The Dangers of Love

My head is like an ITunes jukebox full of music ready to play for any situation.  For American Lit this week, one song specifically came to mind:  ‘What is Love’.  After all our talks in class about violence and love, lyrics like ‘What is love/baby don’t hurt me/don’t hurt me no more’ just followed naturally.

Writers like Edgar Allen Poe and his ‘zombie women’ prove the dangers that can often lie dormant in a relationship where love reigns.  In the relationships the narrators in Berenice, Ligeia, and Morella not even the old adage ‘love conquers all’ could survive.  One of the questions Suzanne listed at the beginning of the class was ‘Is love rational?’ After the readings we’ve done in the last two weeks the only logical response can be a resounding no.

In my opinion, all love does some kind of damage to the people it ensnares.  At the very least, love can make people blind to the faults of the person they’re with, either for a short time while the bliss of being in a new relationship is still in bloom or throughout the entirety of their time together.  As much as I hate to say it, I can see parallels between Poe’s twisted narrators and some of the relationships I’ve been in during my lifetime, usually placing me on the same pedestal at the narrator and not the unfortunate brides.  Several of my first relationships began under dubious circumstances where I couldn’t “for my soul, remember how, or precisely where, I first became acquainted” with the boy in question (Poe 569).  Dating in through middle school and high school what I knew some of the people I dated very well, others not very well at all.  Like Wendy in The Shining I stayed with people who were emotionally, but not physically, abusive to me at times.  I put up with a “best friend” for a number of years who once kicked me in the arm hard enough to bruise just because I changed the radio station off a song he liked that I didn’t.  Like the narrator who states “a recollection flashes upon me that I have never know the paternal name of her who was my friend and betrothed” there were things I simply didn’t know about certain people I dated that I probably should have made it a point to find out before dating them such as middle names or what they were allergic to, though never anything as drastic as not knowing someone’s last name (Poe 569).  I grew bored in certain relationships as the narrator in Morella does who “longed with an earnest and consuming desire for the moment of Morella’s demise” (Poe 588).  My boyfriends no doubt painfully “conscious of my weakness or my folly” that led me to sabotage my own relationships, find faults in them that may never have even been there and leave them before they could hurt me (Poe 588).  It would be too easy to blame my fears of abandonment and commitment on my absent father and have it at that, but I know that would be partially a lie.  Almost every man in my life, be it father, friend, or boyfriend, has shown me I’m nearly impossible to want to stay with for long, that after a time they could “no longer bear” to be near me (Poe 588).  They left, one by one, two or so friends returning and standing fast since then.  Around high school I decided to stop waiting for everyone to leave and counterattack – I would leave first.  I’ve broken up with every boyfriend I’ve ever had save one.  I’ve lived my life as a pessimist with the theory that “the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are, have their origin in the ecstacies [sic] which might have been” (Poe 581).

The female character to which I most relate, I think, would be Ligeia.  Once upon a time I dated a boy (names with asterisks have been changed for the sake of privacy) was named Paul*.  There was nothing really that special about him except that he was a perfectly ordinary straight edge boy from our tiny high school town.  Like Ligeia, I was significantly more intelligent than my partner, which created a fair share of distance between us the longer we dated.  I couldn’t have known the crazy the lay beneath the surface of Paul’s seemingly-normal façade.  When we dated, he did everything in his power to keep me away from my other male friends because he thought I was spending too much time talking to my guy friends and he wanted me to myself.  By the time I actually managed to corner one of my guy friends to inquire why they were all avoiding me, Gabe*told me he’d threatened they to stay away from me.  As a counterattack I started spending hours a day ignoring him talking purely to my best female friends, merely hoping he would get the point and realize how crazy he was being.  Instead, he started doing the same thing to my female friends.  All in all, he wanted me to himself.  Creepy much?  Needless to say that relationship didn’t last long – although instead of emaciating myself to death like Ligeia did, I broke up with him in an elevator in Disney world.  Happiest place on Earth just got a little less shiny for me, let me tell you.

