A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away

*ALERT: SPOILERS AHEAD*

The last time I watched Star Wars in a cinema (discounting the 3D version of The Phantom Menace) was 2005, when Revenge of the Sith was released. That was a decade ago, but Star Wars has been in my life for much longer. I remember spending many weekends watching Episodes 4, 5 and 6 in LaserDisc form in the campus library when I was a child and watching Episodes 1 and 2 countless times at home on TV (definitely less of 1, though, which includes a certain long-eared character I cannot tolerate). I remember dressing up as Leia for Halloween in kindergarten and walking down the assembly hall during my high school graduation to the Star Wars theme. I have never been the kind of fan who can rattle off the names of all the droids in the galaxy, but Star Wars - which has been a huge part of essentially my whole life and shaped me in so many ways - has all of my love and affection (as you can probably tell from the url of this blog).

So, I watched The Force Awakens today and felt all the feels and shall express them as intelligibly as I can via this blog post right now. The backdrop of the storyline is this: Luke has gone into retreat after one of his padawans turned to the dark side, submitting to the "First Order" helmed by the evil supreme leader Snoke. The "Resistance," hoping to right the galaxy (and led by none other than Leia herself), aims to destroy the order and find Luke before the stormtroopers can get their hands on the map that leads to him. As usual, this key information is stored in a droid, which in this case is the unbelievably adorable BB-8.

So, Star Wars is still Star Wars - we have our trusty droids, lightspeed-capable ships and, of course, the familiar black-and-white stormtroopers. One minute in, however, I realized that this is the first time I have ever seen storm troopers portrayed so believably - not just clunky, dumb and dull but actually terroristic, savage and humane. When we see blood smeared across FN-2187's helmet, we are reminded that the stormtroopers are human: they bleed. And for the first time, we also get an indication of their backstories, how they were seized from their homes to serve the order. Finn thinks that his decision to flee is an act of cowardice, but it is one of strength.

Speaking of strength, I LOVE Rey. I love her like I love Leia. Both are such smart, independent and capable women. The first thing Rey says is a shout, a command, and that already sets the tone for her character. She can scavenge, fly the actual Millennium Falcon, fix it as well, and clearly needs no hand-holding. But there is more to her than just skill - there is also the force. And it is very strong with her, which of course sets up questions that (I hope) will be resolved in Episodes 8 and 9.

Despite all that is new about The Force Awakens, however, a lot is the same: the classic cinematic transitions between scenes, the familiar shots of X-wing fighters as they zip through the galaxy and, of course, major father-son issues. What distinguishes the rift between Han and Kylo Ren (or Ben) and the one between Vader and Luke is that the latter involves a son hoping to help his father, while it is the son that has turned to the dark side in the former. And while we do not truly witness Vader's internal struggle until he eventually decides to bring down Darth Sidious, we see Kylo Ren's dilemma from the start. Even though he entreats the Dark Side, hoping to remain in its iron grasp, whether or not he truly belongs there (probably not) remains to be seen.

The Force Awakens made me so happy on a myriad occasions. I lost it when I saw the Millennium Falcon (the piece of "garbage," as Rey calls it - of course). I also lost it when Han and Chewie showed up for the first time, when Leia, R2D2 and C3PO turned up, when Han made that golden reference to the trash compacter, when Luke turned around on the cliff at the end.

But naturally, there were also times during the movie when my heart broke. When the First Order tested out their new weapon - that was basically Alderaan x 5. And, of course, when Han died...
I saw it coming when I saw the bridge, but the fact that it happened is heart-wrenching nonetheless. In my eyes, Han has always been invincible. He has survived Jabba and all the smugglers on his tail. He has evolved so much, going from a major force-skeptic to one who says in this movie, "all of it's true." So, watching him being brought down by the dark side of the force was depressing, to say the least. Yet I understand that it wouldn't have been ideal to keep Han on board for the rest of the series, which should focus instead on the new generation. So, Han's death - although devastating to witness - didn't ruin the film for me.

