The Motives of the Pilgrims

I'm still binge watching the series The Affair, now into season four (4). The plot arcs include a married couple where the wife is an undocumented alien from Ecuador who come to the states when she was 10. There's worry that the powers that be will eventually discover her situation resulting in her deportation. There's additional angst due to there being a stepdaughter involving shared custody with the ex-wife. This contributes an overall unease that the marriage is somehow unbalanced - she's essentially subjugated her entire life/culture to be a housewife in a small tourist town in white bread America. 

Her situation prompted a train of thought about the immigrant experience, and I decided to do a little research. I confirmed what is commonly held to be true about the Pilgrims, that they come to America motivated by the desire for religious freedom. But that wasn't the primary motivation for coming to America; they had already achieved religious freedom, having lived in Holland for ten years, worshipping as they wished under lenient Dutch rule -  according to an account found of the official website of the Mayflower Society:

"Fearing their children were losing their English heritage and religious beliefs, the resumption of war and their inability as non-citizens to find decent jobs, a small group from the Leiden church made plans to settle in Northern Virginia" 

I suspect most people aren't aware of that part of the story: the original immigrants' primary motivation was to preserve their native ethnic culture and beliefs. The idea of America becoming some sort of melting pot which originated in the late 1700's was not part of the original intent of the first settlers.

The reality is that it's not possible to integrate certain ethnic cultures because their world views are mutually exclusive. A backlash to the concept of the melting pot led to development of multiculturalism. While it does repudiate the assimilation that I associate with the concept of the melting pot, the problem is that at any given moment, one world view has to dominate, which means some people will be somehow unhappy or dissatisfied with any given choice that affects everyone. 

So it comes as no surprise that there is polarization in America, and I am compelled to conclude that the global tendency towards tribalism is going to affect America as well. I'm not sure how I feel about this. 

Comfort

I work for a couple of places as a tutor. I was working with a student earlier today (this was true when I started this post, now it's a couple of days ago) and while working through one of the assignments, a student asked for clarification on an unfamiliar word and the subsequent discussion went off on a tangent to the word 'comfort', which prompted me to google the word which produced the definition, and I also found myself going through a webpage that had quotes on the topic of comfort.

The thrust of these quotes were about the lure of comfort, some quotes acknowledging how comfort dictated their choices, while others spoke against the lure, touting the importance of leaving one's 'comfort zone' in order to truly live/enjoy life. A quote by C.S. Lewis went quite a bit further in this direction. I've read of lot of his writings, but I'd never seen this quote before:

"If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair."

The modern definition of comfort has two distinct meanings, and Lewis addressed them both:

noun 

1. 1.

   a state of physical ease and freedom from pain or constraint.

   "room for four people to travel in comfort"
2. 2.

   the easing or alleviation of a person's feelings of grief or distress.

   "a few words of comfort"
   

The meanings share a common goal - a relief from pain. 

Given the timing since the last post about truth, this doesn't seem like a coincidence. Exposure to truth is often uncomfortable. If this is the first post in my blog you're reading, then I need to mention that I took a fifteen (15) year sabbatical from meaningful work, which would have been longer except I ran out of money (and I lost $50k learning how to trade foreign currency (FOREX) - and I actually know how to do it, but my limited universe of facts at the time compelled me to make the same kind of bad choices over and over), and it took another five years to reach a point of relative financial stability. I've never had a good explanation for why I did it, but now I can see that it was a response to all the pain I'd been carrying, and I sought to create a refuge from all of it. 

This is a choice we all have to face - deal with the unpleasantness that comes with some truth, or try to seek comfort. 

Someone wrote something that's always resonated me, although it now seems even more profound, even though I can't quite clearly articulate why quite yet. Unfortunately I need to paraphrase it and I suspect that something will be lost in translation: When you find yourself lying there bleeding at the bottom of the pit, you instinctively will want to stop the bleeding. Resist that instinct.

The Affair

is a TV series that aired from 2014 to 2019 (or so). I discovered that it featured two actors/actresses whose work I'd admired in series such as The Wire (Dominic West) and Luther (Ruth Wilson).  I started watching it and I'm currently still in season one. 