This gives me the perfect segue into my next topic:  Disney set our generation up to fail when it came to love.  In class we talked about how we’re taught to look for the perfect relationship like our favorite characters had growing up.  We were shown as little girls that once you’ve found your Prince Charming who would fight your dragons or scale your towers to save you that everything would be happily ever after.  Is it any wonder the divorce rate is so high when people have been taught that love conquers all your problems?  When things get tough, when the fairytale honeymoon period of a relationship ends and reality begins again, people can’t cope.  If the happiness and butterflies die, people don’t know what to do.  More people need to reevaluate their opinions of what love should be, and of whom they should be looking for.  We can’t all marry Prince Charming and be whisked off to rule a country.  We all want our fairytale, our happily ever after, the stuff of songs and poetry.  We all want to know if we’ll get our perfect ending, just like the girl in the song ‘Happily Ever After’ by He Is We:

Some fairytale analysts say that stories like Cinderella are bad for kids.  They say behind all the magic and hoping “you are left with a tale of wishes-come-true-regardless,” to which one analysts responded “If that were so, wouldn’t we all be married to princes” (Dundes 303)***.  Further, characters like Cinderella that most of us grew up with are perfect examples of “insipid beauties waiting for Prince Charming” which presents “the majority of American children with the wrong dream” (Dundes 303)***.  I agree – when I was a child, I didn’t dream of career success, but of a husband who may or may not have been a prince.  My views, thankful, had changed.  Waiting for a Charming Prince sounds so tiring.

 For me, I’ve changed my ideals of love so many times I don’t even know where they began and how they’re going to end.  When I came to college, the last thing I wanted was to look for a boyfriend.  Sure, I noticed a few people I thought were cute or that I might be capable of being interested in, but I’d given up the ideal I’d held all through high school – to find someone I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.  I’d reached a point where looking for the ideal partner was tiring me out and the lyrics from the song ‘Dogs Days Are Over’ by Florence + the Machine started to feel like they applied to my life: Leave all your loving, your longing behind/You can’t carry it with you if you want to survive.  Love, and the search for it, was wearing me out and killing me slowly with longing for the perfect person who would make everything that had ever been bad in my life worth the pain.  But as I entered college, I made the decision to change and let go of my Fairytale dreams, my secret Disney princess complex, in favor of being single.  If I found love, I found it, but I was done looking for love and a boyfriend. 

                In class, we talked about how people needed to give up their ideals about what love should be in order to find it: and that’s exactly what happened to me.  I gave up on ever finding the perfect man to love me and make it all better, and then found my boyfriend.  Or, more accurately, was introduced to him by one of my closest friends that I’ve made here at Otterbein.  Love, clearly, is best left to chance.  Looking for it is like looking for a rainbow when it’s not even raining – you’ll find imitations and man-made ones, but never the real deal.  I think Beth said it best when she said “Love simply is.”

Can we ignore the obvious grief the narrators in Poe’s writing go through, though?  Grief and what happens after death is something that I feel varies not only from one religion to another or one culture to the next, but from person to person.  In history, different peoples from all around the world had all manners of strange customs relating to death.  In some cultures, there is a “prohibition against uttering the name of the dead person” for mourners (Freud 54)*.  Even stranger to me, it used to be the practice that “if the name of the dead man happened to be the same as that of an animal or common object, some tribes think it necessary to give these animals or objects new names, so that the use of the former names shall not recall the dead man to memory” (Freud 55)*.  Queen Victoria had a hobby of "collecting dead flowers taken from the grraves of deceased royals" which started when she took "some that grew on her late husband Albert's last resting place and it jsut sort of took off from there" (Shaw 191).  All cultures have their own customs on how grieving should or can proceed.  For example, the Catholic side of my family holds big wakes and funerals with large dinners afterwards.  Not being Catholic myself (and I apologize to any offended family that might read this) and not being able to see anything as somber as a funeral as a social event, I don’t grieve the same way most of my extended family does, such as they did when my Nana passed this summer.  I won’t lie – I was disgusted.  Everyone seemed so excited to see each other when we were at the church waiting for the funeral to start like they were at my graduation or at birthday parties.  It took everything I had in me not to strangle someone.  Most people only act on emotions when someone dies, and sometimes people forget that this means others will react different.  While most of my family wanted to talk about their grief, I wanted let alone.  I needed to handle it on my own time, and in fact the final blog didn't come for me until I got back to college and found a picture of my Nana and me in my computer files.  Grief is something you can't force onto someone, "people find their own level of involvment and should do so voluntarily" (Kubler-Ross 93).  In the same way, the characters in Poe’s zombie bride stories all grieve their losses in different – yet disturbing if you ask me – ways.  Below I have posted a music video by Panic! At the Disco called ‘The Ballad of Mona Lisa”.  The video - which also contains a fantastic song if you ask me – is centered on a traditional Irish wake ceremony as the setting. 