In the days leading up to the premiere of The Force Awakens, we become aware of just how many people in the world (well, galaxy) love Star Wars: film buffs, Jimmy Fallon, kids clutching books about the series, and more. Star Wars has attained the status of legend. There is a 'correct' order in which one 'must' watch the films, everybody knows the sound of Darth Vader's signature breathing, and news that someone has not watched the series is usually followed by an astonished (or outraged) gasp. The seemingly worldwide worship of Star Wars has inevitably led to its immense commercialization in ways that often only succeed in looking cheap. But the films' vast fanbase has also paid tribute to it in wonderfully creative and deserving means, and The Force Awakens is an outstanding example. I cannot wait for Episodes 8 and 9.

May the force be with you!

“Sure, some news is bigger news than other news. War is bigger news than a girl having mixed feelings about the way some guy fucked her and didn't call. But I don't believe in a finite economy of empathy; I happen to think that paying attention yields as much as it taxes.”

The Empathy Exams: Essays by Leslie Jamison
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have wanted to read Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams for a very long time because the questions she grapples with are ones that I, too, often try to answer: what is empathy? What kind of territory do I find myself in when I empathize with someone? And what do I make of my own emotional response to the pain of those with whom I empathize? 

The Empathy Exams is a fitting title that captures the nature of the eleven essays in it. The title essay traces Jamison's experience as a medical actor, a job that required her to play the role of sick patients in simulated scenarios and speak to medical students whose performances she would later evaluate via a checklist: how well could they assess her condition? Did they give the right advice? And, checklist 31: how well did they express "voiced empathy" for her "situation/problem?"

For the medical students, the 15-minute session was simply an exam they had to take. Yet an "empathy exam," like all tests, takes work, and can herald disastrous consequences if failed. What distinguishes it from a regular exam is that passing is not simply a matter of getting over half of the questions right:

“Empathy isn’t just remembering to say that must really be hard—it’s figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all. Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see ”

“Empathy isn't just something that happens to us - a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain - it's also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It's made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it's asked for, but this doesn't make our caring hollow. This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always rise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones.”

The parts of the book with which I resonated the most strongly were those in which Jamison looked at empathy from a self-analytical (and sometimes criticizing) standpoint, discussing what one might call the 'problems' of empathy:

“When bad things happened to other people, I imagined them happening to me. I didn’t know if this was empathy or theft.” 

When does empathy actually reinforce the pain it wants to console? Does giving people a space to talk about their disease -- probe it, gaze at it, share it -- help them move through it, or simply deepen its hold? Does a gathering like this offer solace or simply confirm the cloister and prerogative of suffering? Maybe it just pushes on the pain until it gets even worse, until it requires more comfort than it did before. 

This is the anxiety of the empathizer, a self-consciousness that Jamison - and I, honestly - have never been able to escape. Is empathy still empathy when we "trust the fact of suffering, but not the source?"  

How do I inhabit someone’s pain without inhabiting their particular understanding of that pain? This anxiety is embedded in every layer of this essay; even its language—every verb choice, every qualifier. Do people have parasites or claim to have them? Do they understand or believe themselves to have them? I wish I could invent a verb tense full of open spaces—a tense that didn’t pretend to understand the precise mechanisms of which it spoke; a tense that could admit its own limits. As it is, I can’t move an inch, finish a sentence, without running into some crisis of imputation or connotation. Every twist of syntax is an assertion of doubt or reality.

While it is only in "Pain Tours" that Jamison examines empathy in specific geographical locations, she conveys the territorial nature of suffering in all her essays. After all,

“Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia - em (into) and pathos (feeling) - a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another person's pain as you'd enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze there?” 