The series explores the emotional impact of an affair between two people married to other people. A uniqueness in this series is that episodes were often divided into two parts, with each half being told from the very different perspective of characters involved in the same incident, which allowed viewers to reach their own unique conclusions based on their own personal biases. Of course, there's also the personal bias of the head writer, who admitted that the genesis of the series came out of the writer having just ended a bad relationship, so it's not unreasonable to infer that the plot includes elements of the writer's own personal story. The writer gives us free rein to speculate, she said about the series:

"there is no objective truth on this show – there’s only peoples’ truthful interpretation of what happened. And it’s up to the audience to bring their own biases and perspectives to viewing the story – to weave through the differing accounts and figure out for themselves, individually, what they believe. So, in a way, each viewer comes away having watched a slightly different show. I built the show that way, because that’s how life works. We experience things, we talk to people we trust, and we all come away with different versions of collective narratives. In the case of The Affair, what follows is my perspective on the experience."

I confess that this disclosure made me itch. So I've stopped to scratch.

Part of it comes from my enjoyment of the writer Kazuo Ishiguro, as a lot of his works explore the concept of selective memory which had its genesis in his experience with the homeless, an experience that mirrors mine in that the stories the homeless tell about themselves often deviate from the actual historical truths about themselves. But the real target of their deception is not us, but themselves. So this also draws from M. Scott Peck's (better known for The Road Less Traveled) (IMO) seminal work People of the Lie which explores the lengths people will go to avoid facing truths regarding themselves by creating a web of lies often forcing falsehoods upon others concerning their own self worth. 

And I've boiled it down to the great divide between the concepts of absolute truth and personal truth. It's been my experience that 'personal' truth is often influenced by trauma coupled with a response that includes denial. And in coming to grips with the insanity of the person who nearly ended my life by severing the anterior branch of my carotid with a box cutter, motivated by a desire to attack a 'church group whose teaching were sodomizing religion' along with a desire to drink my blood, I have embraced the concept of insanity described in the essay "The Maniac" by G.K. Chesterton in his work Orthodoxy. Simply put, those who are insane have not lost their reason, but rather, reason is the only thing that they have left. What causes the insanity is a limited universe of truth. With that limited universe of facts to draw upon, the insane can only reach the same flawed "insane" conclusion over and over. And this is possible when people embrace the concept of personal truth, which might be described as trying to avoid dealing with things that makes us uncomfortable. 
 

I can relate to that viewpoint. I embraced it when I took a fifteen year sabbatical from the real world, where I didn't work and lived off my savings until I was completely broke. My personal truths at the time I made this choice included (among others) the ideas that I was fundamentally unlovable, and that any risk could be expected to end in failure, and my talents would forever go unrecognized.

I've maintained a blog dealing with the aftermath of the attack I referred to earlier in this post. I re-read the blog in its entirety earlier this week, and damn, but (as I expressed in a blog post), I've come a fucking long way.

I've toyed with the idea of creating something similar to Einstein's concept of a grand unification theory to describe "wholeness" (whatever that means). I think I've come up with fundamental postulates.

Truth is absolute. The concept of personal truth is a response to avoid dealing with discomfort, which can be a response to some sort of pain, or the realization that something about us is displeasing. 

Discomfort is not to be ignored or suppressed or denied. This sense of discomfort is a signal to us that something is damaged and needs to be addressed.  Granted, there is needless discomfort - and that is clearly something to be avoided and or eliminated. More needs to be said about this, but not here.

It requires a lot of strength and discipline to embrace the idea that things about us are in some way displeasing, which is why few do. Those who can not are not to be looked down upon, nor is it anyone else's job to force someone else to acknowledge truth.

I think that's enough for now.

Pig

is the title of a new movie featuring Nicolas Cage. This post contains serious spoilers, so if you haven't seen the movie and plan on doing so, you should stop here and go see the film.

First off, it's Nicolas Cage, and at this point of his career, he's choosing intriguing roles in smaller films and using what I'd describe as the Stanislavski technique on steroids to play the roles he's chosen. And it's as much the other roles he's played throughout the years that helps define the strength of his performance in this film. There's a fine line between subtle/nuanced and lacking, and Cage treads the line very carefully, whereas restraint is not an adjective that would be appropriate to describe many of Cage's past performances. In this case, less was so much more. The plot is ostensibly about a hermit truffle hunter seeking the return of his truffle pig, and the behavior and actions taken prompt a suspension of disbelief, but it begins to make sense about three quarters of the way into the film that the actions apparently motivated by the theft of his pig is transference of the grief over the loss of his wife, an event that prompted Cage to leave his position in the culinary firmament, abandon his restaurant, and move into the woods where we find him fifteen years later. 

