If you’re fond of natural disasters, come to California.

Wild fires, earthquakes, and cougars!* And oh, unbreathable air! Although that’s not always natural.

I never realized I lived in such an exciting state; you know, beyond my pride that it is the state most often associated with the Beach Boys. But I miss out on a lot of the fun living in NorCal, and when I was in San Diego, I slept through the one pathetic excuse for an earthquake that we did have.

And I want to be around for a big one — hell, I’d be up for being around for the big one. I’ve always wanted to expierence a sizable earthquake; that desire is coupled with the more intense one to go tornado hunting with all those crazy sexy tornado hunting scientists people one day. Because tornadoes are fucking awesome.

And crazy natural phenomena in general are pretty awesome, in the classic sense of the word, “full of awe.” Edmund Burke once speculated about this quality of the “sublime,” and if I remember anything correctly about that lecture discussion oh, four years ago or so, I believe he commented on this guilty pleasure we take in the sublime even when it has horrific effects. I am very much in touch with this emotion — a pang of disappointment that the quake yesterday wasn’t “the big one” broke straight through my subconsciousness and into my complete awareness. I think at some point when reporters speculated about the much dreaded arrival of “the big one,” I responded, “Bring It.”

It’s not that I’m callous — in the ideal situation, we’d arrange to have “the big one” in the middle of a nice, empty field with only earthquake enthusiasts patiently waiting for the fun times to roll – but just that I love having nature remind me of her presence, particularly if she does so violently and with all sorts of shocking sublimity. Most of our lives we go about our days obviously aware that larger forces like science or the physical world are swimming about us and working away — but really, how often do we experience directly the force and nearly eternal nature of those processes which don’t give a damn about our existence? It’s delightful to me whenever it happens (you know, again assuming death and maiming are not the result) — it seems like God is saying hello, and we get to experience the forecful prescence of things much larger than ourselves.

So, I’ve successfully sentimentalized an earthquake to the point of this seeming like a psychological report. And that’s very well and so; delight in small things usually points to deeper desires, and for me, natural disasters have the attraction of presenting me with a stage which I find dramatic and monumental enough to satisfy my fantasies of witnessing the incredible, in whatever form it comes. I look forward to the day where I am in an earthquake-safe space when “the big one” hits; I plan on flinging myself on the ground to feel the vibrations, and with a big grin, declaring, “Woooo!, here we go!”

——————–

* Ignore that there are plenty of cougars all over the United States.

Well, I’ve found the feel good video for the rest of my life.

I should be conservative with its use and only bring it out for really bad days and general crisis, but man, I haven’t gotten through it yet without tearing up.

And it’s not just that it’s adorable and sweet, although it certainly is that. But when I sat down to watch this today, I went from a completely neutral mood, slightly worn out from three hours of French and biking home, to suddenly crying my eyes out. And I’m not exaggerating. By the end of the first viewing my cheeks were puffy and my nose was running.

There is something so deeply moving about this to me — it is love in its most pure and powerful form. It is how mothers feel about daughters and daughters about fathers, and dogs and owners about each other. And of course, it being an animal makes it all the more accessible to my heart strings, since they often seem to represent in their beautiful simplicity the most undiluted essence of love. Dogs especially, of course, particularly since they don’t usually have a record of also eating people every now and then.

When I was a girl I read a book called Dogs Never Lie About Love, and of course agreed with the declared argument. But he was arguing for this, against people who would claim otherwise. Nowadays, the fact that animals love is one of the few opinions I get dogmatic about. If you think otherwise, even after owning a loving animal, there is just no talking to you. Since when does love have to be a complex emotion of only the human species? It appears, actually, it is one of the things clearly connecting us to the larger animal world of which we are a part (that and killing other people’s babies, that is).

Anyway, I think this video basically encapsulates the point of life. Pretty much.

Daniel Watts is a wise wise man.

Slighty terrifying at times, but wise…at times.

