Eucatastrophy Reader: 2009

"He was a prodigious noticer"

nobody@vox.com(vtpanther) — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 11:58:39 -0800

Mark Twain - A Film Directed by Ken Burns

“Great books are like wine. My books are like water,” Mark Twain once said. But Mark Twain said a lot of things worth remembering. I just finished the PBS Documentary on Twain’s life. I found myself wishing I had watched it backwards as it is hard to see the lights going out in his life at the end. It is sad to see the lightning strikes of tragedy taking away his great soul and Spirit.

Of the many things there were to love about this man, but I liked the line “He was a prodigious noticer.”

I find it sad that Ken Burns will probably not create a two hour biography of my life. He does such a fine job of it. His documentary on the Civil War was moving – tracing the arcs of the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. His documentary on Twain has the same effect on me though it traces the arc of one life. Twain teaches us how to be human one of the commentators says of him. He has given us “laughter out of a font of sorrow” says another commentator. Would that the same could be said of my teaching someday. I feel like I am slipping away from that ideal the more I need to find teaching work to support myself.

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"All right, then, I'll go to hell"

nobody@vox.com(vtpanther) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 22:39:10 -0800

Unborn in the USA

Confession: I teach a college Ethics class. Thus far in the course, we have discussed ethical theories that can help us process difficult ethical decisions in our lives. But we have shied away from the debate of contentious issues. My own hope has been to begin to share common processes for ethical decision making before we descend into the murky depths of those issues that are likely to make it impossible to do anything mutually. And now we have a week left and two of the students have decided to do their presentations on two of the most controversial ethical dilemmas we face and will face as a nation. Abortion and Euthanasia.

So, in the interest of exposing myself to as many sides of these contemporary issues as I can, I have been watching and reading what I can. Tonight’s documentary, Unborn in the US is one that I cannot imagine anyone not finding something to cringe about. The filmmakers have not attempted to explain anything. They simply film people who care about this issue the most deeply doing what they do and saying what they say. They seem to have made the decision to make the primary focus of their documentary those people most involved with the radical pro-life movement. By nature of their endeavors in the field of public protest, it is only natural that the film also gets to cover, with some substantial face time, the most vociferous of their opponents.

No matter which side of this debate you are on, this movie will introduce you to people that you will find it impossible to like. By design, the film focuses on the ragged and emotional polar edges of the debate while it responds to those few who struggle to stay in that middle between apathy and screed.

One reviewer of the movie at Amazon thought that perhaps this fixation with the high conflict proponents of the two sides was a mistake. She writes:

“It was with great anticipation and expectation that I partook of "Unborn in the USA" - a thought-provoking, insightful presentation about our nation's most divisive social issue.

As a woman whose long and tortured journey has hardly been unfettered, I welcomed the opportunity to observe the filmmakers as they presented proponents of both sides of the abortion debate. I wished to be challenged, touched and informed. None of us is omnipotent or infallible enough to be unmovable, in my opinion.

For the most part, the producers succeeded. However, they committed one cardinal sin here: allotting inordinate amounts of screen time to the undeserving - on both sides.”

And yet, periodically, one is forced to consider whether it is the unbending and uncompromising on both sides that are the only ones to “get it”. As a historian, one is tempted to ask; “Who understood slavery better? Abraham Lincoln, William Lloyd Garrison, or John Brown?” And yet one also must ask, “Who was likely to succeed at ending slavery eventually? Abe Lincoln, William Lloyd Garrison, or John Brown?”

This movie demonstrates how many ways there are of NOT coming to a resolution. Alas, it shows us precious little about how to succeed at it, and for that reason I suspect that many who watch will simply say “Now we know why we should not bring this topic up for discussion.”

I sit here wondering if, even after a full semester of learning about various theories of ethical decision making, a class like mine is ready to look at this question – a question I even wonder if I should be blogging about.

Earlier today, I was listening to Hucklebury Finn talk of his moral dilemma over slavery.

“So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn't know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I'll go and write the letter - and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:

Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send. Huck Finn.

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking - thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and suchlike times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

"All right, then, I'll go to hell" - and tore it up.

- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Question for comment: Do you think it is best to leave an issue alone if you know that no one is going to change their minds about it? Or does that fact cause you to want to force it to the surface?

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"Our World isn’t all there is, Rivka."

nobody@vox.com(vtpanther) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 22:49:19 -0800

Kadosh

Kadosh is one of those movies I am tempted not to blog about. It is an Israeli movie in which secular Israeli actors play Orthodox Jewish characters. Amos Gitai has chosen to focus on the experience of women in two somewhat irregular but never-the-less, realistic and not altogether uncommon, Orthodox marriages.

The word, Kadosh, in Hebrew can be translated “Holy” or “Separate” and has the connotation of an attribute of God that suggests that He is immaterial. Mind but not body. Separate. Altogether different, above, uncorrupted. In some sense, the title describes the way that this community of people, in its search for Holiness and absolute separation from the world, has, at times separated itself from its material existence – Its understanding of the way the material body, emotion, and instinct actually “work”. The emphasis on the spiritual aspect of life minimizes (at best) and represses (at worst) the influence of our materiality. Decisions are made by rabbis that affect people’s deepest psyches and yet that do not take those psyches into consideration as a consequence of their abiding focus upon the Torah and the Talmud and the Ethics of duty,

By Talmudic law, a man may (and some Rabbis say, must) repudiate his wife if she has not born him sons in the period of ten years, and the two main characters in this film, Rivkah and Meir, are a husband and wife who, though they love one another, have reached this place in their relationship to one another and to their community. It would be a mistake to say that this movie is disrespectful of religious communities and their laws. It isn’t. But it would also be a mistake to say that it does not evoke within the viewer a certain displeasure at some religious communities that seem to negate the power of that within us that is not simply a mind that has memorized the Torah.

Carol Gilligan, in her influential book, In a Different Voice, speaks of the tendency all societies have had to allow men to speak for women, to monopolize the male experience as “the human experience”. She insists that women often repress that voice that they have to share and one gets a great sense of this in the character, Rivkah, who almost never speaks but says, with her silence and with her eyes, more than anyone else.

A few quotes from Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice speak to the need to hear women like those in this movie.

“My questions are about psychological processes and theory, particularly theories in which men's experience stands for all of human experience--theories which eclipse the lives of women and shut out women's voices. I saw that by maintaining these ways of seeing and speaking about human lives, men were leaving out women, but women were leaving out themselves”

“The differences between women and men which I describe center on a tendency for women and men to make different relational errors -- for men to think that if they know themselves, following Socrates' dictum, they will also know women, and for women to think that if only they know others, they will come to know themselves.”

“The failure to see the different reality of women's lives and to hear the differences in their voices stems in part from the assumption that there is a single mode of social experience and interpretation.”

In the end, the final shot of the movie makes it clear that the target of the movie is not so much the men who force these people to make the soul-suffocating decisions that they wind up making “for God” – it is the books that these people revere. The last shot of the movie is a shot of the bookshelves full of Torah and Talmud. Nothing is said. But the point is undeniably self-evident. As much as these books offer comfort and solace and meaning to all of the characters in their daily lives, men and women alike, they contain that which is soul killing to some as well.

And therein lies the reason that I hesitate to blog about the film. Silently, quietly, respectfully, it says to the viewer that no set of religious guidelines can orchestrate from ancient history, the lives of contemporary people. “One size fits nobody” as I often say. So long as people are not universal, law codes that try to be cannot serve them all.

Question for Comment: Is there anything soul killing about the authorities that you try live your life accountable to? Can anyone say that their source of authority always commands in accordance to what we as individuals need?

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"A Convention of Moral Lunatics" (1858)

nobody@vox.com(vtpanther) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 18:05:25 -0800

"A Convention of Moral Lunatics": The Rutland, Vermont, Free Convention of 1858.