In some ways, we can derive a sense of self-gratification from such travel: we are often inclined towards sentimentality, just as "we like who we become in response to injustice: it makes it easy to choose a side." Yet the foray into "another person's pain," of course, also hurts: "empathy bleeds." Jamison's geographical analogy works so well because visiting a troubled country and trying to help it is a lot like taking a tour of somebody's broken emotional landscape: the journey may not be pleasant, but the traveller must always strive to remember the purpose of the visit and the people for whom it is made. Throughout her book, Jamison approaches the subject with a critical eye, an often-innovative form and piercing introspection to convey that empathy is difficult, demanding - but also indisputably important.


View all my reviews

The universe next door

    

I am re-emerging from what has almost been a 3-month hiatus to post on this blog once more, to lay down my thoughts on a familiar space and to understand them in that way.

This is my 9th week of being a college student and my first quarter at UChicago has introduced a new and exciting rhythm into the music of my life that has shifted my pulse by several beats. There have been very few pauses along the way - I have been tapping my feet to the myriad variations on a theme that relentlessly weave new notes into my every waking day, filling them with endless sequences of quick quavers and rich chords. 

Music streams at me from all directions (quite literally, given 2.5 hour chamber orchestra rehearsals each week, swing dances every Saturday and 'non-stop' Hamilton-streaming-sessions at night) and I find myself not wanting to turn down the volume. Having spent huge chunks of my writing life trying to express myself via musical metaphors, I suppose I should give the following summation in the simplest terms possible: I have been so busy. 

Since getting here, I have been continually inspired but have found it terribly difficult to keep writing because I find that I can only effectively turn certain ideas into poetry once they have simmered down and can be regarded in retrospect. At that point, they grow quieter, clearer, and wait on the brinks of memory so that I can lay them down as words on a page. 

But so much has been happening at once that every event I attend, new taste I acquire, book I read, dance move I learn, building I explore and much more surge at me with a collective power, like the kinetic rush of particles in a heated space. It has been hard to find time to give each of these particles their equal weight; all that I most strongly register is the energy they produce, a force that almost seems to lift me off my feet. The music is always reaching a crescendo and my earphones are always plugged in.  

Last night, however, I felt a change in tempo. A caesura, a grand pause, a break. As I lay in bed alone before going to sleep (my roommate has gone to see relatives so our double is now a single, a 'dingle'), I experienced the extraordinarily familiar sensation of being home - home as in on my bed in Hong Kong. Here I am, thousands of miles away, feeling almost exactly as I would in a completely different context. Is this what it means to have finally 'settled in?' When the musical themes of your past and present unite? 

Today is Thanksgiving Day, and the first time I have ever celebrated this holiday in my life. There is so much I am thankful for this year and the list is ever-growing. I am thankful for all the family and friends I have, the beautiful campus on which I live, the classes I attend and the books I get to read. I am thankful for the colours of autumn, leaves at my feet and snowfall. I am thankful for all the new melodies in my life.

Yet I am also thankful for the pauses, the rests, the times at which my music fades to a pianissimo. These are the sacred parts in an orchestral score where the violinists get to put down their instruments for a while, turn the page and wait. I'm looking forward to hearing how this piece will grow - for I know I will grow along with it. 

for life's not a paragraph / And death i think is no parenthesis

Selected Poems, 1923-1958 by E.E. Cummings
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Although I don't believe that one can ever truly 'finish' reading a poetry collection (this is truer said about poetry than prose), I have officially marked E.E. Cummings's Selected Poems, 1923-1958 as 'read' on my Goodreads account.

E.E. Cummings is well-known for his unconventional use of form  (see: "Grasshopper," which seems to 'leap' off the page), syntax and punctuation, and we see why from the first and sparsely punctuated poem of the collection: "in Just-spring". Just looking at a Cummings poem is an adventure in itself. Yet what I learned from his selected poems is that it is just as important to hear one being read aloud. You will have to pronounce every word in the bizarre "ygUDuh," notably, to access the depths of what is mere 'jibberish' on the surface. And you must read "may i feel said he" out loud because it reads so, so well. Just be careful who you read it around (trust Cummings to make one of the most erotic poems I've ever read sound like a nursery rhyme).