        Memories, like love, are violent in the things they do to their owners.  In The Shining, Jack seems to be haunted with the memories of times he’s lost his temper, something the Overlook taps into when it leaves him the scrapbook and alcohol showing him his failings.  Through the book we learn of times he’s lost his temper which come up repetitively.  He’s haunted especially by the memory of what he did to Danny.  His son is haunted by memories that will come to be shown to him by Tony when he’s waiting for his father to get home from the job interview at the beginning of the book.  Danny is also haunted by the word divorce ingrained into his memories from his parent’s thoughts.

               One thing both The Shining and the works by Poe we’ve been reading have most in common is their commentaries on the dangers of domestic tyranny.  As the ‘head of the family’, Jack feels he has to provide for his family.  Feeling like she didn’t have anywhere else to go if she left Jack and thinking that Danny loved his father more than her, Wendy stayed with him even after he broke Danny’s arm.  When Danny and Wendy had locked Jack up, he shouts for Danny to “mind your daddy” and “open this door or I’ll bash your fucking brains in” keeping the terror he’d be wreaking on his family while the hotel possessed him alive (King 378).  In Ligeia, not only are her eyes fetish objects over which he obsesses, but his possessive love actually seems to contribute to her wasting away.  As Jacqlyn so aptly put it in class, “he was feeding off her rather than she was starving herself” then comes back to haunt him, her ‘resurrection’ a final rebellion from a repressed woman.  

               At the times we were reading these pieces for class, I was also reading Rainbow Boys by Alex Sanchez for GLBTQ book club.  In the book, Jason’s dad is a perfect example of domestic tyranny.  A drunk, foul, violent man, Jason’s father dominates over his mother who at the beginning of the book is quite meek, breaks Jason’s things like his radio, and in one scene even tries to hurt Jason.  In real life, domestic tyranny is still alive and well just like it was in Poe’s time.  Domestic violence is still a huge problem worldwide.  In high school, my best friend Daisy* was dating a boy I didn’t like.  I thought he was a dumbass, too immature, but not exactly a bad guy.  She always defended him when I spoke badly about him, so a lot of the time we didn’t discuss their relationship.  Once they broke up, she confessed he’d actually been hitting her and that she’s been so ‘in love with him’ (totally Stockholm syndrome if you ask me) she hadn’t been able to bear leaving him.  Thankfully I’ve never been in a physically abusive relationship, but I have been in some emotionally damaging relationships and verbally abusive friendships.  And yet, instead of staying, I found a way to leave these people.  I feel horrible for people like Wendy in The Shining who feel like they can’t leave.  What could be worse than being trapped by an obsessive, possessive, abusive ‘love’?

* Quote taken from Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud

** Quotes taken from Death: The Final Stage of Growth by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

*** Quote taken from Cinderella: A Casebook by Alan Dunges

Bloodsuckers and perversity? Sign me up!

As a culture, no one can say we aren’t attracted to the occult.  Whether its rip your throat out werewolves or hard core guts and gore blood suckers, we love creatures of the night even though if we really met one in a dark alley, rather than throw ourselves at it, we’d probably piss ourselves and cry for our Mommies.  But it’s not just these classic monsters we run towards – look at movies like ‘Saw’ or ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’.  What do these have in common, besides the fact that they both have the capacity to make us pee our pants in fear?  It all comes down to two words:  perversity and darkness.

Perversity seems to be Edgar Allen Poe’s stomping ground.  If there’s a norm to our society, Poe probably found a way to turn it on its head in a piece of fiction or a poem.  Cruelty is a facet of human existence, and yet as long as you don’t step over a certain line, we usually accept cruelty.  For example, an older brother can beat on a younger brother, but if we hurt an animal people consider that crossing a line.  I’m not saying either is acceptable, but that I find it strange we have rules on how much and what kinds of cruelty come with certain results.  For example, there’s a difference between manslaughter and attempted manslaughter.  In the first case, you were outright evil and took someone’s life, but in the second since you only attempted it but didn’t succeed, there’s a less severe punishment.  Personally, in this case, I want the punishment to be the same.  Even if you didn’t succeed, you tried to take someone’s life and that’s just unacceptable.  Poe thought everyone was capable of cruelty, and I think he’s right.  There’s a certain thrill or adrenaline rush that comes from being bad or doing something you know is wrong.  In this way human beings are perverse.  We as a society have a set of morays or laws that tell us what we can and can’t do, but we get a primal urge and pleasure out of doing wrong to others or to animals.  In The Black Cat, the narrator says he hung the cat “because I knew I was committing a deadly sin” (Poe 205).  As a general rule, human beings try not to commit such deadly sins “that would so jeopardize my immortal soul” where it would be “beyond the reach of infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God” (Poe 205).  Here, the narrator does wrong just to do wrong, because he can.  If that’s not perverse, I don’t know what is!