RutlandFreeConvention

READ HERE. Just one more reason why I love my State. It is only 1858 and it is already attracting oddballs like bees to honey. And if you read the article, you see that these oddballs do not all agree with one another. What they agree on is that the world should be a better place than it is. What they disagree about is how to make it so. What they agree about is that everyone should have a platform on which to make the best case for their argument. What they disagree on is what that argument should be. Temperance, Abolition, Millennialism, Spiritualism, Mesmerism, Herbs, Channelers, Women's Rights Activists, Cult of Domesticity Advocates, Anarchists, Celibates, Shakers, Free-Lovers, and names you can't even pronounce gathered on Grove Street in Rutland (the street I grew up on) to hash out their various theories of alternative thinking.

It was like the Olympics of screw balls drawing people from all over New England, America, and the world. If I could go back to a moment in Vermont History, I would go back to this summer of 1858 and walk around the grounds of the Rutland Free Convention with a digital camera and a tape recorder. Thats what I would do.

Question for Comment: What moment in your State's History would you go back to?

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Existentialism comes to Valhalla.

nobody@vox.com(vtpanther) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:38:13 -0800

What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain knowledge must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.

—Søren Kierkegaard, Letter to Peter Wilhelm Lund dated August 31, 1835

The Bothersome Man

Existentialism comes to Valhalla. The Bothersome Man, a rather bizarre Norwegian movie, has its disturbing moments. It is difficult to decide if those moments take place when the main character, Andreas, cuts his finger off or gets himself run over by a train a few times, or if those moments are in the vast spaces between those somewhat gruesome moments when seemingly NOTHING of interest happens that Andreas might lodge in his mind as a worthwhile memory.

Andreas, we surmise, kills himself in the opening scene; I suspect because he finds everything in life completely vapid and banal. Everything seems absolutely and totally material to him and so he throws himself in front of an oncoming train, only to wake up in a world one level further down in an existentialist’s Dante’s inferno where everything is one degree MORE banal, vapid, and meaningless. Refusing to be satisfied with a world that has no pain but no meaning (and no smell and no passion), Andreas eventually discovers a crack in a basement wall through which he discovers the slightest hint – the slightest smell of beauty. A woman singing. A child laughing. When he jackhammers through, he discovers, yet ever so briefly, a world, like the one he came from in the life before this. Not entirely meaningful but one level less vapid than the one he has wound up in. It is a world where you can at least taste the food. A world like ours.

Alas, “the angels” in this world he has been deposited in will not tolerate this breaking down of walls. They come and haul him off, seal up the wall, and stuff Andreas in a bus that dumps him off in a world one level lower in the hell of meaninglessness. No one can understand why Andreas cannot simply be happy with meaninglessness and order. This new world he has been sent to, we surmise from the howling of the wind as the final scene draws to a close, is one level chillier and less interesting than the last. In short, to kill yourself is not a sin. It is something people “just do” from time to time. But to try and find meaning? That cannot be tolerated. People who do that are taken away and deposited in worlds where that hope becomes even more impossible to achieve.

"...how hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for!... There can be no peace without hope." - Albert Camus, 1948, The Plague

Question for Comment: What do you think you will "wake up to" when you die?

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"When did the maw of Avarice gape wider?"

nobody@vox.com(vtpanther) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 21:36:37 -0800

Frontline: Breaking the Bank

I just watched FRONTLINE'S Breaking the Bank. I am not sure what to say that has not already been said really. Really. It is like watching Rome burn. Why talk about it? I think I will just share some lines from Juvenal's Satires, descriptions of life in Rome in the days before its fall.

"Why tell how my heart burns dry with rage when I see the people hustled by a mob of retainers attending on one who has defrauded and debauched his ward, or on another who has been condemned by a futile verdict—for what matters infamy if the cash be kept? The exiled Marius carouses from the eighth hour of the day and revels in the wrath of Heaven, while you, poor Province, win your cause and weep!
. . . Would you not like to fill up a whole note-book at the street crossings when you see a forger borne along upon the necks of six porters, and exposed to view on this side and on that in his almost naked litter, and reminding you of the lounging Maecenas one who by help of a scrap of paper and a moistened seal has converted himself into a fine and wealthy gentleman?
. . . For when was Vice more rampant? When did the maw of Avarice gape wider? When was gambling so reckless? Men come not now with purses to the hazard of the gaming table, but with a treasure-chest beside them. What battles will you there see waged with a cashier for armour-bearer! Is it a simple form of madness to lose a hundred thousand sesterces, and not have a shirt to give to a shivering slave? Which of our grandfathers built such numbers of villas, or dined by himself off seven courses?
"What can I do at Rome? I cannot lie . . . No man will get my help in robbery, and therefore no governor will take me on his staff . . . A man's word is believed in exact proportion to the amount of cash which he keeps in his strong-box."
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/juv-sat1eng.html

Question for Comment: What do you think is the root cause of the present financial crisis?

