No Middle Name

 

Lee Child

There is just one thing that I have in common with Lee Child, the author of the Jack Reacher series. In the past three years I have been working my way through the series via library audiobooks, as audiobooks tends to be less of a page-turner, so to speak, than paper books. 

Yesterday I finally picked up a paper version of his short story collection "No Middle Name," published in 2017. The third story in the book, "High Heat," confirms my suspicion that Mr. Child, like me, has a particular fondness for people beating each other up with their bare hands. Certainly, there were plenty of guns in the Reacher series, and he devoted one full book ("Persuader") to the study of various guns. But description of hand-to-hand combats is salt to his books. There have to be multiple fight scenes in each book. 

In High Heat, he even devised a plot point to get rid of all the guns the bad guys may have, just to allow the 16-year-old Reacher to beat them all up. It's pretty clever, but a little far-fetched for organized crimes in New York City in 1977.

I have to imagine that Mr. Child's choice to put bare-knuckled fights into every book he writes reflects a real personal interest. (It must be difficult to avoid completely repeating oneself though.) Out of all the different types of violence on screen and on paper, I too most prefer this type of fighting scenes. Sure, the gun battles in John Wick are nicely choreographed and impressive, but they are inspired by unweaponed combat choreography too. There is an intimacy in these scenes that can better portray characters than any other types of fighting. The cold efficiency of guns offers less room for characterization and emotional, as well as visceral, impact. 

The Prophecy of Middlemarch

 

Some years ago I read Daniel Deronda on a whim. Two things, or rather two characters, in the novel left a lasting impression: the fervent Zionist Ezra Mordecai Cohen and Daniel Deronda's mother, a Jewish actress who gave her son up, so that she can continue her career on stage. More than anything, it tipped me off to the origin of Israel that predated WWII, even WWI. 

I have not even finished reading Middlemarch, but some elements really blew me away with its modern resonance. It was written in 1871 and depicted an earlier period around 1830, so I never dreamed that I would see so many concerns that I had thought belonged strictly in the 20th century, at least.  

First, one of the main characters, Dr. Lydgate, was a young physician trying to change the way medicine was practiced in the country. Not content with treating local patients for their common illnesses, his ambition was to do research and unravel the pathology of diseases. He had microscopes and experimental apparatuses at home and kept up with new scientific discoveries in the field from the Continent. 

Moreover, he broke from the traditional practice of selling medicinal products (mostly tinctures and potions back then), because he recognized it as a type of conflict of interest. Physicians were incentivized to give patients their own concoctions because they could make more money selling medicines than diagnosing and caring for patients. Who cares if the medicines were effective? 

Oh my God this is so modern. Neither concerns have been completely resolved in medicine today. We are still doing research and unraveling pathology of illnesses. We are still struggling with nudging physicians to do the ethical thing in the face of greed. Both remain front and center in medicine. 

A second main character, Mr. Will Ladislaw, has an even more contemporary profession: campaign manager! I have never, ever seen this profession mentioned in classic literature, until "All the King's Men", which was published in 1946 in the United States. Ladislaw not only wrote speeches and opinion pieces in the partisan newspaper for his boss, Mr. Brooke, he also devised campaign strategy for him and coached him in his campaign! 

Alas, poor Mr. Brooke liked to veer off script and blab to anyone "You have a point there." There is a hilarious campaign rally scene that could happen even today. At one point, Will and the doctor had an argument about whether a politician should be sincere and say what he believes in. The doctor, talking from a scientist's perspective, found Will's cynical approach of saying whatever to keep voters happy appalling. I almost fell out of the chair laughing.

I don't know why George Eliot was so much better at seeing the future than other novelists of the same period, but she seemed to have acute insights into social trends and political sentiment roiling underneath the surface. No, she was not writing about what is often called "universal and timeless human nature," whatever that means, but rather a prediction of the tides to come and wash us away in the new millennia. And she was spot on.  

Heat (1995)

I don't think anyone who has seen this movie could forget the bank robbery shootout scene. Living in LA during the 1990s, my memory of this heart-pounding scene was further solidified by a real-life shootout between 2 bank robbers and the police (the notorious North Hollywood shootout in February 1998) that eerily imitated the movie and was televised on network news.

Rewatching the movie 27 years later, I feel it's a real shame that Michael Mann has not been able to repeat his achievement in subsequent movies. The screenplay is extremely efficient and understated. The dialogs strive for a realistic feel on both sides of the law. None of the key information is repeated, so that the audience has to pay attention to understand the chain of events. Some plot elements are done so economically as to verge on underdevelopment --- including Natalie Portman's character and the character known as Waingro, who may or may not be a serial killer. There is a thin line between suggesting a larger world outside of the plot and tossing threads all over the place, and this movie has both. 

Nearly every action set piece in the movie is well done, including a brief one involving a failed money exchange between DeNiro's Neil and a crooked financier. Mann clearly attempted to make the action as realistic as possible with minimal soundtrack and naturalistic sound design. I say "nearly" because the final showdown between Neil and Pacino's Vincent is a disappointment, which did not improve on second viewing. After all the impeccable scenes previously, the chase and the conclusion seem too long and somewhat confusing. Can a person get from the hotel to the runways of LAX on foot? (Why is the hotel next door to LAX in the first place?) Where was the plane that was going to be Neil's escape? Where is the money? Without the money, does Neil really have a reason to get to the airport anyway? How far behind him was Vincent? (The scene has him either very far behind or very close.) If Mann intended the final chase to be anticlimactic and somewhat pathetic, I would be OK with that, but the intention is not clearly conveyed on screen. 

On second viewing, Pacino's performance is particularly jarring when he is surrounded by the understated and matter-of-fact approach from just about everyone. He really stood out like a sore thumb. According to reviews, it was apparently Mann's decision to make the character so ... flamboyant? aggressive? loud? unstable? I guess he wanted a stark contrast between DeNiro's internalized Neil and the half-crazed policeman for unexpected effects. However, everything about Vincent rings false. First and foremost, Pacino reeks of New York and does not fit into the Los Angeles surrounding at all. I know because I spent my formative years there. From his costume to his accent to the manners, Pacino seems to be in a totally different movie. In one scene, Vincent is standing in front of a kitchen sink full of dirty dishes, contemplating washing them, in his suit. Does he ever wash dishes? Does Mann? It looks so fake as to be almost laughable. It is baffling.  

Talk about baffling, it is both interesting and a little hilarious that Mann decided to give every male character a woman, except the financial guy and Waingro, who are apparently considered the lowest of the low. Every single one of the career criminals has a woman in his life. Neil falls hopelessly in love with Judging Amy (oops, that's what I remember Amy Brenneman from). At some point I was thinking that only the Hispanic guy played by Danny Trejo didn't have a woman to warm his bed, and then the movie immediately proved me wrong. So this must mean something. Mann did not stuff his movie with so many side characters for nothing. Heck, the camera even lingered on a woman in the arm of a policeman in one scene. 

