Evidence for God
September 27, 2009
I was looking at Ayn Rand on YouTube and rather enjoying her personality. And saw her refutation of God and liked that too. She said, that while it is impossible to prove a negative - to prove the non-existence of fairies, say - she does not and we should not believe in God since there is no proof of his existence. If there were no evidence for the existence of God then I would agree. Donahue, the interviewer, then pointed out the order in the world. She countered by saying that it makes no sense to postulate a ordering mind, an order outside the order. We see the order, and the chance, and try and understand the order, but there is no reason to assume that there must be a something outside the order that we see that creates that order. This seemed fair enough to me too.
I would not say that I believe in God exactly. But I do think that there is some evidence for the belief in God, these are:
1) Testimony of others, over wide time frames and geographical locations
2) Behaviour of others that seems to suggest the existence of non-self-cantered motivations (altruism, "good")
3.1) Ones own adherence, and the adherence of atheists, to being honest non-contradictory and reasonable. All atheists should be self-interested, and therefore part-time, at least death-bed, theists.
3.2) The very existence of my own reason, or its nub-come-nexus: self-speech. Why am I, we, you doing it?
First Airplane Ride
September 14, 2009
For context see here. The following is fiction. The first person is female.
Some people get very nervous when they get on airplanes, but most people don't appear to be. A big chunk of metal the size of a block of flats revs up, gains speed and then TAKES OFF. And all the while the majority of the people on the plane are behaving as if this is the most normal thing in the world, chatting, checking their watch, taking out their copy of the inflight magazine. Nearly million pounds of metal and passenger meat goes up into the air, and almost nobody screams "Let me out of here!"
That is how I felt when I started going out with John. He was the first guy I had ever dated. People were telling me that he liked me, that he wanted to take me out on a date, that he was a good kisser, that he would be sure to want to make out, and all that and a lot more like it was all the most normal thing in the world. People make out, start relationships all the time, and get on jumbo jets all the time, millions of them every day. But when I thought about the the possible consequences, ranging from death from AIDS to finding my partner for life, I felt inside that I wanted to scream "Let me out of here!"
Another thing I have heard about riding an airplane is that the flight attendants do a sort of mime where one of them (or perhaps a tape) narrates the procedure to be followed in the event of the accident, while the other mimes it out. I saw a comedian make a joke about it. The fact that they are miming what would, should be a really scary event with a calm smile on theif face is pretty creepy. More so is the way the smiling stewardess who is fastening her seat belt, putting on the oxygen mask, and demonstrating the brace position, is doing it all to words that are not her own.
That was the way I felt the next morning talking to my friends in the diner after my first date. I was like I just said, cruising at a thirty five thousand feet in a block of flats. I felt that the diner was up in the air. But my friends were all asking me things like "where did he take you," and "did he make a move," and "was he a good kisser," and making jokes and smiling and laughing. And I responded in the same kind of way, with a smile, and using words that weren't my own. I felt like a puppet acting out the part of the high school girl on the day after her first date as if it had not been by far the most traumatic experience of my life, smiling and miming and pretending, being forced to pretend, there is no difference between life threating disaster and ballet class.
And then
Flying on a jet airplane sounds so classy. I mean they even had a phrase "jet set" meaning people with rich and classy lives. But, I hear that on jet airplanes the the food is not all that good and the toilets are really cramped sometimes messy. Flying on an airplane is on the face of it really high class, but in the detail there are some dirty, cramped and messy parts. Dating for the first time was like that.
Dating is a guy is meant to be all romantic. I had in mind sunsets, roses, whispers, and going to special places and spending a lot of money too. Or okay I hoped that someone would be spending so money on me. I thought that dating was going to be classy. But as it turned out, it was not all as classy as all that. We did go to a fancy, for me, restaurants or two, but we also went to some other places, which were not so classy.
Love is like flying, you get a feeling like your feet are not touching the ground, like you are floating on air, shaky, and ready to right back down to earth at any moment.
Love is so powerful that it can make everything else seem small, like the view from the window of a jumbo jet, where the fields, the size of football pitches, look like the patches in a quilt.
The worst bit is the landing. Again everyone appears calm but there is a tremendous difference in height and speed, so it is not surprising that it is bumpy, there is a lot of noise, and engines spinning in reverse. Splitting up is like that.
