The Bullets

Leaving the country is a lot like dying. At least, this is how people act when they learn that your destination will be a place where the dominant skin color isn’t white. As soon as you say you’re going, friends and family, even soon-to-be former co-workers, begin to mourn. And eventually you stop telling people about your destination because it only accelerates the grieving process.

It’s true: you might be going away for a long time, maybe for good. Still, it’s not the length of time that makes you seem terminally ill to your friends. It’s the destination. Your friends have all seen the same Hollywood films, the same highly mediated news footage, listened to the same spots on NPR that depict the countries of Africa as chaotic pits of destruction.

Stereotypical assumptions that go back at least as far as the 18th century suddenly begin to emerge in your friends, who are otherwise intelligent and sensitive people. Won’t you get a disease? Don’t they have insects there bigger than small dogs? Dirt floors? Burning cars? Dusty jeeps full of angry, heavily armed young men rolling through the streets? One in every six people dying of some kind of retrovirus? Beheadings? The tattoo of distant ritual drums in the night? No Wi-Fi?

Such questions run on ignorance like the worst hearsay-fourth-hand impressions founded largely on the unkind fictions that necessarily emerge when vast economic and geographic distances stand between cultures. It’s as if your friends stop hearing themselves, stop seeing (if they ever did) that such concerns are veiled only by an inherent legacy of racism that seeks to remain invisible at all times beneath worries about health, safety, and cultural backwardness.

In your last week at work, Jim pulls you aside and says, “Don’t bullshit me. You own a vest?”

“A vest?”

“You know. Kevlar. For the bullets. Travelers can get them now.”

The bullets. The bullets constantly flying through the air between the disease-ridden mosquitos and crazed death threats.

“Got a Koran?” he says. “Seriously. You haven’t thought of this? Where’ve you been? Put it in your carry-on.”

“It’s a predominately Catholic country, Jim.”

Jim looks at you with a wide-eyed concern, his lower lip quivering. “I heard it’s hell on earth.”

“Really? Where, exactly, did you hear this?”

“What happened to you?” Jim says. “Normal people just do Xanax and a therapist. They don’t run off to Africa.”

You decide that your friends have also read the same books about death and loss. Everybody seems to understand that the denial phase is supposed to follow the bargaining phase for the terminally ill. And when you say positive things about “that place,” you’re obviously in denial.

You receive emails with subject lines like, We’ll Remember You Fondly and Concerned But That’s Life, Right? The mother of an ex from long ago sends you flowers with no card, just a wreath. People start unburdening themselves, explaining, clearing the air, making their peace. Several of them may have taken Xanax beforehand.

Nearly all of them mean well. Nearly all of them are uninformed and strangely proud of it. Yes, there are dangerous elements on that continent. Yes, you must take anti-malarials and get vaccinated for Yellow Fever and Typhoid. Yes, there is a history of abject poverty and political instability of some of the countries through which you will travel. And yes, most of these elements can be found elsewhere in the world as well. But never in such lethal concentrations, goes the objection. When you reference the malaria problems in Alaska, the glories of south central Los Angeles, or the entire catastrophe of Detroit, most objections of this sort stop.

The mundane logistics of going take up all your time, all your emotional energy, and you catch yourself thinking that maybe Sarah from admin is being extra passive-aggressive today. Then you realize: no, she’s just composing a potential eulogy, envisioning how she’ll redecorate your office as soon as you depart, as soon as you’re departed, dearly.

People wonder out loud if you’ve learned the language at your age, which is inconceivable since everyone knows only children can learn new languages and certainly not full-grown Americans who’ve lost their virginity, paid taxes, and had full-time jobs. You tell them you will be able to get by at first with what you’ve learned from Rosetta Stone and that you’re not worried about it because you’re a quick study with languages. No one believes you. They shake their heads in dismay or nod condescendingly: you are either crazy, stupid, naïve, or a secret genius-which they have already decided is the least likely option.

Instead, they ask about the hospitals, whether, you know, germ theory is understood by the “native doctors.” Those still capable of politeness take a more circumspect approach: This is so fascinating. Now, is western medicine very present there? You tell them that people drop dead on the street for no apparent reason, that the local hospitals practice leeching and diagnose through spirit communication. Everyone nods. That’s what they thought.

As JFK drops away beneath the plane, you listen to the hiss of the cabin air, the hydraulics of the landing gear being retracted. There are four connections and twenty-seven hours of flight time ahead of you. When you land in Bujumbura, Burundi, you will have moved one day into the future. You start a new page in your journal with this line: There is no way to truly know a thing unless you live it. Then you close the journal. The rest of the page will have to remain blank for the time being.

