longer be alone... and on the strength of that astonishing, wondrous not-being-alone, we can brave and conquer all the other hostilities of our world.
The culture of Monsoon Wedding is, of course, a family in India. I don't know enough about India to judge where it fits into modern Indian culture, but I know plenty about families, so that's where I'm going to focus. Family comes with its own problems, and its own kind of isolation. Paranoia is not an issue... you pretty much know who you can rely on for what, and when there's a betrayal of trust it's shattering (as opposed to PDL, where it's expected.) But just as there is an isolation of solitude, there is an isolation of belonging. In PDL, Barry Egan says, "I don't know if there is anything wrong because I don't know how other people are." That's the isolation of solitude... you are horribly conscious of the gulf between your mind and anyone else's and you have no idea what's going on on the other side. You can't define yourself in terms of other people, as we all for some reason feel compelled to do, because other people are hopelessly distant from you.
In the isolation of belonging, you have no problem defining yourself in terms of other people. You can't escape it. Everybody in a family has their labels, and the family as a whole has an identity against the outside world. The isolation comes because you're not really defined by those labels, and you know it. You have your secrets, and you have the pieces of yourself that no-one sees. The torment here is to be in a room filled with people who know you well, and yet don't see who you are; to have someone give you a glance of understanding, and yet have no idea where your pain really comes from (I am thinking of the scene when Tej has just offered to fund Ria's education, and amid the celebration someone mentions Ria's father, and Ria's eyes fill with tears.)
In the love stories of both movies there is a moment of honesty, where one character reveals to the other something they've kept hidden. And it is that moment that forges a union between the lovers: suddenly they are no longer isolated individuals, but allies against the rest of the world, whether it is the cold, bare hostility of Punch-Drunk Love or the noisy, nosy crowd of Monsoon Wedding.
Monsoon Wedding, of course, doesn't stop there. Being about a family, it displays a range of relationships in many stages. And it is clear that the moment of honesty is not a one-time thing. As relationships continue over time, there is a continual ebb and flow of concealment and authenticity. Isolation-- reaching-- and rebuff or embrace, leading to further isolation or another moment of unity, solidarity, lasting for a while until the process starts over again. And in between? The patterns of family life, the everyday conventions we use in dealing with those close to us. The quality of these patterns largely determines whether family is a comfort or a misery, and also either facilitates or inhibits the moments of authenticity. But I have strayed now from talking about movies, so I will end here.
-The link: They're both love stories. I didn't say the link had to be terribly specific.
-The comestibles: Gouda cheese, Clementines, and the leftover Shiraz from when Leah was here. I have no idea how these things are going to go together, or how they'll go with the movies, but they're what I had on hand, and tonight was kind of an afterthought. Plus, the wine really needs to be drunk.
-Thoughts and expectations: Monsoon Wedding is one of my favorite movies. Punch-Drunk Love is a movie I've wanted to see for a long time. Pretty much I walked into Blockbuster looking for a movie I that I hadn't seen, wanted to see, and could make a plausible pairing with Monsoon Wedding. I did say tonight was something of an afterthought. It'll be interesting to see what happens.
Now, for the movies.
***
Wow. What an interesting combination. I'd really love to write a separate blog entry on each one, but I don't have time. So we'll stick with a brief overview, with a particular eye to how they comment on each other.
I knew they were both love stories, and I had a hunch I'd be able to make the link more specific, but I didn't know enough about Punch-Drunk Love to be sure. Now, though, I can say that they're both love stories deeply embedded in a cultural context. The romance itself in each takes up a fairly small amount of screen time (in Monsoon Wedding, of course, there are several romances, as well as other storylines.) So you have a love story with lots of other stuff going on around it.
