45/52 - Boxes and Boxes

"We are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being." - Martin Amis

Dear Internauts,

1) I read Kevin Smith's 2013 memoir, Tough Sh*t: Life Advice from a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good, several months after leaving college. I don't remember too much of it, but what sticks in my mind is a lesson he picked up from director George Romero (“I don't think you need to spend $40 million to be creepy. The best horror films are the ones that are much less endowed.”). I'd do the particular story a disservice to try and retell it, but basically Smith wanted to make his own film but felt hindered by his lack of resources, connections, and position. Thus he decided to make a film about working at a convenience store, and Clerks remains probably his most famous work. Shot relatively cheaply from a script he wrote and starring his friends. The lesson, he wrote, being that the more resources you think you need in order to accomplish your goal—the more roadblocks you're setting up before you—the more excuses you're giving yourself to stop pursuing it. Figure out the best way to make your goal using your limitations to your benefit instead of telling yourself you can't do anything until the situation is optimal.

2) Last Thursday, my folks and I went to a TEDx event featuring several great speakers who presented eighteen-ish minutes each on a variety of topics. They were all interesting, but what stuck with me the most was actually this video they played from artist Phil Hansen. If you haven't already seen it (or even if you have), I def recommend taking the time to watch it.

[tl;dw - Basically, in art school, Hansen developed a nasty hand tremor which prevented him from continuing on his current stylistic path. Lost, he allowed this setback to drive him from his goals, dreams, and best self until he purposefully set forth to reclaim those ideas in new ways despite the troubles he perceived as blocking his path forward. Through this determination, he discovered a refreshed sense of creativity by embracing his limitations as a part of himself, rather than fighting against them. From there, he began to explore other mediums, styles, and concepts for his art, setting up purposeful parameters as a way to inspire creativity instead of letting those borders hinder him.]

3) I've loved wolves pretty much my entire life. They're pretty much my favorite animal. A common idea about wolf pack social structure is that of the Alpha. This is the one at the top who keeps everybody else in check, gets to eat first, and gets first dibs on a mate. Well, this has been the thinking for a long time, and I believed it from the stuff I'd read and seen. However, over the past year I've been reading a lot about how the whole Alpha male, etc stuff is not really true to nature. Sure it exists, but the major research done to confirm it was/is based for the most part on wolves held in captivity. Specifically those who were strangers before being put in the same enclosure would form these hierarchies out of the immediate necessity for order. That's not to say that their aren't leaders of packs in the wild, but rather that the conditions of captivity necessitated in the wolves a power structure built on violence, control, and subordination. In the wild, a more organic, familial support system can develop depending on circumstance.

(This is not to say that I don't believe there are certain rescue sanctuaries which truly do help wolves, though even then those places only need to exist due to human destruction of natural ecosystems and wide-spread wolf slaughter in the past century by the uninformed, uneducated, and greedy.)

So if the nature of wolves can't be best determined by their survival within captivity, what is there to say about the nature of humans within the captivity of, say, capitalism?

 In the words of Emma Goldman—

“Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet, how can any one speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?

John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?”

Think about the world of Hunger Games as brought to us by Suzanne Collins:
While the various districts are made to focus on and root for their hero/celebrities in fights against one another, the actual antagonistic force was the oppressive Capital, facilitating, encouraging, and enforcing this struggle as a way to maintain a status quo of control. The very idea of challenging them was so far out of thought, because people were too busy fighting eachother, starving, and simply trying to make their way from one day to the next.

Or in Star Wars' own Clone Wars:
The Republic and the Separatists were so busy destroying one another that they let themselves be ripped apart from within, betraying any ideals they had once held dear and fought for in order to unwittingly bolster their mutually assured destruction and introduce a singular figure of oppression once it was too late to reconcile.

Or whenever we as people are so caught up in fighting over borders, parties, sects, or resources that we ignore the root causes of this scarcity, which is used by those in power to maintain the illusion of their own usefulness and necessity.

So to recap:

1) Don't let the list of things you think you need to be successful stop you from even beginning to try.

2) Instead of seeing your limitations as weaknesses, accept them as part of your unique self and thus unlock the chance to sow creative expression from the uniqueness of your particular challenges.

3) And remember that the outward enforcement of limitations by those in power need not be the sole means of structuring reality for yourself, your interactions, your community, and your world.

As long as there are boxes for people, there are people climbing out, climbing in, and running around inside and out. All those people are unique and all those people are capable of more than simply being defined by their relationship to their box.

Thanks for reading,
Odist