Obviously Mann had something to say about the relationship of violent men (on both sides of the law) and the women in their lives. Throughout most of the movie, I thought the point was how delusional they are and how they are incapable of constructing a normal and sane life, as represented by women. But Amy Brenneman's character proves me wrong: Look, here is a woman living a normal life as a graphic designer, who is willing to give up everything to run off with this master criminal! I guess his message is, maybe, that no woman can resist the romanticism represented by violent men? I am not against this theme at all, but it contradicts 80% of the movie that comes before it ... 

Barry Lyndon (1975)

 

Finally, I have watched this movie. My interest was driven first by the music choices (Sarabande and Schubert's Piano Trio in E-flat) and then by some still photos of the cinematography.

In some ways, Kubrick's choices in "Barry Lyndon" remind me of "Tar". The characters' feelings and motivations are deliberately obscured. There are mentions of the main characters' cruelty and harm onto others, but there is also explicit effort to win sympathy for them, including one of the most manipulative devices --- tenderness toward young children.

As expected, the music is beautiful and haunting, the cinematography is stunning. Many a shot leaves me with an illusion of witnessing a scene through a time machine. Well, not quite. The scenes tend to be a little too clean and orderly to be realistic, especially the battlefield ones. Rather, they tend to mimic classical paintings of the era, which are a sanitized version of daily life of aristocracy. The renowned candle-lit scenes, supposedly shot with no artificial light, and the indoor scenes have an eerie quality that is both realistic and dream like. Technically, it is every bit as good as the critical acclaims. 

Nevertheless, something about Lady Lyndon bothered me. Every other characters is vividly drawn, including two other female characters and a dozen or so male characters. The only character that makes no sense whatsoever is Lady Lyndon. We see her son from her previous marriage complain about and fight with Barry over his depravity and greed that are ruining her, but she does nothing. In fact she barely speaks a line or two. Instead, we are treated with an occasional scene of Barry making love to her, on top of many scenes of his debauchery, and left with the impression that she is too in love with him to see his misconduct. We are supposed to believe that this conflict is entirely between the two men. 

Out of curiosity I looked up the source materials, Thackeray's novel The Memoir of Barry Lyndon and the real-life person, Andrew Stoney Bowes, on which the novel was based. So the funny (ironic, not haha) thing is that Stoney married a rich heiress, Lady Bowes, for her money through an elaborate scam (involving a duel), and inside the marriage he not only squandered her fortune but also psychologically and physically abused her for eight years. He beat her frequently and severely. After she finally escaped with the help of a maid, he sent some guys to track her down, who also beat her and threatened to rape and kill her. She was fortunately rescued and then initiated a long and arduous process of divorce and, despite his various efforts to smear her reputation, won back her freedom and what's left of her estate.

Well I suppose no one would ever think that Lady Bowes' story was thrilling, terrifying, dramatic, or heroic enough to turn into a novel or a movie. In Thackeray's novel, it is at least mentioned that Barry admitted to beating his wife (but only when he was drunk, according to himself). In the movie, however, that detail is entirely absent, as all abuse and confrontations are transferred between the stepfather and stepson. To me, it is comparable to narrating the adventure of a Japanese solider in China during WWII without mentioning that he had chopped off a few civilians' heads. I am not against humanizing anyone, even the worst, but excuse me for puking a little over here.

Andor and THX1138

When I watched the prison break episodes in "Andor", I felt there was something familiar about the set design but couldn't put my finger on it. Eventually, the buried memory surfaced. The all-white prison interior is almost certainly a conscious reference to THX1138, which was George Lucas' first feature film, released in 1971, before "American Graffiti" won him wide critical acclaim. Actually he made a short film THX1138 at USC and later expanded it to feature length, casting Robert Duvall in the lead role. 

Of course, THX1138 was hardly the first dystopian science fiction movie, and the influence of 1984, Brave New World, and the Cold War was unmistakable. Super original it was not. Nevertheless, the aesthetics was quite stunning.

Compare this visual style with the set of prison in Andor. 

The orange stripes are the only visual relief from the oppressive whiteness in this world. After all, this is a Disney series, not an experimental art film. 

The question of whether Tony Gilroy talked to Lucas before making Andor remains unanswered. It tickles me to death what the latter thinks of Andor, although I doubt he would comment publicly.  

Coincidentally (not!), THX1138 is, at least metaphorically, also a prison break movie. L.O.L.

Empire-related awkwardness: Avatar

 

The talk about just who the "evil empire" represents in Star Wars reminds me of another awkward example of imperialism and colonialism --- "Avatar" (2009). One may argue that James Cameron is a little bolder than George Lucas, because the baddies in this movie are obviously American military. However, Cameron's politics is far simpler than Lucas', as the former appears to believe that having a white savior, aka Dances with Wolves, join and lead the natives in their resistance is more than enough to absolve the character's affiliation with the colonialist army. 

The question is, does it work? Can the audience (the descendants of colonialists and beneficiaries of genocide) be relieved of any discomfort and self-examination by gleefully imagining oneself as the white male savior riding the dragon and bedding the pretty native girl? It seems to work for Cameron, who is perhaps more "left wing" (whatever that means) than Lucas but lacks the latter's self-awareness. Indeed, Cameron's left-wing tendencies were on full display in "Titanic," which was despised by a friend who grew up in the final days of USSR and me, who grew up under CCP. The movie's simpleminded familiarity made us laugh. 

Lucas was fully intentional in acknowledging the sins of the father and the darkness inherited by the son. This is why his sextet was so conflicted within itself. I often wonder whether this internal struggle contributed to the storytelling failure in the prequels. There was a sincere desire to demonstrate how the ideals (represented by the old Republic) descended into evil and perhaps to take some ownership in it, but his fear of being truly understood and rejected, maybe even hated, by the audience must have stopped him short. 

The things we do for love (ie, being loved).  

Andor and the Contradictions of Star Wars

 

The showrunner Tony Gilroy said he was not a fan of the Star Wars series. However, as one of the best script doctors in Hollywood, he got roped into fixing up "Rogue One" and subsequently was given the (I'm sure a lot of) money to do the spinoff series "Andor" for Disney's streaming business. 

Nevertheless, the relatively dark and menacing "Andor" series caused me to revisit the contradictions in the heart of George Lucas' original Star Wars series. Critics have commented that "Andor" is tonally different from the SW franchise and more "adult" in its depiction of war, police state, oppression, the prison-industrial complex, and revolution.  

For example, the torture scene is quite disturbing in "Andor", even though it is much less graphic than the scene in "The Last Jedi," but we should not forget that there was also one in A New Hope, in which Princess Leia was tortured by Darth Vader (who turned out to be her father, think about that symbolism for a moment) with no apparent effect afterward. (Yes, when they want to show an entity is evil and to induce sympathy and outrage, the go-to device is that they torture and rape/kill women. Everyone knows the trick.)