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The Trap

nobody@vox.com(vtpanther) — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 23:27:31 -0800

A few days ago, I dropped in at a blood drive and donated some blood. The man who took it was Serbian. He told me a small part of his story but not all. And I wondered what kind of story lies behind the decision to take one's family and move to another country altogether?

The Trap

The movie, The Trap is not a pleasant look at the difficult lives of post Milosevic Serbia. It is not a pleasant movie. It is about a moral and ethical dilemma that no one should ever have to face. Set in a context where criminals have money and good people don't, where some people can buy picture frames with the money that could save other people's children's lives, the Trap explores the complexities of moral decisions making in a society that is fundamentally immoral. And I think in many ways, it shows how difficult it is for Serbians to find their way to doing right after having, for so long, allowed themselves to be manipulated into doing things that they now know were wrong.

"When I was little, I imagined that life was a film that you could rewind and start again where you wanted" Mladen tells his wife after explaining that the only way he could come up with the money to pay for his son's surgury was to commit a murder. For Mladen, there is no path to redemptions besides confession of what he has done and explanation of why he thought, in the moment, it was justified. When he pleads that he killed a man to save a boy, we are left to wonder if he is asserting his guilt or innocence.

The Trap is a profoundly depressing movie in almost all respects. At its core is a plaguing question that no one likes to ask but everyone answers. Are some lives more valuable than others? Mladen and his wife move towards the climax like the protagonists of Greek tragedies. We are left to wonder, "How do people with such good intentions get so screwed and so messed up?

As an aside, the movie reminded me of Robert Frost's poem, Home Burial. A poem in which a husband and wife grow increasingly distant as a result of the way they deal with their grief differently.

Question for Comment: Do you think there is something fundamentally immoral about social systems that do not provide healthcare to all children, regardless of their income?

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"the only place where the lilies are considered at all"

nobody@vox.com(vtpanther) — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 18:49:28 -0800

“You have listened long enough. Demonstrate your note.” Seamus Heaney, Station Island

A Room for Learning: The Making of a School in Vermont

Tal Birdsey

My hat is off to Tal Birdsey and the students who made him worth listening to. As a student and teacher of Vermont History and as a person who has tried to visualize different ways of organizing young people into learning communities practically my entire adult life, watching someone throw themselves off a cliff like this was an immense pleasure. I couldn’t help but think of Emerson’s words in Self-Reliance when he writes:

“Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”

The beautiful thing about this book and the thing that makes it unlike most books on education is that it has a voice. Tal Birdsey is not a curriculum but a personality. He does not say “teach like me and you will succeed” but “teach like you and you will succeed.” Reading some of these chapters is like listening to a Socratic dialog in which Socrates himself captures the sound of Socrates teaching.

Everything lasting in education begins with intention and succeeds through personality and this book testifies to that. Birdsey quotes the sculptor in Chiam Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev “Asher, anyone can draw. Art is when it is connected to the scream inside you.’” The Northbranch school is “designed” - if you can use that word - to give young people a place to hear and express that scream, and to shape it in the cleft of the rock of community that safety creates.

Here are a few of my favorite lines:

“These kids . . . were at the chasm between childhood and adulthood. At that threshold I should be able to hold them for a moment and give them something of themselves to take before they went.”

“We most likely had assembled the least credentialed middle school faculty in America. It is a miracle that anyone at all trust us with his or her children.”