I'm struggling to define the culture that Punch-Drunk Love lives in. It's contemporary American, obviously, but it's more specific than that. It's a culture that hasn't been named, as far as I know, but it's very familiar to us. I might even say it's the default culture of Americans: if you don't have a group-- family, ethnic, religious, activist-- then you probably live in this culture. It's the culture of isolation and alienation. Its hallmarks are a craving for intimacy and a profound distrust of people and institutions alike. There is a desperate need to be heard, to be understood, to connect with someone, anyone, but the knowledge of how dangerous it is to reach out for that is crippling. And it's not paranoid: they really are out to get us... if not to crush us maliciously, at least to use whatever we give them for our own ends.
Punch-Drunk Love is not subtle on this point. Twice, early in the movie, Barry Egan tries to break out of his isolation. He knows the dangers. In both interactions he voices, repeatedly, his worries about what the other person might do with the information he is giving them. They assure him he's safe, protected, that this is confidential. They lie.
And this is the culture the movie lives in. How do you have a love story in this kind of world? The movie skirts this question, simply allowing, almost miraculously, that Barry meets a woman who does love him, protect him, and forgive him. He can't possibly reach out for her: the avenues he attempted earlier to break out of his isolation were both much more clinical, professional. He was looking for closeness, but a distant kind of closeness. The idea of actually looking for a woman, an intimate companion, was inconceivable to him. He did everything he could to avoid it. She found him, she pursued him, she made it safe for him to come to her.
So the hope-- I might even say the daydream-- is that a Lena Leonard will someday appear in our lives, and like us enough to persist through our weirdness until we can bear to trust her. Then we will no longer be alone... and on the strength of that astonishing, wondrous not-being-alone, we can brave and conquer all the other hostilities of our world.
The culture of Monsoon Wedding is, of course, a family in India. I don't know enough about India to judge where it fits into modern Indian culture, but I know plenty about families, so that's where I'm going to focus. Family comes with its own problems, and its own kind of isolation. Paranoia is not an issue... you pretty much know who you can rely on for what, and when there's a betrayal of trust it's shattering (as opposed to PDL, where it's expected.) But just as there is an isolation of solitude, there is an isolation of belonging. In PDL, Barry Egan says, "I don't know if there is anything wrong because I don't know how other people are." That's the isolation of solitude... you are horribly conscious of the gulf between your mind and anyone else's and you have no idea what's going on on the other side. You can't define yourself in terms of other people, as we all for some reason feel compelled to do, because other people are hopelessly distant from you.
In the isolation of belonging, you have no problem defining yourself in terms of other people. You can't escape it. Everybody in a family has their labels, and the family as a whole has an identity against the outside world. The isolation comes because you're not really defined by those labels, and you know it. You have your secrets, and you have the pieces of yourself that no-one sees. The torment here is to be in a room filled with people who know you well, and yet don't see who you are; to have someone give you a glance of understanding, and yet have no idea where your pain really comes from (I am thinking of the scene when Tej has just offered to fund Ria's education, and amid the celebration someone mentions Ria's father, and Ria's eyes fill with tears.)
In the love stories of both movies there is a moment of honesty, where one character reveals to the other something they've kept hidden. And it is that moment that forges a union between the lovers: suddenly they are no longer isolated individuals, but allies against the rest of the world, whether it is the cold, bare hostility of Punch-Drunk Love or the noisy, nosy crowd of Monsoon Wedding.
Monsoon Wedding, of course, doesn't stop there. Being about a family, it displays a range of relationships in many stages. And it is clear that the moment of honesty is not a one-time thing. As relationships continue over time, there is a continual ebb and flow of concealment and authenticity. Isolation-- reaching-- and rebuff or embrace, leading to further isolation or another moment of unity, solidarity, lasting for a while until the process starts over again. And in between? The patterns of family life, the everyday conventions we use in dealing with those close to us. The quality of these patterns largely determines whether family is a comfort or a misery, and also either facilitates or inhibits the moments of authenticity. But I have strayed now from talking about movies, so I will end here.
Double feature: introduction
Here at a raid on the inarticulate, we like to introduce new features every so often, to continually improve the quality of blog our readers have come to...