Another example of parallel plot is how a reluctant central character makes the decision to join the rebellion. Does anyone still remember the turning point of Luke Skywalker? The imperial troopers killed Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru. Similarly, it was only when his mother Maarva had died that Andor decided to stop running from his destiny. His father had been executed by the Empire years ago. Of course Maarva was not directly killed by the empire, but it was close enough. 

So my argument is that Gilroy was really trying to hew pretty close to the original SW, which is pretty dark and sinister if you look closely. And yet, the series also "disneyfied" itself from the start, making it palatable to the American mass audience. It was Lucas' conscious decision to make the deaths completely bloodless, when SW was financed by 20th Century Fox. Hell, the dead characters even come back as smiling, approving ghosts (a device cleverly echoed but not exactly endorsed in "Andor" with the holographic recording of Maarva).

This manipulation cannot be blamed on Disney's production of episodes 7 to 9, unless we consider the decades-long effect Disney had had on the American popular culture since it started to convert dark and vicious folktales into cute cartoons. I was struck, in "Attack of the Clones", how indifferent and meaningless the action scenes were, because the killing was enacted upon thousands and thousands of fleshless droids. There is no feeling, no stake, and nobody cares. But it was intentional to protect the audience from seeing any blood and real death.  

We should also consider the contradiction at the heart of SW. What is the empire an allegory for? Commentators and the public assume that the empire refers to the British Empire and the rebellion the American revolution --- All the imperial characters spoke with an English accent while the heroes spoke with an American accent, and that's no accident. Sometimes Lucas tacitly approved of this interpretation, but occasionally he said openly that ROTJ is an allegory of the Vietnam war, implying that the empire is the American one. Nevertheless, he took care not to be too loud about it. 

I gotta hand it to his sophisticated manipulation. George Lucas is the best case of "having his cake and eat it" that I have ever seen. This is how you do it, baby! We do not need to worry that the audience may recognize themselves in the evil empire (and some actually do so). Contrary to the logical awareness "Are we the baddies?", the human instinct shields people from such uncomfortable reflections, and everyone believes he is one of the good guys. Besides, Ronald Reagan told everyone who the evil empire was --- those guys over there! 

The Princess and the Queen

 

After finishing the first season of HBO's House of the Dragon, I hastily read the novella on which the series is based, "The Princess and the Queen", published in 2013. The novella is not that interesting, as this fake-history format barely provides any room for character development. The reader has zero opportunity to bond or identify with any character. Nevertheless, it is easy to see that GRRM has some degree of emotional investment in three characters: Prince Daemon, his final lover Nettles, and another bastard dragonrider named Addam. As for the rest of the aristocracy of the Targaryen court, he has shown very little sympathy for either the Greens or the Blacks. He is more interested in the random nature of history and how the average people are crushed regardless of who rules. The story might also be a sly ode to the surprising power of an angry and desperate populace, which is not something the American TV industry or culture is interested in, and I doubt the series will be able to do it justice in future season(s). 

The novella itself is not all that good, but I am glad I finally read it. Why? Because it is obviously the clue to the laughable dumpster fire that is the ending of the Game of Thrones series. In the last two seasons, without any ASOIAF materials to go on, the pathetic incompetence of Benioff and Weiss was on full display with various dead-end plot lines and out-of-character characters and stiff, trite, cringy dialogs and nonsensical twists to hastily wrap up the series. The worst choice was in the disintegration of Daenerys Targaryen's character and her demise. It's not that she could not, theoretically, become a megalomania and threat to civilization, but the way to get there is a prime example of how lazy, unimaginative, and dumb the writers are.

Regardless, it has now become clear to me that they did not even come up with that storyline with their own mind, which is not surprising. Nearly everything they had independently come up with was either stupid or nonsensical, or both. The only interesting ideas and twists in the series, some executed well and some poorly, came from GRRM. One could safely bet that Sansa's betrayal of Uncle Littlefinger came from GRRM, even if not done in the way shown on TV, while the death of the Night King at Arya's dagger did NOT come from GRRM. Now I can also safely bet that Daenerys' turn into a tyrannical idiot after her occupation of King's Landing also came from GRRM, except not from ASOIAF but instead from Rhaenyra. In addition, the writers took the idea of the scorpion, a dragon-slaying weapon akin to shoulder-launch missiles, from this and perhaps other related stories.

It is curious to observe that all the other 5 or 6 prequels in development were killed off by HBO, while the only 2 series that have received enough money to show up on our screens are both based on a single idea of a woman in power who is stupid and tyrannical and is severely punished for her folly. There is one remaining series in development, which centers on the most boring leads in the ASOIAF, Jon Snow. How very predictable.

Anyway, now that I am fairly confident that GRRM did not tell the bozos the full ending of the series, I have my own idea about how Daenerys came to her demise. As I previously pointed out, the final chapter of Book 5 in ASOIAF previewed the battle between her and the army of the Others. That is the end. She and the Others will perish together, bringing about the end of the winter and leading Westeros into a new cycle. Even The Princess and the Queen has demonstrated GRRM's fondness for mutual destruction. I don't think he can resist the elegant symmetry of such an ending.

Karma (Yoga Sutra Notes #2)

A while ago I wrote about how wars may come and go, but conflicts and hatred do not go away, and no one changes their mind, after watching an episode of La Guerra E Finita. After learning the original concept of karma, it appears that, again, the ancient Indians had thought about it before. Maybe they had thought about everything. 

I am not sure whether the common understanding of karma could be credited to the Buddhist definition of karma, ie, a moralistic understanding of good and bad, reward and punishment. Indeed, I have heard many times that one's suffering and misfortune in the current life is the result (or perhaps "payment") of having done wrong in the past life, like eating meat or harming people, while good fortune is a reward for having done good things in the past life, like being vegetarian. The idea is to encourage (?) people to do good in the current life to ensure a better life next time, lest one comes back as a worm or a donkey or something. 

But the definition of karma in the Yoga Sutras or the Sankya school of philosophy is apparently not so judgmental or ... shall we say, Pavlovian. According to the commentaries collected in the book, karma refers to the endless chain of events that is linked by consequence. One action leads to the next, and the next to the next, and on and on. The Indian mythology is less interested in the origin of everything, when and how the world was created (although there is no lack of origin myths there) than in the perpetuation of change and flutters. What we are doing now has an endless chain of cause and effect before and after us. One could argue, for example, that in 1787, the colonies failed to reach an agreement to abolish slavery or, perhaps more precisely, agreed to preserve slavery as a union, and that occurrence has created an endless chain of consequences that stretches into today and may never end ... until climate change redraws the world map, maybe.