The Replacements

It’s an old story. Boy meets girl. Boy marries girl. Kids. One of them dies, is imprisoned, is atomized in a steel box, gets deported, is spontaneously liquefied while buying a hot dog, is eaten by bears, runs off with a radio preacher, or goes out for a pack of smokes for 30 years. Everyone is sad. Remaining parent remarries. Kids remain sad. What about mom / dad? they ask. Was all that love stuff just an act? To which the universal response is always: suck it up, junior. It’s my life. Someday you’ll understand.

Meanwhile, the new replacement spouse initiates a scorched earth campaign to eradicate any lingering trace of the dearly departed, which includes the kids. They’re packed off to boarding school, to their pedophiliac uncle, or to social services. And, you know, fuck them for being so inconvenient. Suddenly, all is quiet. But Replacement Spouse is bitter: this isn’t what I wanted. You want me to be HER and quit asking me to wear her dresses! The surviving parent is bitter: this isn’t want I wanted. You’re obsessed with yourself and your meatloaf tastes like warm manure! Everyone is sad again.

Alcohol is purchased in significant amounts. Books speculating on the possibility of finding happiness in second and third marriages are read while the aforesaid alcohol is consumed. She criticizes his sexual inadequacies to her friends. He blogs about her obsession with Elizabeth Gilbert novels. Misery. Radioactive fallout (It was manure, you imbecile). The kids grow up swearing not to be like their parents. They fail.

There are many variations on this theme, but such is the through line. The idea of “through line” comes from Stanislavski and is closely associated with his concept of the “superobjective”:

When objectives were strung together in a logical and coherent form, a through line of action was mapped out for the character. This was important in order to create a sense of the whole. Stanislavski developed the concept of the superobjective that would carry this “through line of action.” The superobjective could then be looked at as the “spine” with the objectives as “vertebrae” . . . . These objectives, when strung together, revealed the superobjective, the logical, coherent through line of action. Stanislavski called this superobjective the “final goal of every performance.” (Sawoski 6)

With this in mind, our superobjective, the final goal of our performance, is not the happiness of the boy, the girl, the Replacement Spouse, or the kids. It can’t be. The vertebrae are all wrong. They’re fractured. Our characters are in psychological traction. They’re emotional quadriplegics. And instead of a functioning spine, the “logical, coherent through line” points to an abundance of potential suffering, right to it, like the Devil’s lodestone.

And like the lodestone—an ancient magical item “held in high regard as a Powerful Amulet and all-around Good Luck Charm because its Magnetic Influences are supposed to attract Power, Favors, Love, Money, and Gifts” (Yronwode)—the through line of our story functions as a Bad Luck Charm, attracting Injuries, Hate, Penury, and Loss, a cursed item of power. Or maybe it’s like Tolkien’s One Ring, leading our poor love hobbits straight to Mount Doom instead of a cozy faux-Ireland with ergonomic sunken houses and lots of comfort food.

Old stories are the most powerful. And this is one of the oldest, older than Macbeth, older than the short stories about crocodiles and honey jars found in the pyramids, perhaps older than writing itself: look for a Replacement Spouse and you never, ever get the Shire. You get displacement, disrecognition, self-alienation. But the saddest thing about this story, maybe the reason it has always been classifiable as a tragedy, is that it proceeds from a faulty assumption: people can be optimized like things.

My significant other got liquefied and all I got is this lousy T-shirt. And the bit of her I was able to pour into this jar. I think it might be her elbow. And it’s depressing to have to look at that on mantelpiece every day. The brilliant short story writer, Sam Lipsyte goes so far as to have his protagonist in “Cremains” take down his mother’s ashes and mainline them like heroin. So if you’ve read his Venus Drive, maybe that appeals to you as an option. But think about it. If you line up three or four shots of Old Elbow tonight, what’s left for tomorrow? That’s real loss—not just losing dearest but getting faded on her liquefied remains and having to live with the knowledge that you could have just picked up some Midori on the way home.

People are not things. Replacements cannot be found. Loved ones will go the way of all flesh. And we must then either make amends to our memory of them or ask hell to let us in. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud writes that “By abandoning a part of our psychic capacity as unexplainable through purposive ideas, we ignore the realms of determinism in our mental life. Here, as in still other spheres, determinism reaches farther than we suppose” (278). How far it reaches on our through line, how far it determines our final cause, depends on the extent to which we are willing to cower like mindless puling beasts that know neither reason nor truth. To what extent are we willing to sacrifice what we have, which is to say, what we remember, in our attempts to avoid pain—our best and only teacher?

“We are only what we remember of ourselves.” – Trevor Goodchild in Aeon Flux

Japanese By Spring

(or Why Robert Downey Jr. Owns the Role of Tony Stark and You Are Not Worthy)

1. Alien Slave Planet

Once, long ago, I had the misfortune of riding in a truck being driven at high speeds by a drunk PE teacher. We were in the mountains. His name was Dick. We’d just spent three days at a beginning of the year retreat where the administrators of the high school frowned and grinned and perspired in front of us like survivors of an airstrike. The food was bad; they ran out of coffee the second morning; and the team building exercises were run as if they’d been designed by a New Age Stalin. We played a lot of group games that weekend and fell in love with each other all over again.

