Gone Girl, Gone Truth

By the time I actually watched Gone Girl, I have already had my fair dose of spoilers from more than a dozen movie reviews, half of them devoted to the relentless psychoanalysis of the protagonists, and the other half lamenting marriage as an abduction. I am no expert on psychoanalysis, let alone marriage, or abduction. However, what left haunting in the remnant of my memory is the omnipresence of storytelling: the societal obsession with stories, the legal urgency to tell a convincing story, not necessarily a truthful one, to either incriminate or exonerate, the existential need to validate oneself through an autobiographic self-narrative, and, as Jerome Bruner put it, Life as Narrative.
　　
　　 Amy’s life is a narrative. She is the real-life Amazing Amy, who is forever overshadowed by her fictional alter ego, who is truly amazing. She fell in love with Nick, and, for the first few years, they are the co-authors of their love story: treasure hunts, orchestrated serendipities, and countless epiphanies. Every day is like an unexpected shower in a sugary drizzle. Eventually, their relationship sank to a lull. Amy wants to continue writing their story, but Nick wants an out. So Amy decides to gear their careless hipster love story to a different shelf in the bookstore: suspense and murder. She is beautiful. She is sexy. She is smart. Most of all, she has a vengeful mastermind that weaves her own story where she, the screenwriter/director/leading actress, sacrifices her own life so that her legally innocent, but morally shaky, husband would be put to death by the people jury in Missouri. She doesn’t tell her story. She lives it.
　　
　　 As Amy well expected, the public cannot get enough of her story. The public, through the two cable-TV hosts, rifled through Nick’s privacy, fragments of his life glimpsed through the camera, to read his state of mind, trying to spin a convincing story about Nick. A loving husband? A disgusting cheater? A soulless killer? Or just an average guy who means well but inevitably fucks up. Nick’s incrimination or exoneration all depends on how the clues left by Amy are read. Nick, again, wants to co-author the story. Like Nick’s lawyer said: “She has the perfect story going. Now, you need to tell your version.”
　　
　　 Nick’s lawyer surely is a master of storytelling, his taste for words of surgical precision: “Don’t say ‘built up’. It implies an explosion coming”. Storytelling lies at the heart of what lawyers do, as JBW famously argued. The law always begins in story, and it ends in story as well. Usually, the client comes in with her story, recalled from her memory, if not faulty but definitely incomplete, and told from her perspective to achieve her purposes. The lawyer distills the legal elements from the myriad of facts, casts them to a legal framework, and reorganizes them into a legally convincing, sometimes morally appealing, story that, hopefully, resonates with the judge and the jury. Hence, at the trial level, two competing stories are told. Is Amy a first-degree psychopath with the most fucked-up mind who framed her husband as a murderer? Or is Nick a shameless cheater who kills her nice and beautiful pregnant wife? Eventually, it ends in story, too, with a decision by a court of jury, who shuffles the facts presented by two competing narratives, draws on their specific past, however biased, and constructs their own stories so that they can say yea or nay.
　　
　　 Narratives are innate ways of understanding and structuring human experience. This is what makes them inherently persuasive in the courtroom. However, our obsession with storytelling dates way back to when our ancestors were still trying to figure out how to preserve food or navigate the sea. Years after years, oral legends had been recounted by willing tellers to willing listeners, from the Iliad and the Odyssey to Mahabharata and Ramayana, from Norse sagas to the Bible. Story tellers and listeners eventually all find eternity in the grace of death, but the stories live on. History, his-story. Whether there are embellishments, modifications, exaggerations, alterations, adaptations, or omissions from what may have been the “factual” events is largely irrelevant. The story, as it is, carry the cultural identity of tellers, retracting and shaping the cultural identity of the listeners, from which emerges an intellectual truth, a psychological truth, and a moral truth.
　　
　　 As Henry James put it, stories happen to people who know how to tell them. Amy is a good storyteller, because she knows her audience very well. Her story is hitting every button, and ringing every bell. She understands the need of a sensation-craving crowd to construct the reality through familiar stories, a constricted imagination of this collective mind. Indeed, “the soul of a people is mirrored in their legend.” The Greeks find resonance in the stories told by Homer, because they live in a similar world with the one described in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The heroes and battles that shape the Northern world find their eternity in Norse sagas and live on in those who find faith and strength in reading the stories. The crowd who are pushing Amy’s story to a well-planned climax is the invisible pen Amy wields to send her husband up the river and land him on death row.
　　
　　 However, the omniscient authorial voice of Amy fades when she decides to continue her communal life with Nick. The story of Amazing Amy now has a new sequel, and Nick, her partner in crime, is in it. Is she still the Amazing Amy, a psychopath, or a mother who is struggling to find meaning in life? Life is preserved and illuminated through one’s autobiographic recounting. Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves. She needs an inspiration. She needs a real purpose. She needs a rebirth. So she continues writing her story and recreating herself by living the story. In this autobiographic self-narrative, the psychological reality of “life itself” blurs. After all, life imitates art far more than art imitates life, as Wilde said. Amy disappears in her story, from which another Amy surfaces. The story goes on. So, dear, how shall you tell YOUR story?