This is a way of looking at any history, from macro to personal, as a continuum that extends beyond major historical events or one's own lifespan. The idea of reincarnation, or samsara, seems scientifically absurd, unless you view it as a metaphor to describe the continuity running through generations. Indeed, the action of one generation reverberates into the next generation, and the next generation into the next, and so on, vastly overwhelming the random de novo mutations. This is karma, and it is a much more accurate description of reality than the "big story"-based theory of humanity in time.

It seems to me that the episodic and event-based view of history (again, it could be either macro or personal) is easier to create and easier to digest for the vast majority of us near-sighted and feeble-minded average people. I don't know what it was about the ancient Indian thinkers that allowed them to come up with such astute and profound insight into the human existence. Maybe wisdom passed down from aliens? (I kid! I kid!)

Being educated in the feeble-minded non-Indian cultures, I have spent much energy and effort in my life to understand how and why we got to this place and where we originally came from (thanks, Jared Diamond!), as if understanding the series of logical links that make me who and where I am can free me from the chain (pun intended but all credits to the Indians) of karma. But the Indians were right: In the subjective experience of an individual, there is no beginning and no end, only a series of consequences within the limits of one life. The ripples of all the karma that led to my life are practically unknowable to me, and so are the ripples of all the karma I am generating, flowing into the future and beyond, mixed with countless other ripples.

The Yoga Sutras contains some vague advice about diminishing the effect of karma within this life and for the next life, such as eating vegetarian food and being nice, or you can devote your life to worshipping a god (but it didn't specify which one, Shiva? Vishnu? Parvati?), which are hardly as specific or didactic as the "donate money now or you come back as a fly" school of persuasion. Rather, the emphasis is on the practice of yoga. This practice of yoga, which Patanjali talks about over and over, is to recognize and experience how the body and mind, thoughts and feelings, the whole lot, is a shell, and even when you shed all of them, there still exists a white light of one's essence, a singular life force completely independent of the shell, that glows on its own energy. (Interestingly, Buddhism does not believe in purusa, but I don't know the details.) What does that mean? I have no idea, but I like it.

Tár: A Detail

 

It seems funny to me that many people, including some esteemed and highly experienced critics, consider Todd Field's intention for the movie to be a stand against the "cancel culture," a term now used almost exclusively by the right wing in the political and cultural power struggle to clobber the annoying rise of nontraditional factions in society. I suppose certain choices made by Field could cause this conception, although I do believe it is a misconception. 

This is a meticulously plotted movie with barely visible threads woven into a tapestry that often obscures the intention through mumbled dialogues, half-finished sentences, glimpses of email text, and scenes that cut away from accusations and depositions. Perhaps he is too clever for his own good, and it serves him right to be misunderstood. 

I am fairly certain I can tell where Field's sympathy lies. There are many little clues throughout the movie that consistently support my interpretation. But I will bring up just one detail that I have not seen anyone mention (not that I've read every review online) ---

This movie made the extraordinary choice of putting the film's supporting crew on the opening credits, while leaving the actors to the end credits. The list of names of gofers and assistants and hair and makeup people and stunt actors and drivers and accountants and marketing people went on for several minutes before the movie started, which is a prime location that is almost always reserved for only the stars and the important people: cinematographer, music, screenwriter, and director. I have NEVER seen any movie putting the support people first.  

In the background of the extraordinary opening credits, a song was played, and all the while I wondered what language it was. Spanish? French? No. It only became clear in the opening Q and A between Lydia Tar and Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker that this was the music of the indigenous people of Peru, which served as one of many stepping stones, or body ladders, that built her glowing career. 

Well, that seems to have gone over people's heads, who have probably also missed the face of an indigenous man in Lydia's dream, shown after the other more familiar faces of people who had been USED by Lydia.

Still don't get it? Consider the denouement of the movie, when Lydia is told by the Filipino boy in the boat that the reason why there are crocodiles so far up the river is the Americans. Many years ago, the film crew for that Marlon Brando movie (obviously referring to Apocalypse Now) put the crocodiles in the river, and now they can't swim in the water. Thanks a lot, you Imperialist shits. 

Yes, it's all intentional. None of it is an accident.

Everyone and his mother is throwing around the word "power" without any follow-up discussion in regards to this movie, as if they could actually recognize it when its manifestations hit them between the eyes. No, the movie is about exploitation, even if it is very coy about it. I wonder if Todd Field thinks it's funny to fool people into thinking he supports right-wing conservatives on the matter of poor canceled celebrities who have exploited many. Is this a joke to him?

Citta: The Brain (Yoga Sutras Notes #1)

 

In this book, Bryant translated and collected major commentaries and explanations of the famously brief and sometimes cryptic sutras by Patanjali. I especially find his approach of mixing certain Sanskrit keywords in the text to be instructive. In these instances, the non-interchangeability between Sanskrit concepts and their (supposedly) corresponding English words is palpable. Despite sharing the Indo-European roots, the non-translatability is probably due to the massive distance in time. 

It is hard to overstate the vast theoretical context behind the brevity of this manual. I am crawling my way through it slowly, and every few pages I am surprised by the deep insight into human psychology that was gleamed by the ancient Indian scholars and practitioners. I am in awe of these insights, not necessarily as a source of mysticism or exotic wisdom, but rather by the exhaustive and sophisticated examination of ... neurological patterns of the human mind. 

Take for example the concept of citta, which refers to an organ that provides three types of functions: buddhi (roughly translated as intelligence), ahankara (the sense of self, I-ness, ego), and manas (the part of the mind that performs thinking and sensory processing). 

Looking at these three components, one cannot help but be struck by their accuracy in describing some of the major activities of the brain. In the most basic aspect, it is now well established that one of the major functions of the brain is to centrally process and interpret the excitatory signals transmitted from the peripheral nerves (ie, manas), which allows humans to perceive and react to the environment. This neurological discovery in modern medical science was fairly recent and based on the anatomical exploration and understanding of the nervous system. The definition of buddhi, which emphasizes discernment and judgment, largely matches what is referred to as the executive function in neuroscience, which is carried out by the prefrontal cortex. 

Of course, I am by no means saying the ancient Indian theory of the brain is complete or comparable to modern neuroscience. Several other types of brain functions that we now know are not described in this theoretical system, such as the emotional and instinctive activities in the limbic system and the structure and activities related to learning and memory (the hippocampus and more). Their technologies and research framework did not allow the ancients to realize that major bodily functions, such as body temperature, breathing, and heart rate, are linked to the brain stem. Nevertheless, I am greatly impressed by how far they had gone using only direct and empirical observations of the mind. The power of their self observation is astounding and unparalleled. (Perhaps this is in some ways related to the pursuit of "detachment", but that's a topic for another day.) 

The examination of the sense of self is particularly fascinating and sophisticated. Recently I am intermittently reading a book by the German psychiatrist Fritz Simon, in which he explains how every concept is defined by what is inside versus outside a border (ie, what it is versus what it is not). It is a difficult and abstract concept that I have a hard time grasping and have never seen described in basic psychological theories. Yet the ancient Indians realized that the human mind (or what is now widely referred to as "consciousness", a fashionable and self-aggrandizing buzzword since the 2000s) is self-referential. 