Now I’ll offer you up a song as a modern retelling of The Black Cat:

The first verse sets up the story just like the original version does: Close up camera one/The hero sings in this scene/The boy that gets the girl gets to go home where they get married/But stop the tape,/The sunset still looks fake to me/The hero looks like he can't breathe.  In the beginning of The Black Cat, everything looks normal and happy for the couple.  They’re married, living together in their own little world.  As we read on we realize he’s a drinker, and cruel to animals, not the perfect hero of the story we’d been hoping for – although if you looked for a hero in Poe’s writing, you’re bound to be disappointed.  The first two lines of the chorus are meant directly for Pluto: You're like a black cat with a black back pack full of fireworks/And you're gonna burn the city down right now.  The house of the narrator in the story catches fire after he hangs the cat, and the narrator suspects the cat of having some supernatural hand in everything that happened, including the “figure of a gigantic cat” burned into the wall that didn’t cave in (Poe 205).  In this way, he feels Pluto was trying to sabotage and haunt him.  Next comes the words: Oh close up camera two/ Cause the hero dies in this scene/ Your inspiration is the loss of absolutely everything/ And flashback on the girl/As we montage every memory.  Going back to the beginning of the short story, the narrator says “to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburden my soul” after which he flashes back to everything that happens to him, starting at infancy and ending with the reason he’s made to die (Poe 203).  If you ask me, Mayday Parade must have had one strong love for Edgar Allen Poe to write this song they way they did.

As a culture we submit to darkness, whether that is real or something fictional.  We often link love with violence, romance with danger, just like the narrator in The Black Cat does when he hangs the cat he professed he loved.  Creatures of the night like Dracula (including most of his retellings and reinventions) are portrayed as being suave and sexy, as well as powerful and terrifying.  We want him to bite us, to sink fangs into us and make the ecstasy we feel watching him come true.  He doesn’t even need magical or supernatural powers to draw him to us anymore – we’ve romanticized and sexualized him so much all he has to do is offer his hand and he’d have an entire room full of woman fighting to be the one he takes.  Look for a second at the film ‘Dracula 2000’ starring Gerard Butler – whom I might interject is my favorite portrayal of Dracula yet, and damn fine while he does it.  The tagline to the movie on the cover of the VHS – yes, it’s that old – says ‘The Most Seductive Evil of All Time Has Now Been Unleashed in Ours’.  And even though that should be terrifying, I have no doubt in my mind millions of women who went to see the movie were practically begging to be his next victim.

In the background of all I’ve said, the thought of free will has been floating waiting to be confronted.  Why do we as a society love what can be worst for us?  Why do we enjoy the perverse?  Because we have free will, and in doing so tend to abuse it.  Look at addictions of any kind.  We have the free will to start using heroin or meth like Nikki Sixx from Mötley Crüe did.  For now, he’ll be my example while I talk about free will, addiction, and degrees of addiction.  A while back, I read a book by Nikki Sixx called The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of Rock Star which was basically his diary from when his band was big chronicling his usage of drugs and what that did to him.  A lot of the things we talked about in class were in the book, including the degrees of addiction and how that affects how much of continued use of a drug is free will as opposed to addiction taking the choice away from you.  In the beginning of the book, Nikki talks about how he could stop using drugs if he wanted to, and that he wasn’t using the top ones like heroin because he knew they could really fuck a person up.  Yet, the longer he does drugs, the more desperate he becomes, and the worse drugs he’ll try. 