After we split up my friend said to me, "Well, that was one hell of a roller coaster ride wasn't it?" And that is when I said I felt that I had been on a jet airplane. The ups and downs, the thrills and the emotion, were like a roller coaster. But the biggest difference was that, when you get on a roller coaster you get off at the same place. But when after only 3 weeks I stopped dating John, I felt that I had got off somewhere else. I was in the same town, going to the same school but it all looked different. It was different, and I did not have a return ticket.
Two Lip Synchs: Blue Velvet's "In Dreams," and Mullholland Dr.'s Club Silencio
September 09, 2009
Two of the best scenes from David Lynch films are lip synch scenes, where someone lip synchs the words to a romantic song. I am thinking of the scene in Blue Velvet where a drug dealer called Ben lip synchs to "In Dreams" by Roy Orbison, and the "Club Silencio" scene in Mullholland Dr. where a female singer lip synchs to another Roy Orbison song in Spanish (?).
As a structuralist the similarity between the scenes turns me on! What are the similarities and differences?
Similarities and Differences.
Two major characters are watching the lip synch being performed. That there are two viewers is more apparent in MD than BV. In Mullholland Dr. The two lead females watch the lip synch from adjacent seats in the theatre. In Blue Velvet, the two male leads, Frank (Dennis Hopper) and Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) are both watching the lip synch, but it is more a case that Frank is watching the lip synch, while being watched by Jeffrey.
In both there is something stage like about where the lip synch takes places. In MD this is apparent. In BV, the camera pans out to reveal a stage-like opening bounded by curtains.
In both there is a square character (Kyle, Betty) and a full blooded character (Frank, Rita) watching, though in BV the full blooded character is up there on or next to the stage.
The act of lip synching, the act of a visual presence pretending and appearing to the source of sounds which in fact come from elsewhere, is shared between the two scenes. The lip synching is emphasised more in MD. The Emcee in MD really makes it clear that Club Silencio is a "lip synch stage", emphasising that we are hearing a lot of instruments, imagining them to be there, but that the sound is not bound up with the visuals that they are imagining to be on stage, or are seeing on stage, even before the song, with the white haired trumpeter that trumpet-synchs before fully-revealing that he is not the source of the trumpet sounds. In BV we could be forgiven for thinking that the lip synch is not important, that Frank is just moved by the song, but in MD the lip synching is given fuller, central importance. "It is an illusion."
In MD the visuals are even an illusion - the emcee, magician(?), in MD disappears.
The viewers are very moved. Or at least Frank is moved in BV. From memory I thought that Rita was especially moved in BD but it seems that both women were moved.
The song in either case is romantic.
The lip synching is made apparent in both, by the removal of the music in BV and by the feinting of the singer (and stopping the pretence by the trumpeter) in MD.
In BV, there is a double lip synch. Frank, moved, lip synchs the words being lip synched by Ben the suave drug dealer.
Well, my take...
Lacanianly speaking, it is the intersection of the symbolic and imaginary that allows us to think that we exist, to pull ourselves out of, to cut ourselves out of, the real. (The real in Lacan is confusing to me: is it the chaotic nothing fog, or is it the mundane/niave, thing-populated, real?)
Ventriloquism (see my youtube video on ventriloquism) is like this scene. A puppet that seems to speak, with a voice thrown from elsewhere.
When we watch TV, when we watch a movie, we see the sounds coming from the speaker in the screen. That is a given. We delude ourselves when watching films. But I think that we delude ourselves all the time. There is never a situation in which my voice comes from my image. There is always a lip synch.
This realisationi is love almost destroyting. IN MD it is enough to force Rita to disappear forever.
Anti-Hero or Accidental Hero: The Anti-Hero is not conflicted, he is a goody-goody wuss
September 02, 2009
Characters like "Dirty Harry," and Jim McClane (Die Hard, 1988) are often described as "anti heros" since their gruff, unkempt, anti-social demeanour conflicts with their do-good, heroic image. On the face of it then, the anti-hero as portrayed by these rogue cops, is a more ‘complex’, ‘nuanced’ or, ‘flawed’ hero. Anti-heroes are, we are told, a little bit evil, or morally ambivalent, not just a bunch of unrealistically, steadfast, moral goody-goodies.
I argue here that, on the contrary, the "anti-hero," is in fact even more unrealistically idealistic, moral and "goody-goody" by virtue of their accidental nature.