“Compiling nice deeds done was not part of the state of Vermont school standards. In fact, nothing we did the first weeks would fit in a school district’s curriculum rubric. I understood the state’s standards but didn't care much about them. I cared about understanding my students and learning who they were and how to make them feel they were making something new and important. I cared about what they yearned to know and understand.”

“Certainly, conventional intellectual knowledge was important. How else would they grow up and be able to enter the world to do rewarding and meaningful work? Mastery of facts, logic, and reason, and facility in linear and critical thinking were essential. But I was talking about fluency in the language of the heart, which emerged from willingness to speak from deeply felt experience. Yes, I wanted them to be able to say things well. Even more, I want them to have something valuable to say.”

“I was realizing that school was a place where such meandering dialogue could happen, where we could create something like a Greek symposium, where the discussion was given time and honor. Our work was that constant interplay of question and answer, speaking and listening, searching and finding.”

“I had a teaching postulate: a good teacher will ask at least 100 questions a day, 18,000 per school year, half of which might be philosophical, theoretical, ambiguous, or otherwise mystical in nature.”

“My dream of what I wanted them to learn to not come back to me regurgitated a test or other conventional achievements. It was creation out of nothing, creation out of them, meaning wrested from the simplest, most complex materials: books, a box of pencils, two tables, and 12 kids and their teachers looking for something great inside each other.”

The other day, my own son said to me that he wished more classes were like math classes. Where something was taught and then students got to engage in constructing something. In short, he was wishing that more teachers believed that young people had something valuable inside them that needed a school to help mine as opposed to the belief that all that was valuable was outside the student standing in need of an injection of that value. “My students love it when their words or actions had influence,” says Tal. “We are mystics. All of us. We have the inner light in the eye of the heart. They're great souls. We are the sweet cold water. Our minds and hearts are whirling dervishes. But we have to listen.”

Part Rumi. Part Socrates. Part George Fox. Part Jung. Part Calvin and Hobbes. His insistence on the necessity of chaos reminded me of M. Scott Peck’s work on community building (The Different Drum) where Peck talks about the futility of constructing communion from pseudo-communities of predictable safety. This is a different kind of safety. A safety that, like the Psalms, allows people to curse God, doubt human goodness, brag, and wonder. A place where it is safe to be entirely human. “The school had to be safe enough for my students locate that self,” says Tal Birdsey,

“to loose what was snarling and alive inside . Then the school could become a true reflection of their minds as they discovered it, as though for the first time in the history of the world. The class had to be safe for anything, including disharmony. Harmony in a classroom could be utterly numbing -- dissonance and dissent, atonality and cacophony were, to my mind, the greater provocateur for learning.”

Tal speaks of the greatest compliment that any teacher could hope to receive from a student. “Sometimes I have thought that the school is like the only place where the lilies are considered at all, she said.”

This is not a school that originated in the mind of someone wanting to know what minimum had to be reached to achieve a State License. One gets the feeling that Tal Birdsey was not the sort to ask a teacher how long a paper had to be. The proper question for anything we set out to do in life is, as he puts it, “How great does it have to be?”

I have often thought of my courses not as History courses but as “critical thinking courses that use History as a medium.” I suspect that Tal Birdsey sees them as “feeling” courses that use … everything from Coltrane to pasta noodles as a medium.

“We think by feeling. What is there to know??” Theodore Rothke

Question for comment: Have you ever had a teacher that actually cared more about YOU than the curriculum?

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An Argument for Fear-Funding

nobody@vox.com(vtpanther) — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 07:13:42 -0800

7 Deadly Scenarios: A Military Futurist Explores War in the 21st Century

Andrew Krepinevich

I am so glad that I do not have Andrew Krepinevich’s job. Trained at West Point and 21 years in the military, he spends his life imagining future military conflicts and advocating that we spend lots of money preparing to fight them. If he is not on the payroll of the military-industrial complex, he ought to be. His book 7 Deadly Scenarios: A Military Futurist Explores War in the 21rst Century takes a look at seven different conflict stories, treating each “deadly scenario” as though it we already history and telling their story as matter-of-factly as possible.