“Don’t you know who I think I am?”* — fun with identity construction.

Identity studies and identity politics are a particularly interesting byproduct of postmodernism – in academics and politics – in the past few decades. Interestingly, the former tends to approach identity as constructed and dependent on historical context, whereas the latter, with the noble intent of battling bigoted depicts of homosexuals as somehow abnormal and perverted, usually focuses on the natural nature of identity.

According to Dror Wahrman in The Making of the Modern Self, the concept of identity most contemporaries would be familiar with is that of the fixed, unique individual – all children, after all, are told they are “special” when raised in the States, and literature across the West has a recurrent theme of the isolated, singular genius producing his brilliance from the original spout of his own mind. This concept, Wahrman explains, began solidifying in the late eighteenth century, an acute response to the destabilizing effects of the confusing new era, and hurried along by the crisis of identity suffered by Britons over the American Revolution. But we are getting too much into details.

Wahrman’s argument hinges on a contrast between this and what he considers the ancient regime of identity – a flexible view of the individual which allowed various personas to be tried on, adopted, and discarded, making identity a fluid and flexible thing. Hence, the common belief that race could be obtained through climate change or the eating of certain foods, and the popularity of masquerades which indulged the identity play the elite of the eighteenth century found intoxicating and intriguing.

As interesting and convincing as Wahrman’s arsenal of evidence is, the contrast is perhaps not as stark as he thinks. Before the age of the modern identity, individuals probably still thought of themselves nonetheless as individuals – perhaps with a flexible sets of descriptors, but autonomous individuals nonetheless. And likewise today, although the unique individual undoubtedly has a firm grasp on our consciousness, we’re not merely made up of one persona ourselves, either.

I’ve personally been realizing this latter point increasingly in the past year. As much as I sometimes desire a consistent, monolithic version of myself, that is the furthest thing from the truth. Indeed, I have several selves, various perspectives and personas, almost all equally me, which I like to emphasize and bring to the forefront when the time and mood is right, or mixed and combined as it currently pleases me. There is a lighthearted, easily amused self – the side which could spend an hour watching my dog play at the dog park, or finds even a repetitively stupid joke to hold the key to the questions of the universe. There is the emotive, deeply serious side which blogs about montages and moments captured through film. And then we also have my disdainful, sardonic cynic; this is the girl who listens to British punk rock, delights in making you look twice and doesn’t give a fuck about whether or not your children are exposed to my frequent use of the word “fuck.” This last persona is particularly useful for what ambiguity my gender identity has – while my scholarly self and emotive self are usually fairly feminine, my cynical side disdains womanly sentimentality and delights in being slightly androgynous in appearance. Definitely still a female, but one whose intelligence is distinctly male.

My British alter-ego, in all her (his) androgynous glory.

When it comes to how I feel about all these various identities and identity play in general in contemporary society, my feelings are pretty clear. Firstly, I avoid anything that appears to me to an overwrought cliché – in America, I can be comfortable with an androgynous pseudo-British philosopher because this presents something I’ve found to be uniquely me (the modern concept of the unique thinker holds much weight in my constructions of myself). The Goth group, on the other hand, seems so packaged and preordained by now that I see little room in there for genuine self-expression. This however, is a value judgment and hardly something to be held against those who prefer a clear group to identify with. (My preference to be uncategorizable, after all, is part of my personally preferred identity.) On the contrary, this, when done consciously, can be admirable – hipsters, who dress up not only with specific clothes or music preferences but with interests as well, are admirable at times to me: they seem to be doing openly what we all do secretly. While most try to claim everything is a “natural” interest, hipsters often make no pretence about constructing an identity in an attempt of communicating and connecting with others.**

My much more feminine and lighthearted self, who heartily believes that a good Mel Brooks film is the solution to all despair.