But not everyone could withstand Pictionary and “3 Things You Didn’t Know About Your Partner” at that level of intensity while metabolizing all the usual faculty venom. Part of me admired Dick for tippling a pint of whiskey at the back of the room throughout that last day. He seemed closer in spirit to the students than the teachers most of the time. He drove like a student, too.

“What I don’t get,” he said, “is this continued credit bs.” We hit a turn and, because the truck had no seat belts, I was able to enjoy a second of antigravity.

When I caught my breath, I said, “Well, if they pay us to go back to school, that’s good, right?”

We caught air from a bump and then went through another curve without slowing. “Useless. They should be paying us for all the extra crap we already have to do just to keep the job. That’s where the money should go.”

He wasn’t necessarily wrong. We all worked unrecognized overtime and were constantly reminded that although positive suggestions were always welcome, complaints would be dealt with severely. It seemed that what Dick was saying could be construed as a complaint. His red ball cap was ratty and he chain smoked. He owned a variety of nylon windbreakers that he must have bought all at once. I liked him, but I thought that he might have been working at the high school a little too long.

“Shouldn’t we like learning?” I asked. “I mean, isn’t that the whole point?”

Dick glanced at me with a crafty expression on his face. “Shit, Mike, I got my degree. I’m done learning.”

That’s when it happened. ZANG! All the stained glass windows in all the churches of the world shattered simultaneously. The ears of babies started bleeding. Stars went dark. The dead walked the earth once more. And enormous diseased birds of prey circled above us, knowing that it wouldn’t be long now. The end was nigh.

2. Hustle: on

At the time, I might have been young enough to feel horrified that one of my colleagues would say such a thing. But I was also old enough to know that I was seeing something unvarnished, something real in the way Dick seemed to think he’d put all that learning behind him. I have never forgotten that moment even if, in my memory, Dick wears his ball cap on sideways and I hold onto the handle above the passenger side with both hands for most of the ride. Done learning? Done? Really? I remember thinking: doesn’t that mean you’re done with life? But I didn’t say it. Instead, I concentrated on shielding the truck with my mind whenever Dick swerved too close to the trees by the the road.

There are so many problems with the idea of being “done learning” that I don’t know where to begin. Sure, we can just roll our eyes and dismiss Dick as ignorant. In many ways, he embodied the negative stereotype of the high school PE coach. He spent most of his time in the small mobile trailer on the upper field that functioned as an office and a storage shed for equipment. At faculty meetings or when he was commanded to sub a class, he had a certain air of bitterness–a displaced person now forced by tyrannical inhuman masters to spend time in an alien culture he despised. He was a lost soul.

But let’s forget about whether he’s still out there somewhere screaming at adolescent boys to “Hustle!” or whether he had a shot too many one night and decided his truck could fly. If we get past the superficial reading of my anecdote about Dick, we can look at his attitude about learning as a crystallization of a disturbing trend in US culture that’s hard to stomach if you believe anything good about education: the concept of the “knowledge marketplace” as legitimate and desirable commodification of learning.

In “The Challenge of the Knowledge Marketplace: How Will the Land-Grant System Compete?” the American Distance Education Consortium Panel (ADEC) offers the following definition:

One way of looking at the knowledge marketplace is through the three basic building blocks of communication and education – knowledge, data, and information. In our current environment, when knowledge (broad-based understanding) is combined with data (specific bits of information), information with significant value is created. This process invades all facets of our lives, from buying products, to making decisions about investments, to remaining competitive in our professions. Educational opportunities occur when potential learners – people who have a need or desire for new information – gain access to that information at a time and place they need it.

As someone who earned an interdisciplinary IT / business masters online through distance learning, I can say with a certain degree of first hand authority that this is exactly how learning takes place in such programs. Knowledge, data, and information are treated as items that can be delimited and placed on a metric. They must be treated this way in order to be delivered and evaluated meaningfully in an online format.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. As Sarah Churchwell points out in “The Internet: is it changing the way we think?“, “Knowledge is not the same thing as information, and there is no question to my mind that the access to raw information provided by the internet is unparalleled and democratising.” And the accessibility of distance learning means that this democratization extends to those who would be otherwise unable to go to school. That’s important and its one of the great virtues of distance learning.

Unfortunately, the great drawback is that by interpreting learning in the marketplace language of deliverables and skill sets, we have shifted the emphasis away from the process of philosophically motivated inquiry. Instead, we are moving towards a static model in which students “signal their traditional academic attainment and continued non-institutional learning by aggregating these accomplishments into a meaningful and dynamic profile” (ThinkStache). In other words, it is possible to be done learning if you have the requisite number of notches on your belt or bullet points on your resume. This horrifies me even though I believe that distance learning is viable and important and needs to exist.