By the time he starts using heroin, he’s given up trying to say he’s in control of his addiction.  Instead of being for recreational use, he relied on the drugs just to get through the day without having to feel the pains of withdrawals.  How much of his addiction was really his fault?  While he chose to do drugs, as a celebrity he had them shoved in his face at all times, and when on tour needed to keep using so he could keep playing well for his fans rather than try to go clean on the road.  For an addict, rehab is illogical, while to the rest of us it makes sense.  For them, their lives can rely heavily on getting that next hit to get through the day, celebrity or no.  As an addict the drug becomes who you are, like a twisted identity you can’t get rid of no matter how hard you try – the drugs are in control.  It takes someone else stepping in most times for an addict to seek help of any kind, because stuck in their monomania they never realize just how bad the drugs are for them.  All they feel is the high they can’t imagine living without, hiding behind their rose colored glasses.  I’m glad Nikki Sixx got his glasses knocked off – he’s quite a great lyricist and musician if you ask me, regardless of how fucked up I think his choices were.

The ramblings of heroin addicts and other addicts seems crazy to me, and yet, crazy is yet another facet of our society we can’t escape.  How many of us have said something along the lines of “I must be going crazy” when things don’t seem to add up in our heads the way we once thought they did?  I know I’ve said that very sentence and questioned my sanity on many different occasions personally.  Just the other day I made a huge mistake, and in overreacting in the midst of a panic attack I almost lost my very best friend – if you’re reading this, which I’m sure you are, I totally love you babe J.  In a fit of emotion, I told my best friend that I was leaving him, because I thought that was what he wanted and needed me to do.  Obviously, he freaked out about it, and a very confusing few days followed.  While we managed to patch things back up with minimal hurt feelings and a lot of learning about each other between the two of us, the entire time we were talking rationally to each other about what had happened and what had been said, all I could think about was how crazy I must have been to have thought he wanted me out of his life.  Now that things are cleared up I can look back and roll my eyes at myself, but then what I had done seemed rational.  Is that the real core of insanity then – does there have to be a rational basis at the center for all the crazy to manifest itself around?  What do you think?  Have you ever been in a situation that at the time seemed rational but upon reflection didn’t anymore?

In The Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator isn’t shown to us as the other one is in The Black Cat.  Instead of trying to justify his crimes, the narrator in this tale is more preoccupied with assuring us that he was sane.  At the beginning of the tale, the narrator questions “why will you say that I am mad” like there’s a big miscommunication on our parts (Poe 199).  Maybe it’s just me, but no one that can kill a man purely because he has a glass eye can be anything but crazy.  For the rest of the story he tried to put up a good argument to make us think he’s not crazy.  For me, I saw his craziest moment to be his sudden confession.  I can’t help but wonder what this says about me as a person – that I could look passed how insane his reasons were for killing the old man and the murder itself to say that his nuttiest moment was turning himself in unexpectedly.  Maybe Poe was right when he said there was cruelty and insanity inside all of us - just a little food for thought.

Darwinism, Superstition, Rockem Sockem Robots, and Masochism

No matter what we say our life goals are one of the unsaid missions of almost every human being is survival.  Sitting in a classroom or working in an office cubical, that doesn’t seem too difficult – but its stories like In the Heart of the Sea that show us real survival situations and what it can take to get through them.  For example, in a Criminal Minds episode called ‘North Mammon’, three high school girl soccer players are kidnapped and thrown into an unknown location together where they’re told only two of them will be allowed to live.  The three girls say they won’t choose, that since they’re friends they’ll hold out and refuse to kill each other, hoping someone will find them.  After a few days though, they realized there’s no way they’ll be found.  One of the girls is already ill, so the bossiest of the three tells the nicest they have to kill her for her own good so she’ll stop suffering and they can get home to their families.  In the end, the sick girl bashes her bossy ‘friend’ in the back of the head before she can kill her.  The weakest of the group somehow finds the strength to save her own life at any cost.  In my opinion, survival of the fittest just got its ass kicked.

When it comes to survival, I think the only thing standing in your way is yourself.  Morals are a concept of human creation.  We cling to them because they make us feel superior to animals and other ‘less civilized’ humans across the globe.  In class we discussed whether morals should be absolute and worth dying for.  Personally, I feel that I don’t have a single belief or moral in my body that would stop me from trying to stay alive in any way I could.  Morals are supposed to show us a way to live, not a way to keep us from surviving.  I’ve always seen morals as a way to guide our actions, like a compass meant to keep us from doing bad things like murdering people or cheating on our significant others.