Another eerily accurate insight is that the brain's existence is proven through its constant activities, defined as vrttis. The ancient Indians asserted that our endless thoughts, feelings, reactions, dreams, and spontaneous, internally generated sensations, are the manifestations of a physical organ that is alive and working. This insight alone outstrips Descartes by hundreds or a thousand years. The Indian philosophers explained it in an elegant analogy: Citta is the sea, and vrttis is the waves.

Fiction

In the year of 3001, Captain Gerald Clement set up an outpost in the Omega quadrant to monitor the only planet E118208 in the system RTM1921-14, where complex life forms had recently been discovered. The unmanned small space station faithfully orbited E118208, and the robots were able to recorded photos and data on the surface for many millennia. 

When the space station started its monitoring activities, there were at least two species that appeared to be sentient co-existing on the surface of E118208, which were named Nooton and Qadyl. They were approximately the same in body size and level of intelligence. Nootons looked somewhat like octopuses, and Qadyls looked like a little like lobsters. The number of each species on the planet was roughly equal. 

Naturally, it was surprising to humans that two intelligent species could co-exist in peace, unlike Homo sapiens and other hominids. Soon it became clear that these two species were highly dependent on each other for survival. Specifically, Nootons required a nutrient secreted by a fungus living inside the brain of Qadyls, which flows out of Qadyls' shell in the "neck" area, while Qadyls could not complete a reproductive cycle without eating one of a Nooton's eight tentacles. 

The consumption did not kill the organism, unless someone suddenly became gripped with greedy madness and bit off a Qadyl's head or all eight limbs of a Nooton. This would only happen if one species greatly outnumber the other, causing an imbalance in the nutrition supply and widespread hunger. As both species were intelligent, they carefully controlled their appetite and maintained a comfortable equilibrium in numbers to prevent decimating each other and, consequently, their own demise.

It should be noted that both species primarily ate other organisms on the planet for energy. What they needed from each other were certain essential nutritional elements that they could not make in their own bodies or obtain from other organisms. Both species probably co-evolved for millions of years to reach the current state of symbiosis. 

Humans followed the data transmitted from E118208 for a few hundred years. Some research papers were published, but the field remained small. Because neither Nootons nor Qadyls developed space travel technology to pose a threat to humanity, interest in the planet cooled off and monitoring became a low priority, leaving the robots to do the boring work year after year. 

This changed when war broke out among human colonies in the neighboring Psi quadrant. A lone vessel escaped the battlefield, carrying a platoon of surviving soldiers, and landed on E118208. Even though the condition was far from ideal, these humans tried to set up a colony, or at least a temporary shelter, on the planet to wait out the war. As the number of humans increased through reproduction and the colony expanded, both Nootons and Qadyls felt threatened and began attacking humans. The conflicts lasted over a century, and all three species suffered heavy losses. 

When one clan of Qadyl fighters finally invaded the center of the human settlement, they were exposed to a large dose of radiation from the human spaceship. In the post-human years, the subsequent generations of these Qadyls grew bigger and sharper claws. Over time, these mutant Qadyls with improved "bioweapons" out-completed all other clans of wildtype Qadyls. Through crossbreeding and competition, after only a few generations, nearly all Qadyls on the planet had big and sharp claws. Nevertheless, they still all needed Nooton tentacles.

Perhaps it was the war with humans or fierce competition within its own species, this new breed of Qadyls tasted the fruits of increasing aggression and sought to produce ever more offspring. To achieve this, more Nootons were needed, so Qadyls began to domesticate Nootons. They capture Nootons from the wild, confined them in small farms, and bred as many as possible. They would chop off all but one of a Nooton's tentacles to maximize the efficiency of production. As Nootons were as intelligent as Qadyls, they were given treatments to keep them docile and content. Wild Nootons disappeared rapidly to the verge of extinction, as those who refused to be domesticated were killed. 

To increase the number of Nootons on the farms, Qadyl scientists developed a technology to grow their brain fungus in nutritional solutions, making it more convenient to support the Noonton population growth, which in turn led to Qadyl population growth. This went on for another thousand years. 

One of the last few Nooton clans in the wild realized that the key to Qadyls' dominance came from the aliens that briefly invaded the planet. So they found the spaceship, now buried and forgotten, and dug out the engine, which still contained radioactive fuel. The Nootons took the material home and exposed as many among themselves as possible. Some Nootons died, but some mutants emerged, who could produce a chemical in one or more of their tentacles that is deadly to Qadyls but harmless to themselves. The Nootons kept this development secret for several generations and devoted all their resources to breeding these mutants and training them for combat, until the mutant Nootons were so numerous that they could no longer hide from Qadyls. 

In the war between Nootons and Qadyls, the Nootons suffered heavy losses but eventually won. They liberated all the domesticated Nootons. Nooton scientists carefully selected individuals carrying the mutant genes to mate with those previously domesticated, while those without the mutant genes were not allowed to produce offspring. Within a few generations, almost all Nootons were now carrying a deadly weapon against Qadyls. 

Even the mutant Nootons continued to need the essential nutrient from Qadyls. However, the Qadyl technology made it easier to grow large quantity of the fungus. Now Nootons only have to keep a few Qadyls around to maintain the source and quality of the fungus supply. Taking to heart the lessons of the past millennium, Nootons decided not to domesticate Qadyls. Instead, they maintained a low number of Qadyls living freely in the wild, their numbers only a fraction of that of Nootons, so that Qadyls would never become a threat again. The two species still needed each other to stay alive, for now. 

In the year 4001, Captain Hilda Chu arrived at the long-forgotten space station and discovered the extraordinary history in the records. 

The Gaze

 

Today I saw some discussion on action movie twitter about Tiger Shroff (pictured above). But I have not seen any of his action movies and am not going to talk about him. Rather, I have been puzzled for a few years now as to why Bollywood is rapidly filling up with ever-more-perfectly muscled male stars. 

Sure, Bollywood (and Hollywood, and profit-driven cinema in any country) has always been full of very beautiful women. The male gaze blah blah blah. The standard for male beauty was always pretty lax. Even the unquestionable No. 1 leading man of the past generation, Shah Rukh Khan, hardly looked like a magazine model at his peak. I am sure Indian cinema had no shortage of heartthrobs back in the day, but the average level of looks alone among male leads was way lower than female leads. 

Something started to change in the 2000s. When I saw Lagaan in 2001, Aamir Khan looked more buff than an average guy, but still within normal range, but 13 years later in PK the older Aamir had even bigger muscles. There was a wave sweeping through Mumbai, apparently, that was forcing every actor, even the big-name ones, to bulk up to ever higher levels of physical appearance. 