But this later point is precisely the only standard I do have – consciousness. Someone who constructs their identity, taking symbols, styles and significance from the culture that surrounds them, and knows they are doing it, doesn’t bother me in the slightest, and I’m more rather to be interested than repulsed. The individual, whoever, who pierces their nose, dyes their hair black and listens to Death Metal in the sincere belief that “this is just who I am, man” drives me positively crazy, and is easily describable with the awful phrase, “trying too hard.” For when you know what you are doing – when you are honest about your constructing – the identity play becomes a lighthearted exercise in self-exploration, even when – as has often been the case with my cynical side – the thing being explored is pessimism and self-loathing. It can be plumbed for what it offers, and discarded or adjusted as desired. And most importantly, you don’t take yourself too seriously; instead, you delight in yourself as a subject of possibilities, and do not grip too desperately to whatever characteristics you think provide the ultimate answer.

It is important to add that just because something involves an element of construction hardly means it does not hold value to obtaining an understanding about “truth,” here being personal truth (or, the truth about your personal self). It is exactly the conscious of construction that allows us to honestly evaluate how much something fits, and in what ways – and then we can honestly ask questions about why, or who we are in a deeper sense, beyond the exterior construction which is intended to represent more profound currents.

People who understand this human and flexible nature of identity play are not the ones described as “trying too hard,” – they are the true eccentrics, or the subtle intellectual who doesn’t appear to be prone to any unusual conceptions about dress, identity or gender. Obviously I’d class myself as having both of those latter characteristics. But, nonetheless, I still have that occasional admiration for a class-A hipster. After all, who can resist those Anglican looking hats?

Common, you can’t tell me that the androgyny going on here isn’t pretty hot.

—————————————————–

* Ever so appropriately, this is a quote from the Libertines “The Boy Looked at Johnny,” and was of the lines that really made me fall in love with the group.

** If you want proof of this claim of hipsters-as-conscious, I direct you to one of their facebook groups, entitled Hipsters: Whatever We’re Too Elitist To Care That You Hate Us!!!

The presence of the intellectual in modern society.

Apologies for the pompous prose here; but this is simply what happens to my writing when I’m reading on the eighteenth century, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like it.

————————————————

It is necessary to preface this topic, on which I have given a plentiful amount of my thought, by defining “intellectual.” “Reason, with most people, means their own opinion,” once wrote William Hazlitt. This is all too true; so for the purposes of this discussion, let me make clear that by “intellectual” I do not necessarily even mean “intelligent,” although the former is difficult to have with the latter; yet surely many intelligent people I have come across in my lifetime are nothing short of fools, and many self-proclaimed intellectuals could hardly grasp a complex thought even if it were to defile itself to make it presentable to them. Therefore, we will here consider as an “intellectual” someone who spends a sizable amount of time contemplating topics other than pop culture or personal problems, and makes an attempt at answering those questions which inevitably arise.

But let us presume then, our intellectual; let’s call him Cirby. Cirby realizes that the world largely operates on certain unjust mechanisms, and that the powers that maintain these are considerable. Upon this realization, he could quite understandably feel an urge to correct it, or exert what little powers he can in this direction. At times, this urge has been felt throughout a society during a time when an abnormal number of a society’s populace considered themselves intellectuals – the French Revolution is one such example, the 1960s in the United States another. In these times, the prospect of change through collective, sometimes coercive action seems plausible, and the enthusiasm built by that possibility results in social movements that do, indeed, produce some change. For an intellectual of this proclivity, these are grand times in which to be. A Marxist, for example, felt quite at home in the year of 1968, and indeed even in the repression that followed the popular movements of the West one could see a dogmatic philosophy of materialism expressed and palpable. (“See, I told you the capitalists would try to oppress us.”)