Does this mean I think I would give in and be a cannibal if I was in a situation like the men on the Essex?  Hell no I would not.  I know we all say we wouldn’t know what we would or wouldn’t do until we were in that situation, but I know myself well enough to say I wouldn’t be able to eat another human being.  I would let myself starve to death before eating someone else, no matter how desperate I was.  When I asked my roommate, she said the exact same thing – so either we’re both deluding ourselves, or we’re actually really anti-cannibalism.  Scientifically, I’ve heard that eating the flesh of another human being will cause you to go mad.  I’m pretty sure that’s the last thing I would need if I was stranded and about to die.  Historically though, there are lots of instances of cannibalism for a variety of reasons.  For example, "some south American cannibals believed you could cure a limp by eating someone else's good leg" (Shaw 214)*.  "Aborigines in western Australia" used cannibalism as population control "by eating every tenth baby born" (Shaw 214).  To suvive after being captured by Allies, one German soldier who they "locked in an abandoned railroad truck" only "survived by eating portions of his left leg and drinking his own blood" (Shaw 216).  During a famine in 1201, Egyptians "survived by slaughtering and eating children" (Shaw 216).

One of the small things about In the Heart of the Sea that I latched onto was the importance in their society of omens and superstitions.  Several times in the book things were taken to be a “sign that something unusual was about to happen” such as comets, “an extraordinary sea animal” on the coast that was unknown to all, and “swarms of grasshoppers” (Philbrick 4, 27).  To us, I’m sure this seems crazy since we understand that science can back up and place all of these things in a realm that can be explained.  And yet, our society can be just as superstitious as the people living in Nantucket.  For example, how many people have been cautious on Friday the 13^th?  How many of us throw salt over our left shoulder if we spill it, refuse to walk under ladders, are careful not to break mirrors or don’t cross the path of a black cat?  Even thought they seem really little to us, they’re still superstitions, just like the ones the people of Nantucket feared shouted the ruin of the Essex.

The differences between Pollard and Chase in the novel were akin to me as the differences we drew a few classes ago about Boyer and Sanford, except they were fighting over a ship and not a lady.  For a start, Pollard starts off seeming unsure and a bit unorganized on the ship whereas Chase is experienced and quick to supersede the Captain to get things done.  For me, one of the most telling things about how the two characters operate was the telling of their histories.  Pollack’s father was a captain that “would make it difficult for Pollard, a first-time captain just emerging from the long shadow of a respected predecessor” find a way to do things, especially given his “first mate’s cocksure attitude” (Philbrick 31).  Chase’s reason for “his impatience to become a captain” wasn’t because he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps, but because “his father was a farmer on an island where seagoing men got all the glory” and thus was “fired with more than the usual amount of ambition” (Philbrick 30).  Chase for me was like Hercules in the Disney version – he wanted to go the distance and find where he belonged. 

This rift between the Captain and his first mate’s baser natures spells doom for the crew.  The first time this happens is when Pollard wanted to “return to Nantucket for repairs” but his first mate “disagreed” and “urged that they continue on” even though “the captain’s will was normally the law of the ship” (Philbrick 43).  Look at it like a video game:  Round one, Pollard vs. Chase.  Chase uses cocky and experienced attack combo – Pollard uses Indecision.  Chase totally kicked his ass – round, set, match.  If this was Rockem Sockem Robots, Pollard’s head would have popped off. 

One of the most interesting things I think we talked about in class about this book was about humanizing the whale, and why that could have terrified Chase so much that it haunted him.  One of the things that humans seem to think makes us superior to animals is that we can express emotions and think critically.  In the novel, the whale hits the ship in the place where it would do the most damage almost like it decided to attack and calculated how to do so.  As a whaler, that would be a terrifying thought – as a hunter if your prey starts hunting you you’ve got a major problem, especially if the prey is that much bigger and stronger than you.  As a whaler the last thing you want is a mafia whale with a hit list coming after you to avenge his brother whales.  I think Hannah said it best when she said it would be like “West Side Story for whales”.  For me, a humanistic whale would be like someone trying to kill Babar the Elephant.  One of things that I think makes it so much more socially acceptable to kill animals than it is to kill another person is because we don’t see animals on the same plain as us.  If suddenly we see whales on the same plain as us, then it would be just as morally wrong to kill a whale as a human being.  It wouldn’t be killing for profit or oil, it would be murder.  For someone like Chase, morals intact at this point, that must have been a horrible thought to have.

