Metal Music, (Heideggerian) Mood, and Memory

Right now, as I start writing this entry, blogging from my (temporary) iPad, I'm sitting in an Irish pub in the Boston airport waiting on a connecting flight to Chicago O'Hare, where I then grab a rental car and drive down the Dan Ryan through the city, up on the Skyway, and south into Indiana, where I watch my daughter dance her parts in a local ballet production of Sleeping Beauty. After that brief respite, enjoying my girl's deepening initiation into one of the high arts, a discipline inducing and perfecting grace and balance, I retrace my steps almost exactly, driving back to O'Hare to catch a flight to Boston, then another down to Raleigh-Durham, then drive back to Fayetteville, to resume classes again Monday morning and finish out what remains of my last semester at Fayetteville State.

On the first flight, suspended in the sky, relocating constantly over who knows what terrain, as I switched back and forth between rereading Platonic dialogues on an iBook reader and writing notes preparatory to an upcoming presentation in a word processor, listening to metal songs shuffling through the sequence my internal iPod randomly spun out, I found myself washed over by the sorrow of nostalgia, an always unfinished grief for times past, that unpredictably swells up out of imperceptibility, and wells up tears -- a reaction I've experienced enough times to know and be comfortable with as much as one becomes towards eccentricities of long-lived-with companions

You see, once you possess halls of memories stretching out long enough for you to have forgotten great portions of what lies behind, once they have looped over each other, sometimes crisscrossedly repeating, sometimes referring, confabulating -- or to forge another hallmark, when some of your memories are of times and moments where you remembered, you ruminated upon, you brought back to affective vivacity other intervals and events -- then enough of your own life is behind you for the past to assume aspects, dimensions more acute and complex than the young can really imagine (though they can yearn for it when they read of it -- glimpses with the heart's eye are afforded some of them).

Desire, Doubt, and the Black Swan

I'm setting aside my previous plan for today -- to finally write a piece discussing the recent book Academically Adrift, the various intersecting controversies it has provoked (or better put exposed), and its use of the CLA as a measure for student learning.  Last night, at our little local downtown theatre, I watched the recent movie Black Swan, and I was so impressed, by the beauty of the production (within a production), resilient brittleness of the main character, the almost claustrophobic spatiality, the interplay play of doubt, desire, and discipline -- so taken, so provoked both affectively and intellectually, that I decided to hazard my very first piece on a film.  Not precisely a review, but not an article either, more reflections on the directions the action and the character takes, informed by thoughts of a few philosophers whose relevance and applicability suggest themselves to those who have long meditated on their works.  Less obvious, I'll grant, to those encountering them only in passing or secondhand, but perhaps this will become clearer though this short essay.  Those philosophical interlocutors I'm bringing in are two Frenchmen, Rene Descartes and Jacques Lacan.  To what I expect is the relief -- or perhaps the disappointment -- of my readers, I write with a style much more "cartesian" than "lacanian," preferring clarity to obliquity and erudition.

Black swan focuses on one central character, Nina (Natalie Portman), the only one to undergo anything which might be called development -- a strong claim which I think deserves a bit of explanation. What I mean is this:  the other characters are important, written and portrayed in their fullness, coming across as living, real human beings, not simply types or stand-ins.  I cannot fault the acting of any of the characters to whom Nina seems inextricably bound:  the neurosis and just-held-in-check intensity of her controlling mother, Erica (Barbara Hershey), Thomas' (Vincent Leroy) intent focus on the demands of the craft, sliding along each downward lingering glance after an explanation, a command, into lechery.  The tragically disintegrating former star Beth (Winona Ryder), the straightforward pleasure-seeking  Lily (Mila Kunis) -- these are all believable, palpable even, but they all travel along the trajectories plotted out for them from the start, following their structured desires, making demands that flow and unfold from their characters.