Aw, who am I kidding? I pretty much post what I feel like posting, when I feel like it. Sometimes. If there's nothing more compelling to do. When a few kind individuals offered suggestions on how to increase my readership, I pointed out that if I increased my readership to any significant degree, it would probably involve creating expectations that I would, oh, post somewhat regularly, and with some continuity of content. And that's the very last thing I want to do.
However, I did have this really cool idea, and it involves a somewhat regular posting here, on a specific subject. And since I intend to make it a steady ritual in my life, there is some faint hope that this, the premiere, won't turn into a standalone post, as nearly all my other posts that were meant to be part of a series have.
Enough preamble. The ritual is Double Feature Night. This is where I watch two movies, with suitable accompaniment of food and drink, and then write about them a little. The parameters for the movie choice: 1- at least one has to be new to me. I'm going to try to make it both most of the time, but every so often I'll pair a movie I've seen before with a new one (as I'm doing tonight.) 2- they must be reputable movies, movies that have some claim to quality. This is not guilty-pleasure-movie night. I may occasionally break this rule if there's a good enough reason, such as pairing a high-brow movie with a low-brow movie on the same subject. Which brings me to 3- they must have something in common, or at least yield an interesting juxtaposition. This I expect will be rather easy to do, since almost any two works of art can yield an interesting juxtaposition if you want them to. Part of the fun will be in seeing what unexpected things come out of the pairings.
I expect three main benefits to come out of this new ritual. First, it will lend a bit of the whole regularity/content thing to this irregular and whim-based blog (my plan is to do this once a month. Maybe twice, if I feel like it.) Second, it will get me watching movies that have been on my list for way too long. Third, it reserves a night for me to do something I enjoy all by myself. And I need that, for reasons that are too complicated to go into here.
Final note: I am indebted for this idea to Sam and Stephen of All Movie Talk. They gave me the idea in quite a roundabout way, by twice mentioning in their show pairs of movies that I thought I'd like to watch back-to-back. The second time it happened I decided to make a ritual out of it. This paragraph really exists solely to be a plug for their podcast, by the way, so it'd be a shame if you didn't at least check it out.
Aw, who am I kidding? I pretty much post what I feel like posting, when I feel like it. Sometimes. If there's nothing more compelling to do. When a few kind individuals offered suggestions on how to increase my readership, I pointed out that if I increased my readership to any significant degree, it would probably involve creating expectations that I would, oh, post somewhat regularly, and with some continuity of content. And that's the very last thing I want to do.
However, I did have this really cool idea, and it involves a somewhat regular posting here, on a specific subject. And since I intend to make it a steady ritual in my life, there is some faint hope that this, the premiere, won't turn into a standalone post, as nearly all my other posts that were meant to be part of a series have.
Enough preamble. The ritual is Double Feature Night. This is where I watch two movies, with suitable accompaniment of food and drink, and then write about them a little. The parameters for the movie choice: 1- at least one has to be new to me. I'm going to try to make it both most of the time, but every so often I'll pair a movie I've seen before with a new one (as I'm doing tonight.) 2- they must be reputable movies, movies that have some claim to quality. This is not guilty-pleasure-movie night. I may occasionally break this rule if there's a good enough reason, such as pairing a high-brow movie with a low-brow movie on the same subject. Which brings me to 3- they must have something in common, or at least yield an interesting juxtaposition. This I expect will be rather easy to do, since almost any two works of art can yield an interesting juxtaposition if you want them to. Part of the fun will be in seeing what unexpected things come out of the pairings.
I expect three main benefits to come out of this new ritual. First, it will lend a bit of the whole regularity/content thing to this irregular and whim-based blog (my plan is to do this once a month. Maybe twice, if I feel like it.) Second, it will get me watching movies that have been on my list for way too long. Third, it reserves a night for me to do something I enjoy all by myself. And I need that, for reasons that are too complicated to go into here.
Final note: I am indebted for this idea to Sam and Stephen of All Movie Talk. They gave me the idea in quite a roundabout way, by twice mentioning in their show pairs of movies that I thought I'd like to watch back-to-back. The second time it happened I decided to make a ritual out of it. This paragraph really exists solely to be a plug for their podcast, by the way, so it'd be a shame if you didn't at least check it out.