Working your way through a collection is the best way to become quickly acquainted with a poet's style, in both literary and thematic terms. Aside from his syntax eccentricities, for example, Cummings also plays with meter (tetrameter and trimeter alternate wonderfully in Ever-Ever land), shifting tense and the most brilliant juxtapositions. Here are some of the oxymorons/sharp contrasts that appear in his work: "big dark little day," "a gift called dying born," "Because / only the truest things always / are true because they can't be true."

Theme-wise, Cummings writes most commonly about love, death, time and life (as do most other poets, I suppose). Yet he very memorably personifies all these abstracts:

"death(having lost)put on his universe / and yawned: it looks like rain."

"Life is an old man carrying flowers on his head"

"Death is young / life wears velour trousers / life totters, life has a beard"

(the last two lines are taken from "suppose," one of my favourite poems by him.

And Cummings shows that there is almost nothing in the literary world that is lovelier than a poet in love:

"For love are in you am in i are in we"

"we're wonderful one times one"

"love is a deeper season / than reason"

The lines (composed of simple words that rhyme nicely) convey such a comfortable sense of simplicity and effortless togetherness.

It's always a joy to read Cummings because he uses (or even coins) the most delightful of words and phrases. "Scented merde," for instance, is quite unforgettable. So is his wordplay on the months of the year in "my father moved through dooms of love," as he writes about the "septembering arms of year" and an "octobering flame." Cummings doesn't draw from a terribly arcane lexicon; in fact, many of the words he chooses are monosyllabic. So whenever a special one (or ones) comes up, it's always warmly welcomed.

One can easily be overwhelmed by a sense of 'i-don't-get-this' when reading Cummings; sometimes, we don't even know how to piece a sentence, let alone a thought, together. But I love, love, love how he can place a single, perfect, quotable line into a seemingly inaccessible poem and utterly transform it. It is fitting that not a single poem has its own separate title; we remember them rather by the individual lines that define them:

"Tomorrow is our permanent address"

"I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing / than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance"

"lovers alone wear sunlight."

"and history immeasurably is / wealthier by a single sweet day's death:"

In this collection, Cummings serenades, seduces, satirizes, speculates and stuns. His poems are magic on the page, even though they don't take up too much space (especially with the lowercase). As Cummings writes in one of the poems in this collection, "there is a time for timelessness" - and timelessness is the quality to which his poems, experimental, wonderful and challenging as they are, should always be ascribed.

 (yes, I did intentionally try to use more parentheses in this review than I normally do).

View all my reviews

The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.”

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Cormac McCarthy has been one of my favourite authors ever since I read All The Pretty Horses back in 2012 (I read The Road first, but it was The Border Trilogy that won me over). So, after having buzzed through four McCarthy books in under half a year, I decided that - in order to preserve/lengthen the magic of reading the rest of his oeuvre - I would have to establish a "Cormac McCarthy Reading Plan" and pace myself with his novels in order to always have some new McCarthy to return to whenever I need the bare honesty, dark beauty and astonishing landscapes he delivers with such stark detail.  According to my CMRP, the summer before college would be reserved for reading Blood Meridian, so that I'd have plenty of time to digest it (or recover from it in case of nightmares). And that's just what I've done! I finished Blood Meridian two days ago and it's been haunting me since. (warning: it is not for the faint of heart).

The novel is a bildungsroman, but the most violent one that McCarthy has written yet. It takes place in the brutal Wild West, during the mid-1800s, a time when savage "scalp hunters" would murder Indians along the Mexican and American border and then - quite literally - collect their scalps as evidence of the massacre. Our protagonist, "the kid," runs away from home at 14 to become "a solitary migrant" and a worker in a diptheria pesthouse before finally ending up with the scalp-hunting "Glanton Gang" - led by none other than the enigmatic and terrifying Judge Holden.