However there is another stripe of intellectual – let’s call him Jacques — which has the blessing and the curse of constant skepticism, a product of the Enlightenment which Romanticism and Marxism both did their best to eliminate. This sort of intellectual – which of course I must be candid and admit I am entirely describing myself – finds holistic systems of explanation to be inevitably flawed, and by his very inclinations Jacques does not like being a member of the crowd. He views parties and programs and systems of resistance as inherently requiring intellectual compromise, in so far as he will have to make fallacious arguments and build dogmatic structures in order to sufficiently body slam the opposing power. As the powers-that-be are certainly not enamored of complexity, so they can never be defeated with nuanced arguments that by their very nature, speak in an entirely different language so incomprehensible to the opposition that there is no convincing the middle crowd which is more easily seduced by the more simplistic narrative.

And this “middle crowd” presents us with the second opposition to Cirby and Jacques, in addition to the admittedly very simply described “powers that be”, (which hardly existed in any monolithic way with a single motivation, but of course I belie my prejudices here and complicate my point) there are, in our current society, the rest of the populace which can hardly rouse itself to caring except for when it temporarily fancies the egos of its members to indulge superficially in what their kindergarden teacher always told them characterizes a good American (and we are speaking chiefly of America here). These folks – call them the masses if you will – have hardly committed any sin by appropriating the obsessions and assumptions of the society around them, nor are they willfully encouraging the general stupidity of their culture. And much can be done to mitigate their more destructive tendencies through education and the gradual improvement of enlightenment – one may hope, for example, that in a few generations the issue of gay marriage will no longer be around and it will seem foolish to school children that consenting people were ever barred from spending their lives together in a legal sense.

However, there are limits to what can be done with the general crowd – for those who are not enamored with the idea of spending their time on the pursuit of larger questions will naturally tend towards simple answers, and simple answers, I’m afraid, are often times quite more powerful than complex ones. The appeal of a fundamentalist religion packs quite more a punch than agnosticism, for reasons that require a lot of speculation but let us just assert without proof that this is because simple answers are more comforting. They provide us with rule and reason. Inevitably, this extends deeply into the politics of any democratic nation; since the rulers of a democratic regime have to first and most principally appeal to the middling sorts (in mind and condition) and therefore will never have it in their interest to advocate a party of intellectuals.

This would be surmountable if democracy was as a whole inimical to the predilection of intellectuals – but alas, most of us support it whole heartedly, even if it has wretched consequences in some areas of the West. (Let us recall Winston Churchill, who argued that it was not a good form of government, but the best he knew). Nothing yet better has come along, depressingly enough. We’re too committed to freedom of thought and choice to come up with an alternative, and whatever ideas we flirt with to battle the predominance of stupidity in our current society – such as requiring a college education to obtain voting rights, wouldn’t that be a dream – run up against our extreme distaste for stripping anyone of the rights of man, something we created quite dearly with the Enlightenment and two Western Revolutions and not even the most elitist intellectual of this sort can part with entirely. (We are excluding Nazis and Commies in this discussion, mind you). This combines with a culture which loves every claim of populism it can pounce on, as the common propaganda of the society is that the majority always knows best, perhaps the most incredible fallacy a country has even be bewitched into believing.

So where does our lonely Jacques go? He can neither change the world in the current climate nor oppose it entirely. All that is left for him is to soldier on in what little ways he can, and reach out to those who are likeminded, those who have had the same enlightenment and will improve him through the fine sculpting of challenge and conversation. For those who think that talk and writing are weak objections – quite, think again. The modern world was birthed in a Republic of Letters, by men who took it upon themselves to seek out kindred spirits and build together a beautiful hope for enlightenment, peppered with an immense amount of diversity and yet shared in the same fundamental values of the beauty of the human mind.

As Ray Porter says of the British intelligentsia, they “are likened to the mixed clientele talking, talking, talking in a hot, smoky and crowded coffee house; men sharing broad convictions and sympathies but differing, and agreeing to differ, on matters dear to their hearts.”

And there, my friends, is the ideal society of my heart. A small circle of intellectuals, giving to each other what comfort and what enlightenment they can muster; and like small sparks we bounce off each other, producing more than what we were alone. And though we still seem like such small fireflies in a network of restless, ravenous flies, we should make a little light to last on our own.