First of all we hardly need to be reminded what all action heroes do; they shoot bad guys and generally destroy a lot of property in the process. Shooting people and wrecking cars are usually seen as examples of undesirable behaviour. The hero remains the target of our admiration and identification due to the existence of the bad guy (it is almost always a male) against whom the hero rises in righteous rebellion. The hero thus is always, at the outset, a degree accidental, dependant upon the entrance of the bad guy for his or her existence.
But is this enough? The best amongst us might urge a hero to back down from action and ‘turn the other cheek’. It can at least be argued that, hurting people, even bad people, is bad. To protect heros from this slur, their enemies become progressively more twisted and evil, the number of people that they threaten and that the hero must protect, progressively larger until, Flash Gordon (comic strip 1934, film 1980) and others become "saviour of the universe".
But then somewhere on the way, even this was not enough. Flash Gordon started to get on our nerves. We stopped liking him as much as we used to. We started to get the feeling that he was not such a good guy, that he is, as his name suggests, “flash”, egotistical, not so very nice at all.
Incipit the so called "anti-hero". The gruffness, the antisocial, and even irresponsible persona is merely a veneer to allow an even greater moral purity; anti-heroes, are not happy in their role, they did not want to be heroes, their heroics are accidental.
For example, the McClane character in all of the Die Hard films is an *accidental hero*. McClane just wants to go home to his wife, meet his wife’s plane, go back to bed, or retire, but circumstances, events, and some really nasty bad guys *force him to become a hero*. Paradoxically, McClane becomes even more of a hero, because his heroics are accidental.
Above all, the accidental nature of his heroism, protect him from any claim of hypocrisy. Bad guys are generally motivated by self-interest. They seek money or power, or some kind of ego boost, the fulfilment of a self-centred desire. Selfishness is at the heart of evil.
Die Hard’s Jim McClane is however not rescuing people and killing bad guys through any James Bondian desire to be suave, or because he has a big John Wayne of an ego. Jim McClane does not even want to become involved but (like Clint Eastwood in the Dirty Harry movies, and Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca) a situation arises where he simply has no choice but to step up to the plate. Usually a bad guy arrives at the party that he is attending, or the plane that his wife is on gets hijacked. Lets have a look at some of the scenes in which the accidental nature of the anti-hero becomes apparent.
From Casablanca (1942):
Rick Blaine: "Of all the gin joints in all the world, she walks into mine."
Rick is hiding out in Morocco. Through a series of coincidences, culminating in the arrival of his ex-girlfriend, Ilsa Lund, the embittered, cynical “anti-hero” Rick is catapulted, unwillingly, into the role of the most acclaimed accidental hero in Hollywood cinema.
From Dirty Harry (1971)
Harry Callahan: [after having reported the “211” armed robbery in progress, to the police and biting into his hotdog] Just wait till the cavalry arrives. [Alarm bell rings] Ah, shit.
This scene ends with one of Harry Callahan’s most famous lines "You've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya punk?"
The same being-disturbed-at-mealtime trope was repeated in the third film in the Dirty Harry series, Sudden Impact (1983), in the scene leading up to Clint Eastwood's most famous line "make my day," though this time Harry is disturbed in his enjoyment of a black coffee. In either case, Harry Callahan allows himself sadistic enjoyment of the suffering of the punks that he is bringing to justice. We forgive him because the viewer knows that Harry did not give reign to his sadistic desire. Harry just wanted to finish his hotdog, or his coffee. His violent course of action - which if he is to take, he might as well enjoy - was forced upon him.
From Die Hard 2 (1990):
Captain (of airport security) Lorenzo: Hey McClane, I've got a first class unit in here: swat team and all. We don't need any Monday morning quarterback.
McClane: Fuck Monday morning, my wife is on one of the god damn planes these guys are fucking with. That puts me on the playing field.
McClane also notices and claims to lament the coincidence, since this is the second film in the Die Hard series.
McClane: Ah man, I can't fucking believe this. Another basement, another elevator. How could the same shit happen to the same guy, twice?
At the same time, when compared to the hero who takes action into his own hands, the anti-hero lacks the courage of his conviction. He can not step right up to the plate, actively seek a position of responsibility. In that sense he is weak, and that is why, as well as a goody-goody, I call him a wuss. This is why the most grim, gravelly-voiced, strong and macho actors must be used in these anti-hero roles.