In the “Collapse of Pakistan” Islamic militants take over the Pakistani nuclear arsenal. In “War Comes to America” terrorists begin detonating nuclear (with former Soviet nuclear arsenal origins) in American cities. In “Pandemic” infectious diseases in Mexico create an invasionary wave of refugees over the border. In “Armageddon: The Assault on Israel” increased weapons sophistication in the Arab-Israeli conflict, funded by a militant Iran escalates into a region wide war that profoundly interrupts the price of oil. In “China’s Assassin’s Mace” economic destabilization in China caused by demographic instabilities combined with military conflict over Taiwan leads to an intractable war over American bases and Sea Lanes along the Pacific Rim. In “Just-Not-On-Time: The War on the Global Economy” again, terrorist attacks on the Malacca Straits and Iranian militancy in the Strait of Hormuz leads to massive disturbances in energy and commercial supply lines. Finally, in “Who Lost Iraq” Krepinevich explores the widening impact of sectarian instability in an Iraq, left to its own devices.

The author’s conclusion amounts to an appeal for more defense spending, more investment of mind and attention to the affairs of future wars, and more preparation for wars of different kinds. “Are you scared yet?

Needless to say, it would be beyond my pay grade to assert that he does not know what he is talking about. He clearly is an informed man. And I can not even criticize him for a lack of imagination. That he has in abundance. It is the direction that his imagination takes. His solutions to imagined conflict involve military deterrence rather than imagined ways to pre-empt the collision of alternate visions for the global future. Throughout almost every one of his scenarios is an assumption that Islamic militancy, in its various forms, will be a force of significant threat into the foreseeable future. In several of his scenarios, it is the idea of a global Islamic State that serves as the rationale behind the majority of threats.

In none of the scenarios is America the aggressor. And none of them involves an aggressive act by one of our key allies (Japan, Israel, Britain, etc.) Krepinevich has no solutions for drying up the swamps of despair and poverty in which oppositional attacks arise. His job is to prepare for the attacks themselves. Not once does he counter the forces of chaos and conflict visible in the present world with the many and numerous initiatives (like those that I take part in) that bring people off different cultures together. It is as though he does not see the massive exchange of communication and comrade-building activity that is going on in the world side by side with military tactical advances and evolving weaponry. His perspective on the future of this planet assumes that we will always live in adversarial relationships.

Question for Comment: Do you think the lion will ever lie down with the lamb and swords be beat into plowshares?

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My blog's worst movie to date

nobody@vox.com(vtpanther) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:22:38 -0800

Synecdoche New York

I cannot believe I used an hour of my BIRTHDAY to watch the rest of this movie. But I did. It is funny how the Rubiks Cubeedness of it challenges me even if its essential morbidity depressed me. Maybe on some subconscious level I have a greater desire to be interested than happy? Grin. WARNING. I RECOMMEND THIS MOVIE TO NO ONE. If you feel the need to depress yourself, just go read Ecclesiastes and pretend that its your only sane way of looking at life.

To start with, in understanding this movie, you really have to be a bit familiar with the whole philosophy (and I use the term with caution here) of Post-Modernism and Existentialism. Camus, Sartre, etc. argue that life has no meaning … no universal meaning other than the meaning we create for ourselves and pretend to have. You just sort of have to imagine some sort of storyline in the universe that gives your life meaning and then play along as if that story is true. That sort of thing.

In short, life is just a play and you can come up with whatever storyline you want. Title your life whatever you want to title it (Hoffman’s character, Caden, does this several times throughout the movie. He keeps saying that he NOW knows how to direct the play he is directing and changing his mind about the titles.) Sometimes they make sense and sometimes they don’t but that is the whole post-modernist point really. Nothing REALLY makes sense so feel free to give yourself a life philosophy that does or doesn’t. No matter. Caden thinks of calling his play Simulacrum – a word meaning “something that is only a pretending to be real” – a “fake” – a “fraud” – a facsimile. There is a whole history of the word "Simulacrum" in Philosophy that is being referred to here.

Seriously, Part of this is stepping into insanity (as Frederich Nietzsche did when he began believing the world WAS meaningless).