This is pretty nifty.

Wordle made a collage of words that appear in my blogger; the bigger the more often.

Although, “just” and “like” are two of the most common words? Aren’t I completely lame.

I do seem to have a healthy obsession with moments, however.

The history of our Revolution.

I just finished watching the HBO miniseries John Adams, and I feel elated. Someone has finally accomplished what I always claimed could be; a quality depiction of the events of the American Revolution, both gripping and accurate, displaying the “founding fathers” in all their beautiful and pained complexity. John Adams as played by Paul Giamati is, with very minor alterations, as I imagined him. You become connected to the characters as human beings, and the historical events play out on screen not as cheesy theatrical moments with a clear wrong side and right, but as uncertain moments stacked with conflict and complexity.

Amazingly, the largest flaw by far and away is the depiction of Hamilton, which I have blogged about before. Thank goodness, then, that he hardly even appeared – I think all in all there are six scenes where he is present, and his script even there is fairly terse most of the time. So, Hamilton might be depicted completely inaccurately – but everyone else is right on target. Franklin comes across particularly well – not as a walking “book of quips” but rather a realistic portrait of a clever, witty man. I also like how they do not shy away from adding a comedic edge by touching on all his romantic shenanigans in France. Washington seems a bit awkward but I think that is because it’s Washington, and in fact, with someone so formal and formidable (not to mention just fucking huge) it always was a little bit awkward to be around Washington.

The depiction of Jefferson was a pleasant surprise. They had him down as quiet and eventually, dogmatic, two things I had pegged him as – but I had never imagined Jefferson as brooding. He carries himself with this almost playboy like arrogance and melancholy, and it’s quite charming. If Jefferson was actually like this, I’d be inclined to like him much more than I did before. In fact, in another film more based around Hamilton, I think I would hire that actor to play the part. He’d have to replace Jefferson’s brooding with Hamilton’s levity and firey intensity, but he has the right looks and the right demeanor of confidence to pull it off.

Yummy Jefferson, being annoyed with someone while he stalks around silently.

And of course the relationship between Abigail and John is depicted as it was in life – a beautiful friendship founded on mutual respect and admiration. I couldn’t help but cry my eyes out when Abigail dies – their relationship was something so beautiful and rare, and is strangely a model for any modern relationship. Adams always had the reputation of listening to his wife’s council more than anyone else, and most of the time, this was for the best.

There are, of course, a handful of historical inaccuracies in the film – which Wiki has a list of if you want to go see them – but on the whole, this is the most accurate film ever made about the American Revolution, as the British are not depicted as evil and the Founders not as philosophers cut out of stone. Just one example of this is the moment right after the vote for independence is finalized – rather than rejoicing or bursting out into song, the delegates sit around in complete, somber silence, encumbered with what they have just taken upon themselves and terrified of the future. It says very clearly “Holy shit, we just declared war on Great Britain. Oh fuck.”

It is moments like that in the film which bring me that closeness to the moment which I think anyone really enamored with the past craves, and when you have your moments of it is a feeling of transported joy. Another favorite moment of mine comes right towards the end, when Adams surveys the famous painting of the signing of the Declaration. He degrades the work, telling the artist that such a scene never occurred, as never was the whole delegation assembled to sign the declaration – and that such fictions would replace the true history of the Revolution, which was lost. Watching this scene, I could imagine the despair Adams felt over this fact – something he did in fact complain frequently about in his old age – but then felt such pride and satisfaction in knowing we have restored it for him. And this is why we do history; or at least, why I do. So I can tell the stories of people I admire and indeed, love, in all their painful and beautiful complexity. So they are not forgotten and their stories live past their time, there for the rest of us to wallow in all their terror and joy, and feel connected to something past ourselves and yet, seemingly so intimate.

And I do not think it is exaggeration to say we fall in love with those we study. For we truly do, and sometimes I feel them so near to me my heart breaks with that sort of happiness peculiar to love.