simba

It's raining. I hope you have a shelter.

Penultimate

Writing, especially writing about one’s own life, has a magic effect: it simultaneously immerses one IN and distances one from whatever one is experiencing.  It amplifies the granularity of experience, as writing is an endeavor to rebuild an alternative history, which would be nothing but repetitive cliché or empty idealism absent details.  To obtain the details, one really has to maximally utilize all the perceptive faculties in order to capture the ephemerals.  Cognitive efficiency calls for ignoring the “inconsequential” so that we could efficiently function in our lives.  For instance, sensations are downplayed when we need to concentrate on intellectual problem solving. Memory is another example. Details are later filled in rather than “remembered” when we are talking about “remembering”. (In a sense, memory itself is writing, constructing a reality, but not necessarily in words.)  But a good writer has to defy, or at least tries to defy these established cognitive principles to become an obsessive compulsive hoarder of the inconsequential.

However, too much immersion in one's current being would easily lead one to lose sight of the transcendental nature of writing.  A writer has the fortune of existing in multiple beings, simultaneously existing at now, in the future, and in the past. It strips away the experiential existence at the present.  Paradoxical of the compulsive hoarder. Life is ridden with hardship. When one is immersed in pain, one queries the meaning of it. The construction of an alternative history through writing may give meaning to it. Actually, Inactivity and pauses are counter-productive in every other professions but writing. Everything is nourishment a writer could take.

An Alternative History

May 16 DC 10:25 PM. Dulles is huge and empty at this hour.  Ticket counter was packed as the flight was delayed and pissed-off passengers were trying to figure out their connecting flights. She was listening to an audio book about Kafka, waiting for the earliest train to go to NY. A Chinese woman sitting near her is video chatting (more like chattering) with her friend on Wechat, exclaiming her excitement of being in the States: “I fell asleep instantly after the plane took off. No jet lag for me. I couldn’t be more used to American time. I am now in the States! I couldn’t be happier!” She had to turn up the volume so that Kafka doesn’t have to mingle with this over-excited woman. 


May 17 5:38 AM. The train passed by a huge spread of woods, with intermittent small pockets of flat lands and ponds.  Mystically, the flat lands had white fog hovering above the ground. Fairy Land.

May 17 6:48 AM. As she emerged from the underground of Penn Station, the city was waking up. She thought, finally, first day of work in two days.

May 17 7:30 AM She wondered whether Lacuna, Inc only existed fictionally. She started to think maybe it actually exists in a mythical dungeon in this city.  How she wishes there is a fast train to the clinic.
"A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now."
Causality? She thought maybe it's all randomness.

May 18 1:13 AM. She decided to walk in heels this summer. It is only 1.75 inch high, and the promotion slogan for the heels is “New Heights”.  As she was looking at girls’ cliff-like-heels in the street, she thought to herself: “withering heights”.  Pavements never experientially existed to her before she started making footprints resembling strings of big-bellied exclamation marks.  She never noticed the different surface materials used for building pavements before this.  But now, as she was walking on the 2^nd Ave., she can tell the difference: Beijing uses small stones or even pebbles, but NYC uses concrete pavements. She thought to herself so NYC is more heel-friendly. But the rolling suitcase kept crushing into her heels every step she took.  She wonder whether this city is heal-friendly as well.