Akshay Kumar, himself a martial arts practitioner, once said that he and another actor were the only two guys in Bollywood who had not used steroids. I believe him. I am not categorically against anabolic steroid use, particularly when it is a necessity for one's livelihood. Who am I to judge? But I am extremely curious about the forces behind this phenomenon. Who are they building the muscles for? The female gaze? Or another manifestation of the male gaze? Or both? (In the US context, excessive body-building has a rather ambiguous meaning of both hypermasculinity and homoeroticism, which might not be mutually exclusive.)

I always suspect that Indian popular culture has the instinct to appeal to the most massive of the masses. So it is fascinating to wonder what this trend says about the masses and the time. Whose gaze are these muscle men appealing to? 

The Naples Quartet: Unused Intelligence

Throughout the quartet, Lenu often lamented the waste of Lila's intelligence. Lila did not receive any education beyond the fifth grade, a fact she often brought up in adulthood. Lila read voraciously god-knows-what without telling anyone, including Lenu. At various times, Lenu felt as if Lila was speaking through her (Lenu's) writing by inspiring ideas and firing imagination. As the highest praise of Lila's intelligence and creativity, Lenu constantly worried about being proven an inferior writer, should Lila's own writing be discovered by the world. 

Well, Lila never shared her writing with the world and very little with Lenu. Consequently, her intelligence was considered wasted and discarded in Lenu's eyes. This argument invites a fundamental question: How do we live with unused (i.e., wasted) talent?

Sure, we all immediately agree that it is a bad thing, a sad thing, proof of the oppression and erasure of women. It is all true and correct, which does not preclude one to think about the flip side: Can it also be a natural and honest choice to throw away one's intelligence or not make use of it? 

For someone like Lenu, who represents many of us, it is unthinkable. It is largely because she herself attained nearly all of her life goals through rigorously using every bit of her intelligence, tenacity, strength of will, and people skills. Being smart and hardworking led to good grades; good grades were the currency to win professors' approval and assistance, which in turn sent her to high school and college. Using her talent and mind, she made a living as a novelist and journalist. Everything can be made use of in service of her advancement. Most of all, she had thoroughly mined the history and events of the neighborhood in her novels, which brought her money, fame, and access.

Lila held the opposite view and repeatedly begged Lenu not to write about the neighborhood, its people, and especially Lila herself and Tina. Lenu did not understand this attitude at all and repeatedly agreed and then violated her agreement. One exception to Lila's aversion to publicity is the Solaras. The only time Lila collaborated with Lenu was the articles they wrote to expose the Solara criminal organization, with the hope of sending the Solara brothers to jail. Beyond this, Lila had no interest whatsoever in making use of her story and turn it into accolades, admiration, or profit. 

So, then, what is intelligence for, if one does not convert it to tangible benefits? I must admit I had never thought about it until I read the novels. 

Of course, Lila did not throw her talent away completely. Initially, she used her shoe designs to win investment in a shoe factory for her father and brother. Then she used her interior design of the shoe store to facilitate her affair with Nino. Later, she used her intelligence to help Enzo begin a new career in computers. Subsequently, she made plenty of money from her computer programming skills, not to mention becoming Michele's chief computer engineer. But Lenu still did not understand, because Lila did not want to write, to share herself, with the world. After the enormous loss of Tina, she stopped working, and her insatiable energy and curiosity turned toward understanding the context of her personal tragedy, i.e., the tragedy of Napoli itself, but still she was not interested in sharing any of this with anyone, nor did she want to exchange it for anything, nor did she want to contribute to the progress of society. 

I cannot help but recall my twenties and thirties, when I struggled with the motive and purpose of writing stories and stuff outside of work (where I was and still am paid to write), none of which were published. If I had zero desire to be seen by other people, I would have written nothing. No matter how conflicted I was about being read and understood and liked, the secret desire was always there. As I grew more cynical about human capacity to understand each other and lost some of the need to be understood, the urge diminished and dissipated. But still I don't think I could reach the self-contained satisfaction of using my mind for my own satisfaction alone, with absolutely no intention to be seen and validated --- or just reflected back --- by another person.

Lenu's pride and urge to write and be published and be read are easy to understand. She wanted to leave something behind, proof of her existence and a temporary escape from mortality. In other people's eyes we confirm our own solid existence. Lila represents the opposite, which I have to admit is rare to see in this world but not entirely incomprehensible. Nearly everything in this world is wasted in reality. People's talent and abilities come to nothing all the time. Even the corporations and individuals who earn millions and billions of dollars every year, can we really say they have contributed to human progress at all? How many of their products end up on landfills eventually? How many of them make life worse rather than better? 

Indeed, what if intelligence is wasted? What if it does not produce anything? Not money, not fame, not status, not admiration, not even showing off. It stands alone, all by itself, comes and goes, breathes and lives and dies. So what? So the fuck what?

The Story of the Lost Child

 

The large majority of this novel, minus the final third, has a very clear arc. With a series of unfolding events, we watch Lenu gradually drawn back to the neighborhood, as if led by irresistible fate, or was it her own unconscious desire? 

Nino appeared once again out of the blue and triggered the destruction of the already-wobbly marriage between Lenu and Pietro. Lenu resisted going to Napoli to be near Nino for as long as she could, finding refuge with Mariarosa Airota and her current boyfriend (Lenu's old one) Franco. Things fell apart with Franco's death. The invisible hand pushed Lenu to Napoli. But still she resisted the call of the neighborhood for more than two years, living in an apartment in the affluent area, rented by Nino, and continuing her journalistic work. Thus, she could pretend that she was not circling closer and closer to ... home. 

As sure as gravity, her orbit crossed with old friends and familiar faces. Alfonso, Carmen, then Lila ... Once Lila appeared in her life, Lenu's homecoming was inevitable. She held out for a little longer, until Nino's double life was revealed, and then his multiple lives surfaced. Meanwhile, Lenu's mother was dying. The journey home was so long and meandering that we hardly realized how insistent and inescapable it always was, but every change in her life pulled her closer to Lila and the neighborhood. Finally, she ended up in the apartment right above Lila's. Welcome home.

Throughout the slow and unconscious journey, Lenu continued her lifelong pattern of projecting her own unconscious motivations onto Lila. She constantly suspected that Lila was plotting to drag her back into the neighborhood and use her in Lila's own struggle against the Solaras, even when it was transparent to the reader that she was fighting with her own desire to go home. Such psychological insight is almost unexpected in an otherwise brutally candid first-person narrative, but we all know how everyone deceives herself all the time. We are all unreliable narrators, first and foremost to ourselves. 

For the final third of the novel, however, we are shown the flip side of homecoming. Lenu would never completely belong to the neighborhood like Lila did, because she had left and built half of her identity in Pisa and Florence, with Adele and Pietro and the editors and publishers and academics. The non-Napoli part of herself was as deep and authentic as her Napoli part. In other words, one could go back, but one could never truly be back. The irreversible force is, of course, time.  