In a way, all of humanity is haunted by something or another.  That’s where I think insomnia comes from.  Whether or not you’re haunted by past mistakes, trauma, or just what you’re going to have to do tomorrow, everyone has things that weight on their mind or keeps them from sleeping.  Personally, I have insomnia because I can’t shut my mind down long enough to rest and fall asleep.  Sometimes I stress over decisions I’ve made that might affect my future, past mistakes I can’t change, my workload, being so far from my family, etc.

In ‘Fight Club’ Jack is being haunted, in my opinion, by the lack of things in his life worthy of haunting him.  His life is empty, so he tries to fill it with stuff and material possessions until he meets Tyler, who in a very Emersonian way believes possessions end up owning us.  In this way he tries to steer Jack away from the kind of consumer culture Jack has been buying into to fill his empty apartment and his life.  In this way, they remind me of Mark and Roger from RENT.  Jack is like Mark, void of the destructive identity people like Tyler and Roger possess, floundering around in his life while watching other people live theirs, Jack from an office cubical and self help groups, Mark from behind the camera lens.  I think the consumer point is driven home most in the song “What You Own.”  Along with hitting the consumer aspect of the two characters and how what you own owns you, there is also a line that says "I don't own emotionl/I rent" which I feel speaks to Jack and Tyler's emotional capabilities or lack there of:

In a way, Tyler is just as empty as Jack is (I prefer to think of them as separate people, even though I know they aren’t, in case you haven’t already noticed that).  In the scene in the parking lot, Tyler has Jack punch him so that he can FEEL something, to fill the void of numbness, and then hits Jack back.  Both of them see violence as a way to feel in a very masochistic way, enjoying and even reveling in this self-inflicted affliction or pain in their lives.  In a way, I can understand how they feel.  Sometimes in the midst of all the numb and the nothing, I need a little sharp pain to remind me I’m still breathing and going about my life, that I’m living it and not just a spectator in it.  For me, I’ve always thought about it as being like the song “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls:

Wasn’t that pretty?  Now let’s get down to business interpreting those lyrics!  I think the most poignant verse for this point is the second one: “And you can't fight the tears that ain't coming/Or the moment of truth in your lies/When everything feels like the movies/Yeah, you bleed just to know you're alive”:   This really reminds me of Jack and Tyler in the way that they seem to be null and void of most emotions unless they’re beating into each other or other people.  They need to bleed to know that they’re really living, to feel pain to feel anything else in their lives.  On the other end, they also seem to me to parallel the chorus: “And I don't want the world to see me/'Cause I don't think that they'd understand/When everything's made to be broken/I just want you to know who I am”.  Fight Club is hidden away from the majority of society that wouldn’t understand what people like Jack and Tyler need pain in their lives to really feel like they’re living.  Jack clings to Tyler to know what he really is and wants Tyler to know him for who he really is – that in the end he’s both himself and the fictious Tyler.  In this way, violence is self-help for these men and other like them.

*Quote from The Giant Bathroom Reader by Karl Shaw

Self Reliance and Obsession, They're Healthy Right?



How many of us have done everything we’ve been told to do by teachers, parents, or bosses?  I know I certainly haven’t done everything I’ve been told, and the abysmal state of my room at home is proof of all the times I’ve ignored my Mother telling me to clean it.  Still, there are doubtlessly many things we as part of a society conform to.  For example, how many of us live without things electricity, the internet, or cell phones?  It’s possible, and yet we’d all rather not.  In this way, we’re tied to what society sees as being normal.  I’ll admit, if I meet someone who doesn’t have texting or a cell phone, I’m really shocked, sort of like I used to shock people back when I didn’t have a Facebook.  When you’re that one person who doesn’t quite fit with the other puzzle pieces, it can be alienating, but at the same time it can be empowering.  I remember when I finally got a Facebook, I felt like I was giving in and just following peer pressure, even though I made it during a camp I was attending so I’d be able to keep in touch with the friends I made there.  For me, it was like becoming one of the girls in Stepford Wives, except without the sundress and the perfect hair.  I’d followed the crowd and conformed to what everyone else said was cool, no matter how hard I tried to justify it.