Monday, November 13, 2006
an explanation, and a break in precedent
So my last post was more than a post. It was a boat-burning. It was the seal on a decision. Now I can say the decision is made, and I've done something to cement it.
My last post was also the beginning of my most recent law school essay attempt. Which is why posting it here was a boat-burning. If I was actually going to submit it to any schools, I wouldn't have posted it here. So my having posted it makes it final that I'm not going to submit it.
But wait-- there's more. Not only am I not going to submit that essay, I am not going to submit any other essay, written or yet-to-be written. This year. Which is a fancy way of saying, I'm not applying to law school this year.
Wow. Writing it feels weird. I've been pretty settled in the decision, but actually typing and publishing it (for all the world to see, right?) is a different thing. It's real now. Kind of like when I cut my hair... I'd been imagining and thinking of it short for two weeks, but actually seeing it short was still pretty dramatic.
Oh yeah, I cut off all my hair. That was the "thing I'm doing on Friday," for those of you keeping score at home. It's short now. I'm just starting to get used to it.
But I digress. By most counts, deciding not to apply-- yet-- to law school is more momentous than the sudden breeze at the back of my neck (though I am knitting up a new crop of scarves to get me through the winter.) And some of you probably want to know why (actually, some of you probably want to know why I cut my hair, too. But we're focusing here. On law school. Not the hair.)
It started when I was trying to write my second essay, which ended up being the one I just posted. I had weeks and weeks of false starts, though, and that's usually a bad sign. I can have problems in writing, when I'm lazy or unfocused or just not in a writing mood... and at those times one of two tactics fixes the problem: either just gritting my teeth and writing until it starts to flow, or putting it to rest for an hour or a day until I'm in a better place. But when I've tried, day after day and week after week, and pushed through actually getting words on the page, but still can't manage to hit my stride, then it's usually a sign that something else is wrong. "Something else" might be the topic I'm trying to write on, or some emotional issue that needs to be written out before I can devote creative energy to anything else... but something is wrong, and just sitting and writing won't fix it.
So I started to get this sense of something wrong, but several topic shifts weren't taking care of it. At last I managed to get an essay out, and kind of a cool one I thought. So I submitted it to my review board. (Again, for those of you keeping score at home, I did not in fact string them up by their toenails, though I wanted to for a minute or two.) They came back with basically the same response that the first essay received: great writing, interesting enough, gives insight into who you are, but not a compelling reason to admit you to my law school. (Neither of them has a law school by the way; though if they did I'd totally go.)
So after a lengthy text-message argument, which served nicely to pass the first four or five hours of my shift at work that night, I got to thinking. Then I went home and thought some more, while I was supposed to be asleep. And the end of all my thinking was: Maybe I shouldn't apply to law school yet.
It was one of those decisions I talked about in my post a couple weeks ago on decisions. I kinda knew right away that it was the right thing. But I thought about it more, because I don't trust these impulses, and also because I've been planning my entire life around being at law school next year. Only the more I thought, the more good reasons I came up with for not going yet.
The reason, in brief, is that I'm not ready yet. There are things I want to do to prepare. I'll talk about some of those later, but that's the gist of it. I put off college for the same reason, and it was one of the better decisions I've made in my life. When I went, I knew who I was and what I was about. Of course, all of that changed through my four years there, but I went in poised and focused, and that was good.
If I enter law school next year, it will be with a firm but vague conviction that that's what I want to do. And that's not enough. That's not how I do things. Nothing about the process, right now, sits well with me. My plan was to apply to a bunch of schools that seemed good to me, and then investigate them further once I'd found out whether or not I got in. But that's not how I do things either. I figure out what I want, and what steps will best help me get there, then I take them. None of this scattershot method of choosing where I'll spend three difficult years. So one of the things I need to do to prepare is visit law schools... all the ones on my list and others that seem worth investigation (anyone want to road-trip to Chicago or New York in the next seven months?)