3. Yukkuri hanashite, kudasai!

So I’ve started learning Japanese and I’m starting to see that it’s one of the coolest things I’ve undertaken in my life. I am horrible at it. I can’t remember any of the Kanji yet. And I essentially know nothing. But so what? This isn’t the knowledge marketplace and I’m not done learning. So when will I be fluent? Everyone asks me this. I tell them I have no idea.

You’ll excuse me if I quote Nathaniel Branden at this point. He’s one of Ayn Rand’s homies. I know, I know, but this is one of the good passages:

Observe, in this connection, the widespread phenomenon of men who are old by the time they are thirty. These are men who, having in effect concluded that they have “thought enough,” drift on the diminishing momentum of their past effort—and wonder what happened to their fire and energy, and why they are dimly anxious, and why their existence seems so desolately impoverished, and why they feel themselves sinking into some nameless abyss—and never identify the fact that, in abandoning the will to think, one abandons the will to live. (116)

And why, when they have to leave their office on the upper field and sit through 50 minutes of sophomore biology they feel lost and abandoned in the vastness of space. Branden is making an important point about learning: it’s a process of growth intrinsic to life. Every creative artist knows this. There is never a point at which you can step back and declare that you have arrived. You’re always-already arriving. To think only in terms of static qualities–deliverables, commodities that can be acquired for future display purposes–is to embrace intellectual death.

I will not ever be fluent in Japanese. I will always be pursuing fluency. In this, I avoid an “existence [that] seems so desolately impoverished.” Don’t we all want to do this–to grow and become more than what we were? I suspect that even Dick might have agreed with me had I put it to him like this.

4. Enter: the Tony

This is also why I loved The Avengers just as much as I’ve loved the Iron Man films. More than any other “driven billionaire playboy superhero” type Tony Stark is almost Discordian in his genius–chattering, obnoxious, manic, constantly worrying away at some problem even if he had to create it just to give himself something to do. And Robert Downey Jr. plays him brilliantly, gives him levels and a sense of roundness.

He’s a synthesis of Sherlock Holmes, Seth Godin, and Errol Flynn on speed. Downey shows us that Stark knows he’s smart enough to get away with it before you say something unduly nasty. So I think these simple superhero action films aren’t actually that simple. Rather, they’re complex in ways that run contrary to the prevailing theme of intellectual stagnation twisting its way into the Academy from military-industrial complex.

I’m less interested in laser beams and hideous alien invaders from the 24th-and-a-half dimension as I am in the American public being presented with an image of brilliance that doesn’t function in terms of deliverables. This is ironic because Stark is supposed to be an uber-scientist-inventor. His entire shtick depends on a fancy exoskeleton and how it can keep him alive. But Stark comes across as someone who would be doing amazing things even if he had no money and no lab and no super-suit that can save the world in 50 explosions.

Moreover, in The Avengers, Joss Wheedon stays true to the way Marvel Comics has always treated scientists, professors, and artists–as superheroes in their own way. Stan Lee, in particular, has always shown a great degree of respect for any kind of creativity. And this has always come through in the comics and in the Marvel movies, even the mediocre ones. We should thank both of them because everyone knows an artillery barrage will always mean box office revenue.

Maybe this time, it’s less about money and more about story, which is to say, more about people, process, narrative arc. Maybe someone’s inner transformational arc is more interesting than the arc of a bullet. It’s something that comic writers have been thinking about since The Amazing Spider-Man came out in the early 1960s: what if we made the superheroes less monolithic and more human? Well, what if? And if we choose to make them flawed yet brilliant, emotionally complex yet open to an existential dimension in human life, what then?

Tony Stark is never going to say he’s done learning. That’s what.

Works Cited and Referenced:

Branden, Nathaniel and Ayn Rand. “The Divine Right of Stagnation.” The Virtue of Selfishness: a New Concept of Egoism. New York: Signet, 1964. Print.

Naughton, John. “The internet: is it changing the way we think?” The Guardian. 14 August 2010. Web. 15 May 2012.

The Avengers. Dir. Joss Wheedon. Paramount, 2012. Film.

“The Challenge of the Knowledge Marketplace: How Will the Land-Grant System Compete?” ADEC. 29 June 1998. Web. 15 May 2012.

The Discordian Society. Principia Discordia, 2012. Web. 15 May 2012.

ThinkStache. HASTAC, 2011. Web. 15 May 2012.

Note: You can thank me now for not naming this post, “Getting Past Dick.”

Note: Pictures related to Marvel are used without permission in my little blog post that no one will care about. Plus, I have no money. And I really, really liked The Avengers. So please be gentle. If you really want me to delete the images, I will. Then I will cry.