As Cage begins to deal with his grief, Cage's character also responds to the grief he observes in the people around him and addresses their losses in ways only his character could do: recreating the only meal that gave the antagonist's (man who who paid to have the pig stolen) wife joy before she committed suicide; building up the reputation of the antagonist's son who's spent his entire life living in the shadow of his father, whose dominance of the culinary scene is most likely an expression of trying to find something that would restore the spirits of his otherwise chronically depressed wife whose only moment of joy came after having dinner at Cage's character's restaurant before Cage's wife dies.

Just about every character in the film is dealing with loss in some way - even the characters in a scene that's part fight club except that food industry workers pay to beat up other people in the industry that have done them wrong somehow. But it helps illustrate how people cope with loss in unique ways.

And there will be those who think it merely a quirky story about a weirdo looking for his stolen pig.  And so it is.  

Girl

 I'm reading a book with that title written by Edna O'Brien. The story is a fictionalized first person account of a Nigerian girl kidnapped by the Boko Haram. It's not a comfortable read, but it's powerfully written. It's all the more amazing as Edna O'Brien is an Irish woman around 90 who has lived almost all of her life in the UK. It's a tremendous work. One reviewer put it this way:

"Fiction does not pretend that having written or read about some calamitous subject the writer or the reader has now lived that experience. But as, in both its creation and experience, fiction is an act of daring imagination — it gives readers the tools to imagine a faithful simulacrum of the emotional and psychological contours of the particulars it describes."

However, I can imagine the voices of those I've come to describe as the professionally indignant suggesting that is somehow an affront that an Irish woman somehow dare to imagine what it was like to be kidnapped by the Boko Haram.  "Write what you know" has evolved to: "Stay in your own lane." and not doing so is now an act of arrogance, bigotry or theft. "Only those who are like us are like us Only those who are like us can understand us - or even try."

To be fair, cultural appropriation probably has taken place when someone claims to speak for any group to which they do not belong. But should an attempt to communicate about things of value outside one's own direct experience fail in some way, let's assign any blame to be assigned to the lack of skill of the communicator, not on the motive. But the tribalists will not let it be so. And tribalism in the world continues to grow. And the world grows smaller as a consequence. 

Shall We Dance

Those who know me fairly well might be surprised by the direction this takes.

There are at least three movies I know of that with this title. The Japanese film bearing this title is one of my favorite movies of all time. I have little affinity for the American version that followed. But it's actually the first movie made in the 1930's that's going to be the subject here; I've always loved Fred Astaire and the movies he made with Ginger Rogers but what makes this film even more special is the fact that the score & lyrics for the film were composed by the Gershwin brothers. Sadly, George Gershwin was already experiencing symptoms from the brain tumor that would claim his life only two months after the film was released.

A favorite song from the movie is "They Can't Take That Away From Me". Both Astaire & Rogers have said that it's one of their favorite songs, even though there is no dance scene associated with the song during the movie. However, they did dance to the song in their last movie together, The Barkleys of Broadway. 

What sticks with me about the lyrics is how well Ira Gershwin understood the human condition and love; we may be drawn initially to someone by qualities we find attractive, but it's the quirks that we find memorable and surprisingly, most endearing: "...the way you wear your hat, the way you sip your tea...", etc.  When past relationships come to mind, it's typically because I've been reminded of some little quirk which probably drove me nuts at the time, but now allows me to remember them fondly. 

Little Children

The Scriptures tell us that before we can enter the kingdom of heaven (having been reconciled to God despite our sin and its consequences) we must become like little children yet still be mature in our thinking. What becoming like little children entails would take pages and pages and while I do expect to expound on that eventually, there's a loose thread in the tapestry I want to tug on.

As we embrace characteristics of little children, how then should we interact with those within the kingdom displaying mature thinking? I like how Chesterton expressed his thoughts about the idea in his essay "The Defendant":

The truth is that it is our attitude towards children that is right, and our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong. Our attitude towards our equals in age consists in a servile solemnity, overlying a considerable degree of indifference or disdain. Our attitude towards children consists in a condescending indulgence, overlying an unfathomable respect. We bow to grown people, take off our hats to them, refrain from contradicting them flatly, but we do not appreciate them properly. We make puppets of children, lecture them, pull their hair, and reverence, love, and fear them. When we reverence anything in the mature, it is their virtues or their wisdom, and this is an easy matter. But we reverence the faults and follies of children. 

The point is that we are probably unintentionally inhibiting others in their development of what God intends for them in reacquiring the qualities of little children. I personally believe that these qualities include having a sense of wonder about everything and when expressed by adults is usually received as naivete and typically belittled as a result - either outwardly or inwardly.