This is good. I'm excited about it. It's a little sad, putting off returning to an academic environment for another year, but there's plenty for me to study on my own (Russian is next on the list.) And I won't mind having my intellectual freedom for a little longer. It's going to be hard for me, especially at first, to let go of all the fun things I like to do with my brain to focus on law. I want to make sure I'm fully ready before I attempt it.
So that's that. I will be entering law school no earlier than the fall of 2008. I'm pretty confident that it's the right decision, and anyway it's made. And, as I've been learning, sometimes to have a decision made is more important than having it be the right one.
My last post was also the beginning of my most recent law school essay attempt. Which is why posting it here was a boat-burning. If I was actually going to submit it to any schools, I wouldn't have posted it here. So my having posted it makes it final that I'm not going to submit it.
But wait-- there's more. Not only am I not going to submit that essay, I am not going to submit any other essay, written or yet-to-be written. This year. Which is a fancy way of saying, I'm not applying to law school this year.
Wow. Writing it feels weird. I've been pretty settled in the decision, but actually typing and publishing it (for all the world to see, right?) is a different thing. It's real now. Kind of like when I cut my hair... I'd been imagining and thinking of it short for two weeks, but actually seeing it short was still pretty dramatic.
Oh yeah, I cut off all my hair. That was the "thing I'm doing on Friday," for those of you keeping score at home. It's short now. I'm just starting to get used to it.
But I digress. By most counts, deciding not to apply-- yet-- to law school is more momentous than the sudden breeze at the back of my neck (though I am knitting up a new crop of scarves to get me through the winter.) And some of you probably want to know why (actually, some of you probably want to know why I cut my hair, too. But we're focusing here. On law school. Not the hair.)
It started when I was trying to write my second essay, which ended up being the one I just posted. I had weeks and weeks of false starts, though, and that's usually a bad sign. I can have problems in writing, when I'm lazy or unfocused or just not in a writing mood... and at those times one of two tactics fixes the problem: either just gritting my teeth and writing until it starts to flow, or putting it to rest for an hour or a day until I'm in a better place. But when I've tried, day after day and week after week, and pushed through actually getting words on the page, but still can't manage to hit my stride, then it's usually a sign that something else is wrong. "Something else" might be the topic I'm trying to write on, or some emotional issue that needs to be written out before I can devote creative energy to anything else... but something is wrong, and just sitting and writing won't fix it.
So I started to get this sense of something wrong, but several topic shifts weren't taking care of it. At last I managed to get an essay out, and kind of a cool one I thought. So I submitted it to my review board. (Again, for those of you keeping score at home, I did not in fact string them up by their toenails, though I wanted to for a minute or two.) They came back with basically the same response that the first essay received: great writing, interesting enough, gives insight into who you are, but not a compelling reason to admit you to my law school. (Neither of them has a law school by the way; though if they did I'd totally go.)
So after a lengthy text-message argument, which served nicely to pass the first four or five hours of my shift at work that night, I got to thinking. Then I went home and thought some more, while I was supposed to be asleep. And the end of all my thinking was: Maybe I shouldn't apply to law school yet.
It was one of those decisions I talked about in my post a couple weeks ago on decisions. I kinda knew right away that it was the right thing. But I thought about it more, because I don't trust these impulses, and also because I've been planning my entire life around being at law school next year. Only the more I thought, the more good reasons I came up with for not going yet.
The reason, in brief, is that I'm not ready yet. There are things I want to do to prepare. I'll talk about some of those later, but that's the gist of it. I put off college for the same reason, and it was one of the better decisions I've made in my life. When I went, I knew who I was and what I was about. Of course, all of that changed through my four years there, but I went in poised and focused, and that was good.
If I enter law school next year, it will be with a firm but vague conviction that that's what I want to do. And that's not enough. That's not how I do things. Nothing about the process, right now, sits well with me. My plan was to apply to a bunch of schools that seemed good to me, and then investigate them further once I'd found out whether or not I got in. But that's not how I do things either. I figure out what I want, and what steps will best help me get there, then I take them. None of this scattershot method of choosing where I'll spend three difficult years. So one of the things I need to do to prepare is visit law schools... all the ones on my list and others that seem worth investigation (anyone want to road-trip to Chicago or New York in the next seven months?)