May 18 3:30 AM The old guy sitting by her at the dive bar was apparently drunk. He wanted to strike up a conversation with her, who was apparently absent minded. “Do you go to Columbia?” “No.” “Do you want to go to Columbia?” “No.” “I have the key to the gate of Columbia.” “Please don’t talk to me.” Last call, it was Bob Dylan played in the background.

May 18 4:20 AM She never realized there are so many people pissing in the street at this hour. She counted: on average, 2 per every block. She was walking past a pizza joint, and cars were parked along the street. A guy was standing between two cars, doing his business facing the front of one car. All of a sudden, the car lighted up its head lights. The guy was all exposed. She couldn’t help but laugh out loud even if the guy was only 5 steps away from her, looking in awe.

May 18 5:33 AM The sun duly rose, but it didn’t feel warm yet.

May 18 7:30 AM The rolling suitcase kept pressing on her heels. Finally, one of her shoes fell off. As she hopped back to get the shoe, a guy walked to her with his thumb sticking up. She felt a bit embarrassed, but quickly realized that the sticking-up thumb is his only finger.

May 18 10:02 AM The doorman of the hotel spoke English with heavy polish accent, and the lobby is in dark velvet green. The check-in counter has a huge of wall of small key boxes, with room number in white under each box. She found it familiar, trying to figure out whether it’s a scene in one of Borges’s short stories or Cohen’s songs.

May19 11:00 AM “If you have to remember one thing from this training, that is always record your time! Learn to love TimeKM. Do it on a daily basis. The average of this office is recording every two days.” The system records time in 6 minute incremental. She wonders whether Lacuna, Inc. uses the same time keeping system.

A Stormy Fortune

Thanks to the winter storm, I get to listen to Kleiber and Richter's recording of Dvorak Piano Concerto full-heatedly, without any diversions. I cannot believe I haven't heard this recording until this day. But having heard it really made my day. Life is good, after all.

This piece is more like a piano symphony instead of a piano concerto. The piano and orchestra, wielded under the mighty power of two mighty men, compete and intertwine, weaving a symphonic web of euphoria. Both Richter and Kleiber are know for nitpicking and hard to work with, because they both have ear so fine-tuned for any impurity in sound. It amazes me every time I listen to Kleiber, raving about how he could fine tune the orchestra to such a level of delicacy. The sound is like a silk wrapping, light but caressing every inch of the skin.

But, I don't know why, as I listen to it over and over again, the feeling of lost is deafening.

Etymology of Missing

It occurred to me that "I missed you" is ambiguous, and open to two interpretations: 1) I failed to see/meet you, as in I missed the target 2) I had you in my mind when you were absent.

From the Online Etymology Dictionary: Meaning "to fail to get what one wanted" is from mid-13c. Sense of "to escape, avoid" is from 1520s; that of "to perceive with regret the absence or loss of (something or someone)" is from late 15c.Sense of "to not be on time for" is from 1823; to miss the boat in the figurative sense of "be too late for" is from 1929, originally nautical slang.

So the object of missing is initially something concrete, as in "missing the target". Sentiments of this act of "missing the target" ensues as in "I miss you" (because I missed concrete presence of you at that time in that place). The object of missing then shifted from something concrete in time and place to something temporal, as in "I missed the boat" (because I missed the time point when the boat was here). Following this logic, it seems that the feeling of "missing someone" derives from the fact that "one fails to get/see someone", and the factual result of this missing is not being on time in life for someone, fate.

Freedom in Aesthetics

I have been thinking about our aesthetic experiences for quite a while. What we view as beautiful, pleasing, or simply aesthetically enjoyable makes up a huge part of our lives. No doubt, beauty (in a broad sense) is largely a cultural product, and, like everything else we learn in life, the concept of beauty is acquired. Consequently, the aesthetic experience is also cultivated. But what are the forces that cultivate this cognitive,emotional,visceral experience? To what extent are we free in the nest woven by ourselves?

dream

醒来前在梦里看到了一张照片，或者说，醒来的那一刻只记住了满屏大的照片，一张照片盖住了整整一个梦。照片里是一对父子，爸爸半蹲在依山而建的阶梯上，儿子坐在爸爸的膝上，背后是蔓延的阶梯，满眼的葱绿。他们开心地笑着，笑容那么满，溢出了整张照片。好开心。