One key point of the movie is this: Ultimately, everyone is going to fall apart and die and be nothing. Caden opens the movie directing the play Death of a Salesman, a play about the meaninglessness of this guy’s life (Willie Loman). Only he uses YOUNG actors. As if to convey that young or old, your life is still in a trajectory of death, dying, and decay.

A few quotes from Death of a Salesman may help:

“I don't say he's a great man. Willie Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.
Linda, referring to her husband Willie Loman, Act 1

You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away - a man is not a piece of fruit.
Willy Loman, Act 2

After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.
Willy Loman, Act 2

I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been.

Biff: Pop! I'm a dime a dozen, and so are you!
Willie: I am not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman, and you are Biff Loman!
Act 2

"I've always made a point of not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all I've done is to waste my life." Act 1, Part 2

"Why am I trying to become what I don't want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am!" Act 2, Part 7

Anyway, Death of a Salesman is pretty depressing too. Synechdoche, New York is just saying that what is true of an old man dyeing is true of everyone. Indeed, the title, Synecdoche, is a word that means this very thing. It is a word for something small that describes the whole. Like when you say you have hired a few extra “hands” for a project you are working on. The word “hands” stands in for the entire people you have hired. Kaufman, the director, is saying that we are all just playing out parts in a big play within a play that doesn't matter. Our lives as individuals don’t matter just like the entire story of civilization does not matter. The stage gets blown up. the City gets blown up. The main characters all die. On the BIG level and the small, same thing. And this is toyed with in comparing HIS art (The HUGE play) with his wife’s (The microscopic paintings). What is true of the meaningless person is true of the meaningless universe. Both the paintings and the play say "We are dieing."

But even when we are young we pretend we are not dieing. For example, early in the movie, Caden’s alarm clock goes off and we hear that it is September first. A moment later at the kitchen table, the TV reports that it is Halloween. Seconds after that, a radio tells us that it is November second. His disease goes from symptom to “its over” in a matter of minutes.

In the movie, a woman buys a house while it is burning down and it continues to bur down every time a scene is set in that house over the course of many years. I think the whole point of the burning house is in this. Right from the very beginning, you know the house is burning down. But you just pretend that it is not and buy the place. This is the quintessential way of looking at the universe as a Post Modernist nihilist. We are ALL dying but we all pretend that we are not. Our universe will someday die too and yet we pretend that it is not. We (as individuals, as a culture, as a world) are all “hurling towards death” as Caden says. This is the message that Caden gives to the people trying out for his “play” – that they are ALL dying and all pretending that they are not.

In this way of seeing the world, it doesn’t matter if we play one part or another really. We can be whoever we want to and shift from one character to another as we wish as Caden and his characters do. They barely know who they are after a while they switch so often. Ultimately, nothing matters and just when we think we have figured out the meaning of life, we die. As Caden does in the end.

And the movie keeps inserting tragedies, - Horrible unexplainable tragedies that make no “sense”. People die. People get cancer. People get diseases. People betray people. They commit suicide, etc. etc. etc. But then they don’t die or they come back. Who cares? You might ask, is there ANYTHING redemptive about this view of the world? Well, all the director offers you is the hope that you will find someone to hold you in the middle of it. While your life comes apart and nothing makes sense and no one cares, and everyone falls apart and the world blows up, and everyone dies and nothing matters, all you can hope for is company, intimacy, and maybe sex. A shoulder to put your head on attached to a face that will smile at you and comfort you and care even though you don’t deserve it.This is so important to Caden that he will be anything anyone who will love him asks him to be. He will say he has done things he has not done. He will take any part he has to play if it provides him some hope that someone will love him and hold him (be it his wife or daughter or a complete stranger).

It is funny that they call this point of view “Post-Modernism because you can read all about it in the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes, a book written to explain what the world looks like without the lens of faith. “”Vanity of vanities,” says the preacher, “all is vanity. Chasing after the wind”.

I suppose he is simply making the argument that you should just give up trying to find meaning in life and just do what you need to do to meet your basic needs. It is pretty bleak.

Ultimately, a person would be much better served using the two hours to tell someone in their family that they loved them. ;-)

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