This is good. I'm excited about it. It's a little sad, putting off returning to an academic environment for another year, but there's plenty for me to study on my own (Russian is next on the list.) And I won't mind having my intellectual freedom for a little longer. It's going to be hard for me, especially at first, to let go of all the fun things I like to do with my brain to focus on law. I want to make sure I'm fully ready before I attempt it.
So that's that. I will be entering law school no earlier than the fall of 2008. I'm pretty confident that it's the right decision, and anyway it's made. And, as I've been learning, sometimes to have a decision made is more important than having it be the right one.
On self-discipline
This post is more than a post. I will explain in my next post. If I actually manage to break my habit of failing to write posts that I foreshadow.
I have a problem with self-discipline. People often assume, when they hear I was homeschooled through high school, that my self-discipline must be powerful; the reasoning, I suppose, is that powerful self-discipline would be required in order to do all the work one normally does in high school without the external motivators of grades and class pressure. And they’re probably right. The flaw lies in the assumption that I actually did all the work one normally does in high school. I didn’t. In fact, at the age of sixteen I essentially dropped out of school (it’s hard to tell when you’re homeschooled, but my parents and I knew) to work full-time. When I decided I was ready for college, I took a few months to brush up on those areas of study my father and I felt I was behind in (chiefly math), and then I applied.
Even before I dropped out, my education was not the arduous, time-intensive march I see most high school students conscripted into. I studied mostly what was interesting, and occasionally what was necessary. What was interesting to me ranged from botany to Greek mythology to the Lizzie Borden trial. As I pursued these and other interests, I picked up a wealth of knowledge on any number of topics most high-school students never study. The question which my parents held with anxiety as I entered college classes for the first time was, Is it enough? Are there major holes in her education, areas where she’ll be hopelessly behind her peers?
There proved to be only one, and it wasn’t an area of study so much as a mental muscle. I found that most of my classmates, unlike myself, knew how to do boring work. They could sit at a computer screen under the weight of some assignment that they weren’t interested in, and trudge through it till it was done. I could not do this; my mind rebelled. If it was mechanical, calculative work I could manage it, but to expend creative effort on a project that didn’t interest me proved impossible.
This, of course, presented a problem, as many of the paper topics and research projects assigned to me were not of my choosing and not inherently interesting to me. But I was determined to excel in college. I suppose I could have learned self-discipline, even at that age, but I didn’t want to. My mind was free and fertile, it delighted in weaving stories and unraveling riddles. Why would I subject it to drudgery? Part of my resistance was simple distaste for an unpleasant task, and part of it was fear of losing the joy of thought that had characterized my life till then.
So I found a different way of coping. Instead of forcing my mind to bend to uninteresting work, I simply forced it to figure out how the work was interesting. This proved easier than I would have thought: it turns out that nearly everything is interesting. Some exploratory thought on a paper topic would show its relation to a question I had been thinking about, and then I could address both questions in my work. Each paper I wrote, then, both pursued my already-existing interests and expanded my ideas of what was interesting. A rich, interconnected web of questions began to form in my mind. As the web grew, the connections extended farther, until in my senior year I was seeing fractals in the novels of Nabokov. Instead of subjecting my mind to tedium, I had discovered a glorious playground of ideas, and how delightfully each question speaks to another.
I have a problem with self-discipline, if self-discipline means forcing the mind, or the body, or the heart, to do something it was not meant to do. The consequences are evident in the world of physical exertion: there is a tremendous difference between athletes who train in cooperation with the body’s strengths and internal rhythms, and those who drive their bodies by brute force of will. Both are working hard, but one is building strength and increasing capability, while the other is working toward physical breakdown. I firmly believe that it is the same with any activity of the mind. Work, by all means, but work with your mind, not against it. Instead of working toward getting the project done, work toward the ignition of interest; then you will find that the project is never done, even when completed, because the questions and ideas it has raised have been woven into your mental framework.