The judge, who is "close on to seven feet in height," "bald as a stone," adept at coin tricks and exceptionally knowledgeable about geography/history/science, belongs on an inaccessible tier. As he says, "Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” Yet it is only at the end, when he is dancing, young as ever, vowing that "he never sleeps" and saying "he'll never die," that readers believe he may be supernatural. And perhaps it is true that only a demon could have done the things he did - doom the innocent (even a preacher!), commit brutal murders, abduct children. At one point in the novel, the kid asks this about the judge: "judge of what?" For this is a 'judge' that does not subscribe to standard, legal laws, but rather believes in bloodshed through war:

“This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.War is god.”

“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”

Such an acceptance of war echoes the 'normalcy' with which the horrors of the novel are portrayed. The following sentence, for example, is delivered so casually despite all its terrifying implications: “They passed through small villages doffing their hats to folk whom they would murder before the month was out." Moreover, McCarthy describes the Glanton Gang parading through a town with human heads on splinters while their arrival is celebrated by a "fantasy of music and flowers" (amazing juxtaposition). Even more chilling is how the children, accustomed to this culture of violence, eat "pastry skulls" at the parade while the judge tries to tempt them with his pockets full of "little candy deathsheads"(CHILLLLSSSS).

The language of the book itself accounts for much of its appeal. And I don't just mean McCarthy's delightful use of arcane plant terminology ("golden grounsel and zinnia"), but also the form of the prose itself. In the opening chapter, for example, the unforgettable and monosyllabic opening words introduce us to the kid: "See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt." Blunt, stark and brilliant. As with his other novels, McCarthy also beautifully weaves the darkness of the times with the landscape his characters trespass:  "in the long red sunsets the sheets of water on the plain below them lay like tidepools of primal blood." They pass the "blackened bones of trees." Amazing.

As mentioned earlier, Blood Meridian is a bildungsroman. At the beginning, "the child's face is curiously untouched behind the scars, the eyes oddly innocent," but he is shot below the heart on page two and then "finally divested of all that he has been." There is a poignant moment near the end of the book where the kid sees an old woman bent over in the desert, speaks to her for a long time, tells her that "he would convey her to a safe place," but then realizes that she had been "dead in that place for years" and is nothing but "a dried shell." The hopelessness of the place hits home right there.

"The kid" is not a child for long, even though he is called "the kid" until the end of the novel. Indeed, despite all the fighting he engages in, he never reaches the level of violence that the men around him do. He cannot shoot the judge and he cannot leave the ex-priest to die (by the way, this is the ~2nd ex-priest I have come across in McCarthy's works. Brilliant symbol of loss of faith.)  The judge even says that he loves the kid "like a son."

So that brings us to the end of the novel, where "the kid" becomes "a man." The ending is terrifying. And, given all that the judge is capable of doing to children and men, I am going with the worst-case scenario regarding the kid's fate. The judge "gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh.” That carnal imagery suggests at much, although we never know what truly happens to him, except that whoever sees him at the end can only comment, "good god almighty."

Blood Meridian is stunning, especially as so much of it is historically backed (scalp hunting, the Glanton gang, even Judge Holden himself). Reading it was like living in a trance - in some chapters, nothing seems to be happening except moving through barren terrain (thankfully, the synoptic chapter headings help one keep track of the plot). I think this is the main shortcoming of the novel. In other chapters, evil is described so explicitly, you don't want to believe what you read (I swore outloud so many times while reading this book).

But regardless of how shocking and horrifying the story becomes, McCarthy's magic never diminishes - the sheer beauty of his prose, his ability to etch out bygone landscapes with stunning believability. Blood Meridian is a book that will leave you speechless, restless and astounded.
Rumor has it that McCarthy's The Passenger may be out next year. Yes!!!

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”

The smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.” 

The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

View all my reviews