Lenu stayed in the neighborhood for more than ten years, in part to protect and comfort Lila in her grief after the loss of Tina, and in part to further her own literary career. Eventually, she left again. Perhaps she finally accepted the reality that she could not entirely fit in Napoli or the neighborhood. No amount of physical attachment can change the mixture in her identity. In the new era, she was as much a stranger in Napoli as she was in Milan or Turin.

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After reading about Elena Ferrante's essays mentioning her admiration for Stanislaw Lem, I can't help but wonder how much Lem influenced her. One of the themes in Solaris is the unknowability of an alien entity, which lately I often compare to the unknowability of other people's mind. Humans do talked to each other and can know a little about each other, but the vast majority of our hearts and minds remain outside of each other's understanding.

In the last book of the quartet, more than any of the previous novels, we are reminded how little we know each other, even our best friends. Lila's actions as well as thoughts and intentions were always just outside of the edges of Lenu's view (one should note that it is by design). From the bits of clues and hints dropped here and there, the reader can piece together a thread of events with a heavy dose of conjecture. Lila's shocking decision to go work for Michele Solara in the previous novel was not some kind of capitulation to money or prestige. She gathered a massive amount of evidence and data on the Solara criminal enterprise, hoping to send them to jail one day. That effort failed because the criminals were rich, powerful, and deeply connected with other powerful networks throughout the political and economic landscape, above and under ground (or as the Chinese say, 黑道白道).  (Sidenote: What a surprisingly relevant observation in current events in a totally different country!) The law could not touch them. For a while, Lila led a peaceful (on the surface at least) but fierce battle with the Solaras and gained an upper hand in the neighborhood. At some point, Pasquale assassinated the matriarch of the Solara family and caused massive chaos. Then the Solara brothers fought back and killed Alfonso, one of Lila's foot soldiers, and regained the upper hand. They were likely responsible for the abduction of Tina, for which Pasquale exacted revenge by killing them. Lila and Pasquale were tragic heroes that fought with the Solara family for years, perhaps decades, and paid a heavy price. 

But that's an entirely different story, one that the author chose not to tell directly. Everything explicit in that story is left out of this one, leaving the reader with nothing but hearsay and innuendo. Perhaps such a story could not be told without a feeling of sensationalism, or perhaps the author does not want to erase the fantastical impression by giving it the full treatment. Either way, it does not belong in this novel.

--------

The disappearance of a child, in particular, a daughter, is obviously of great symbolic meaning to Ferrante, who wrote another novel, The Lost Daughter. There are many possible interpretations of this cataclysmic event in the quartet. In some ways, this is the beginning of Lila's disintegration. If we view Tina as a part of Lila (in a way all children are or used to be a part of their mothers), then her disappearance is a concrete loss of her body and self. In her enormous grief, she discarded her work and connections to the community and her battle for its soul. I see her subsequent wandering in time and space around Napoli as her way of scattering herself around the city, melting and dissolving into the city from which she was never able to leave, perhaps taking possession of it. 

Once could also interpret Tina's kidnapping and probable murder as the patriarchy's violence to erase women, especially on those who refuse to erase themselves. Perhaps the loss of a child is the loss of hope and possibilities. In a city that is old and tired, typified by but not limited to Napoli, the loss of children or youthfulness reflects the calcification of culture and mind, leaving only an ever-shrinking path toward change and progress. The old order would rather go down the road of decay and death than loosing its grip on power for a terrifying new order. This fits with a general sense of lost opportunities since the social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, as the entire world reverted to its relentless conservativism and capitalism for the next half century. For a moment there was a glimmer of hope (or illusion?) of real historical change, but it was quickly snuffed out by the power that be.

Krishna's Practical Amorality (Mahabharata notes #19)

In an article by Hriput Namu Tara that analyzes the morally ambiguous role of Krishna in Mahabharata, the end struck me as particularly poignant: 

Ultimately, the poetic language of the Mahabharata takes us to the threshold, but not the heart of experience. Words, no matter how eloquent, cannot replace experience ... Krishna's ineffable nature, paradoxical and mysterious, cannot but be understood through perhaps a journey that goes beyond any acquired erudite knowledge.

The subject of the article is the age-old debate of Krishna's tricks and deceptions and apparent lack of impartiality in the central conflicts in Mahabharata. He openly proclaims that he sides with the Pandavas and would do anything to help them defeat the Kauravas. Although he does not directly involve himself in the actions, his advice is crucial to the outcome of the war. At each turning point in favor of Arjuna, Yudhishthira, or Bhima, when each of them commits an act against the kshatriya code to beat their equally mighty rival, the story puts the responsibility squarely on Krishna's shoulder. When Arjuna kills Karna when the latter was pulling his chariot wheels from the mud, when Yudhishthira tells the first lie in his life to cause the death of Drona, when Bhima slams his mace into Duryodhana's thigh, the poems says, it is because Lord Krishna tells them to. 

These plot points are sufficient for many readers and scholars to question the divinity or the moral validity of both the Pandavas and Krishna for as long as Mahabharata is in circulation. Nevertheless, plenty and more people continue to exalt the Bhagavad Gita as the ultimate guidance for behavior and dharma and Krishna as the ultimate figure of worship. People continue to feel both disturbed by all the rule-breaking and dishonorable choices attributed to Krishna in the story and compelled by the feeling that he is right --- that his example and advice are truer and more human than any moral education we have be infused with since childhood. 

In some ways, Krishna's cunning, practicality, and attitude remind me of the Old Testament God. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Except Krishna is in no way straightforward. As much as the Pandavas win the war and crown, they are left with fates hardly better than the defeated and dead enemies (in some sense, one could argue that victory is worse than defeat). Krishna himself is cursed, and he does eventually pay the price of a painful and lonely death. The moral ambiguity is sophisticated beyond any religion or mythology that I am aware of, perhaps even beyond Greek philosophy. I have seen a lot of Indian scholars use the word "subtle" to describe the theology of Krishna in Mahabharata. I don't know exactly what they mean, but I would compare it to a warm and glowing ball of hot air hanging in space, emitting powerful electromagnetic rays, defying description and interpretation by words. 

In our well socialized brain, all those tricks, deceptions, and "by any means necessary" practicality (to quote Malcolm X) do not bring us certainty or comfort, but we cannot deny the truth, built upon lived experience. The shock of reading Mahabharata comes, perhaps, from its fundamental difference from all other religions --- we are so used to the routine that we do not question their prescriptive nature, regardless of whether we believe in them or not. In fact, the prescriptive nature of conventional religions is illustrated in Yudhishthira's representation of dharma (never lying is included in his paradigm). Thus, the point-counterpoint debate between Krishna and the Dharma King is but one example of the internal contradictions and co-existence in Mahabharata, where everything is included.