I have a problem with self-discipline. People often assume, when they hear I was homeschooled through high school, that my self-discipline must be powerful; the reasoning, I suppose, is that powerful self-discipline would be required in order to do all the work one normally does in high school without the external motivators of grades and class pressure. And they’re probably right. The flaw lies in the assumption that I actually did all the work one normally does in high school. I didn’t. In fact, at the age of sixteen I essentially dropped out of school (it’s hard to tell when you’re homeschooled, but my parents and I knew) to work full-time. When I decided I was ready for college, I took a few months to brush up on those areas of study my father and I felt I was behind in (chiefly math), and then I applied.
Even before I dropped out, my education was not the arduous, time-intensive march I see most high school students conscripted into. I studied mostly what was interesting, and occasionally what was necessary. What was interesting to me ranged from botany to Greek mythology to the Lizzie Borden trial. As I pursued these and other interests, I picked up a wealth of knowledge on any number of topics most high-school students never study. The question which my parents held with anxiety as I entered college classes for the first time was, Is it enough? Are there major holes in her education, areas where she’ll be hopelessly behind her peers?
There proved to be only one, and it wasn’t an area of study so much as a mental muscle. I found that most of my classmates, unlike myself, knew how to do boring work. They could sit at a computer screen under the weight of some assignment that they weren’t interested in, and trudge through it till it was done. I could not do this; my mind rebelled. If it was mechanical, calculative work I could manage it, but to expend creative effort on a project that didn’t interest me proved impossible.
This, of course, presented a problem, as many of the paper topics and research projects assigned to me were not of my choosing and not inherently interesting to me. But I was determined to excel in college. I suppose I could have learned self-discipline, even at that age, but I didn’t want to. My mind was free and fertile, it delighted in weaving stories and unraveling riddles. Why would I subject it to drudgery? Part of my resistance was simple distaste for an unpleasant task, and part of it was fear of losing the joy of thought that had characterized my life till then.
So I found a different way of coping. Instead of forcing my mind to bend to uninteresting work, I simply forced it to figure out how the work was interesting. This proved easier than I would have thought: it turns out that nearly everything is interesting. Some exploratory thought on a paper topic would show its relation to a question I had been thinking about, and then I could address both questions in my work. Each paper I wrote, then, both pursued my already-existing interests and expanded my ideas of what was interesting. A rich, interconnected web of questions began to form in my mind. As the web grew, the connections extended farther, until in my senior year I was seeing fractals in the novels of Nabokov. Instead of subjecting my mind to tedium, I had discovered a glorious playground of ideas, and how delightfully each question speaks to another.
I have a problem with self-discipline, if self-discipline means forcing the mind, or the body, or the heart, to do something it was not meant to do. The consequences are evident in the world of physical exertion: there is a tremendous difference between athletes who train in cooperation with the body’s strengths and internal rhythms, and those who drive their bodies by brute force of will. Both are working hard, but one is building strength and increasing capability, while the other is working toward physical breakdown. I firmly believe that it is the same with any activity of the mind. Work, by all means, but work with your mind, not against it. Instead of working toward getting the project done, work toward the ignition of interest; then you will find that the project is never done, even when completed, because the questions and ideas it has raised have been woven into your mental framework.
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Lessons from a dysfunctional relationship: communication
These are thoughts I've kept for years. It's time for them to begin to emerge. I can only guess at how they might be received by my various readers, but to two people at least I have things to say. To one: don't worry. What you see here is not a change in me, but a reawakening of parts of me that were asleep when we met. To the other: I love you; and I know that I am not telling the whole story. But this is the part of it that, right now, is crying out to be told.
Whoever talks the most loses. If I bare my soul to you freely and without prompting, and you reveal your thoughts rarely and only after much coaxing, then you are the winner.
First, you are the winner by simple economics. If a good is flowing liberally from me to you, and only scantily from you to me, it follows that I am being steadily impoverished.