Emerson wanted what many people still want today, to break from society in their own way and live their life.  One of my favorite quotes from Self Reliance illustrates this: “My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle” (Emerson 81).  I feel like this was the main point of the entirety of Self Reliance for me and certainly what I took away from it.  Living your life apart from society entailed a certain amount of loneliness, a place where there was no one to show off for or hold you back.  In this way, relying on oneself was both a necessity and a luxury.  If you have no one watching you, then you can really do what you want to without worrying about being judged.  In a time when there are time that “the world whips you with its displeasure,” trying to “insist on yourself” and “never imitate” anyone else isn’t something that can be easily achieved (Emerson 82, 87, 87).  I feel that it must have been easier in Emerson’s time to rely wholly on oneself without ties to society he felt would hamper you.

The truth is, whether we want and strive to be self reliant or not, a lot of the world needs a hierarchy in order to function.  For a minute, try and think of people throughout history that lived outside society and relied on their wits or resources to survive as a subculture.  Did you think of pirates?  Because I certainly did. 

When I think of pirates, I think of men striving to be free without rules on the open ocean.  And yet the clip above shows that even some of the supposedly freest lawless characters I can think of had a code they lived by, and a hierarchy that goes along with it.  In the Court of the Brethren in Pirates of the Caribbean III At World’s End, in order to declare war on anyone, the pirate lords need to vote for someone to become the Pirate King.  In this way, the lawless pirates have to sacrifice their independence and power to a leader for the group as a whole to make a move to attack, following the rules and guidelines set down in the pirate code.

When Emerson was pursuing a life of independence from society, Captain Ahab was chasing a whale.  Moby Dick for me serves as a warning to humanity to be cautious of what we cling to, lest they become out entire purpose and identity.  Captain Ahab was, point blank, obsessed with a giant white whale.  If Dr. Freud were still alive, I’m sure he’d have a field day with what the symbolism of that meant, but since he isn’t, you’ll have to be content with my theories.  In class we discussed how the symbolism of the color of the whale being white had ties to white in animals being unnatural, and thus mystical.  The quest of Ahab to kill the whale was likened to conquistadors seeking treasure and to the Puritans hunting the witches they didn’t understand among other things.  I saw the whale as any and every addicting or obsession-worthy object or ideal on the planet, and Ahab and his crew as a warning against what our addictions and obsessions can do to us.  As an example, trying thinking of it like Lord of the Rings where the whale is the Ring and Ahab is Frodo.  Frodo becomes so involved in trying to destroy the Ring that it becomes his entire identity.  At the end of The Return of the King, lying on the edge of Mt. Doom with Sam, Frodo (this is paraphrased, since at this moment I can’t find a read online version and my copy is at home) tells Sam that he can’t remember his life before the ring or what his home even looks like.  In this way, the Ring became overpowering, his position as the ring bearer becoming his entire identity. 

Obsession has a way of overtaking us and taking control, like a heroin addiction.  No matter how dangerous or bad for us it is, we can’t break free, even if it’s wrong.  For example, Frollo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame comes to mind.  His sick attraction and obsession with the gypsy Esmeralda leads him to do horrible things including burn down half of Paris, throws loads of innocent gypsies in jail, and orders a family to be burnt alive.  The clip below illustrates his inner moral battle and obsession right before the breaking point when he starts to do real damaged to the town, and his decision to go to the ends of his resources to have her or see her burned.

Its one thing for Ahab to be obsessed with chasing a whale, but the fact that he got entire shipload of people to follow him in his obsession and to even feel it as their own is a whole other kettle of worms.  In the same way that people need a hierarchy to follow, they need leaders to give them ideas.  The sailors that worked for Ahab bought into his obsession, somewhat claiming it as their own.  In The Prestige, Cutter tells The Great Danton that obsession is a young man’s game.  I think the sailors in Moby Dick are a prime example of this.  Needing something to hold onto, something to strive for, they seek to bring down the whale along with Ahab, as much for glory as for the very need of having something to chase.

One of the ways Self Reliance and Moby Dick seemed to overlap for me was the idea of sheer loneliness.  When thinking of characters in books or movies, a lot of the villains seem to have two common attributes: they’re independence and able to support themselves without other people, they’re obsessed rather unhealthily with something or someone, and because of two they’re usually crazy lonely.  Take Jareth the Goblin King from The Labyrinth for example.  Even though he runs a kingdom and is a perfectly self sustaining ruler, he becomes obsessed with a young girl named Sarah because of he’s so lonely (even though he’s surrounded by a thousand or so goblins, whatever, apparently none of them count next to wanting a girlfriend).  Because of it, he loses everything, proving that obsessions can be horribly detrimental to continuing forward with one’s life, or you know, the ruling of one’s kingdom and continued magical life.