Second, you are the winner because in both exchanges I am the one betraying need. I need to share with you, and I need you to share with me. You, apparently, need neither, since you neither solicit communication from me nor volunteer information on your own. So I am weak, because I need, and you are strong, because you do not-- and you have power over me, because you control whether my needs are met.
Third, you are the winner because you have the power of superior information. You know things about me, and you can-- and do-- use them against me, while you remain impervious. You understand me, and I do not understand you. You are a cipher, I am transparent. And this is exactly how you want it.
With regard to the first, I did in time learn to stem the flow of communication. I learned to talk, if I must talk, to a notebook, or to a tree, or to God. I learned-- and I thank you for this-- that I can be a whole person unseen, unshared. I can be real without being reflected in another's eyes.
Learning not to need your communication was another matter. It was complicated because I knew that your independence was an illusion. In truth, you needed to tell me things much more than I needed to hear them... but you could hardly bring yourself to share, let alone to admit that you needed to. And so, my love, I continued to need your words-- continued to draw them out with hours of painstaking questions, bracing against rebuffs. It looked, to one watching, as if I was letting you make a fool of me, subjecting me to this mortifying ritual of supplication for your confidence. But by that time I didn't much care about foolishness.
In the end, you found other ears, and I was freed, first to be silent, then to begin to rebuild a sane pattern of communication. We talk, now, like friends. And the real measure of grace is that much of the time I don't even remember what a gift that is. The lack of astonishment in our dialogue is the most startling and beautiful thing of all.
But these things I learned from you have gone deep. The good and the bad in them are wound so closely-- independence, circumspection; constraint, frigidity-- that I hardly know how I ought to shape myself, even if I could master the fear of being exposed like that again. It is such a mixed legacy that time of ours has given me; so many twisted lessons I have learned. It is time, at the very least, to bring them into the light. This is the first.
Whoever talks the most loses. If I bare my soul to you freely and without prompting, and you reveal your thoughts rarely and only after much coaxing, then you are the winner.
First, you are the winner by simple economics. If a good is flowing liberally from me to you, and only scantily from you to me, it follows that I am being steadily impoverished.
Second, you are the winner because in both exchanges I am the one betraying need. I need to share with you, and I need you to share with me. You, apparently, need neither, since you neither solicit communication from me nor volunteer information on your own. So I am weak, because I need, and you are strong, because you do not-- and you have power over me, because you control whether my needs are met.
Third, you are the winner because you have the power of superior information. You know things about me, and you can-- and do-- use them against me, while you remain impervious. You understand me, and I do not understand you. You are a cipher, I am transparent. And this is exactly how you want it.
With regard to the first, I did in time learn to stem the flow of communication. I learned to talk, if I must talk, to a notebook, or to a tree, or to God. I learned-- and I thank you for this-- that I can be a whole person unseen, unshared. I can be real without being reflected in another's eyes.
Learning not to need your communication was another matter. It was complicated because I knew that your independence was an illusion. In truth, you needed to tell me things much more than I needed to hear them... but you could hardly bring yourself to share, let alone to admit that you needed to. And so, my love, I continued to need your words-- continued to draw them out with hours of painstaking questions, bracing against rebuffs. It looked, to one watching, as if I was letting you make a fool of me, subjecting me to this mortifying ritual of supplication for your confidence. But by that time I didn't much care about foolishness.
In the end, you found other ears, and I was freed, first to be silent, then to begin to rebuild a sane pattern of communication. We talk, now, like friends. And the real measure of grace is that much of the time I don't even remember what a gift that is. The lack of astonishment in our dialogue is the most startling and beautiful thing of all.
But these things I learned from you have gone deep. The good and the bad in them are wound so closely-- independence, circumspection; constraint, frigidity-- that I hardly know how I ought to shape myself, even if I could master the fear of being exposed like that again. It is such a mixed legacy that time of ours has given me; so many twisted lessons I have learned. It is time, at the very least, to bring them into the light. This is the first.
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