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

 

A few weeks ago, a debate raged on the twitter-verse over a question of hospitality: Is it strange/cold/unthinkable that a visiting kid/playmate would not be fed by the host family? Some cultures (for example, Middle Eastern countries) are perhaps excessively fond of sharing food with everyone including strangers, while in other cultures (for example, Sweden) people keep enough distance from others so as to spare them of the sense of obligation and indebtedness. There is no right or wrong, and I was only amused by the various expressions of outrage and shock making the rounds online. Because I understand both sides of the argument, growing up in a culture where relationships and kindness are used as a currency and a lubricant in daily life. More often than not, the rule of the transactions puzzled me and made me feel like a failure. Such a culture is certainly not easy on introverts. 

As I am re-reading the third book in the Neapolitan series, the idea of people using people keeps returning to my mind. Never have I read an English language novel in which the subtle transactions in relationships are described so densely and pervasively. Putting aside the undefinable and entangled transactions in families, we are introduced to a huge variety of interpersonal uses. A rich example is how Lenu used her newfound connections to the prominent and well-connected in-laws, the Airota family, to help her exhausted and defeated friend in her lowest point. The Airota family referred Lenu to the editor of l'Unita to publish an expose, to a famous cardiologist to conduct a free examination on Lila, and to a lawyer who forced Lila's boss to cough up the salary he had owed her. At each stop, Lenu was reminded not so subtly that she was using her in-laws' intangible credits in society. A person with highly sensitive social antennae and adaptability, Lenu navigated the referrals with confidence and competence at a young age. In other words, she used her in-laws and their friends in the best way one can and reaped the rewards without depleting the intangible account of social favors. 

Indirectly, Lila was using Lenu in the process, but Lenu instinctively remembered the emotional debt she had owed Lila and how she had used Lila just a few years ago, when Lila bought her textbooks using Stefano's money and let her study in her house, bought by Stefano, not to mention the inspiration she drew from Lila's childish book, The Blue Fairy, for her own successful debut novel. One may recall how Lila casually took money from the store cashier and gave it liberally to her friends, when she was working there as Stefano's wife. It can be interpreted as Lila using Stefano, or perhaps she perceived it as a debt owed to her because Stefano abused and controlled her in their marriage. Ah, the intricate web of the invisible currency passed between one person and the other. It defines a fundamental part of human relationships, but only the Italians can be so acutely aware of it.

Lila's stint at the sausage factory also illustrates the ways people used her. Pasquale and his comrade used her to advance their union-organizing activities against the boss Soccavo. At one point, they even used Lila's first-hand report of working conditions without her consent. When she quit her job, Pasquale was quite unsatisfied with the abrupt end of her contribution to his cause. In parallel, Lila and Enzo used each other and became emotionally dependent on each other, despite the lack of sexual gratification (yet), and enriched each other's life. 

When there is love and reciprocity between two people, the flow of favors and use is free and easy and voluntary, like the relationships between Lila and Lenu, and Lila and Enzo. When it is primarily driven by greed and narcissism, such transactions become dark very quickly. When Lenu visited Gigliola at her super luxurious apartment in Posillipo with an astounding view, it quickly came out that Gigliola paid dearly for her long relationship with Michele Solara, even though she had probably thought that she had made a great bargain in the beginning. She used Michele to gain an upper class status and lifestyle, along with constant neglect and insults.

Michele may be the ultimate user of people among them all. Gigliola described his usual way of using over a hundred women, "to feel them under him, to turn them over, to turn them again, open them up, break them, step on them, and crush them." As Lila held a special place in the heart of this psychopath, she was the only woman he did not want to treat the same way as he did the others. Instead, he "wanted the subtlety of her mind with all its ideas. He wanted her imagination. And he wanted her without ruining her, to make her last." Reading this passage, it suddenly became clear to me that Michele's obsession with Lila's creativity, intellect, and imagination was rooted in his own hollowness and his awareness of this hollowness. So he wanted to possess her and use her and fill up the hole inside himself with her special talent.

In the two cultures with which I am most intimately familiar, sexual desire and the desire for power are so inextricably entangled that there is often no distinction. There are countless women's fantasies in which a man like Michele is the ultimate object of women's desire, in the hopes of rubbing off some of his raw dominance. Yet the author had no such illusions. Even Gigliola was unable to fool herself into enjoying her status as Michele's wife, not to mention Lila's unwavering contempt and hatred toward the Solaras. This is one of the criticisms I've heard about the novels: There is so little self-deception and self-repression in all of these characters. Their instincts are so strong and direct that we the readers are also forced to lay bare our own crudest and truest emotions and motives. There is nowhere to hide from ourselves.

The Prodigal Son (1981)

 

I only recently came upon the anecdote that, according to Sammo Hung's own recollection, when he, Jackie Chan, and their "little brother" Yuen Biao came out of a Bruce Lee movie in theater, he was the only one who was thoroughly won over by Lee's style. "It's brutal," he said, "This will take over the world." The other two guys were not as impressed. Sammo and Jackie went on to build their own stunt teams and glorious careers that revolutionized kung fu movie choreography. True to their youthful inclinations, Jackie's style remained joyful and humorous and very rarely bloody (except when he starred in a Sammo Hung movie), while Sammo became the most vicious choreographer of on-screen fighting since Bruce Lee. 

Years before I heard about Lee's influence on Sammo, it was evidence that Sammo's approach to choreography is more brutal and terrifying than anyone else's in Hong Kong cinema, even though he originated from the same Peking opera tradition of stage fighting and acrobatics as Jackie and Yuen Woo-Ping. He got into a lot of street fights since boyhood, which might be another reason he identified with Lee. He might not be as vocal about the real-world applications of kung fu as Lee was, but in "The Prodigal Son," one of his early masterpieces, he inserted some very practical advice of his own: When your opponent is down, follow through and kick him on the ground. If he is injured, keep hitting his injury so that it hurts more. Use any weapon at your disposal, like headbutts and aiming for his groin. 

Ostensibly the movie is an introduction to the Wing Chun style of martial arts, yet it is full of Sammo's signature hilarity and tragedy and absurdity. The Cantonese opera scenes recall the original profession of Sammo and his good friend and costar Lam Ching-Ying (not sure why he shaved his brows for the role, but it was certainly a distinctive look). One has to suspect that the bantering and jabbing on screen between these two guys was a carbon copy of their real-life relationship. The familiar yet discordant flashes of tragedy in the movie lack Chang Cheh's fatalism and instead suggest an undertone of unexpected melancholy. The trend of irreverent sifu-student stories of the late 1970s and early 80s is reflected here, except Sammo brought out a charming authenticity in the relationships between Yuen Biao and Lam, Lam and Sammo himself, and even Biao and his servant boy.

Also rather unusual for the time is the murky morality in the movie. The main bad guy, played by the Renaissance man Frankie Chan, is not that bad after all. He is a mirror image of Biao's character, both precious prodigal sons being over protected by their wealthy or powerful parents. They have grown up in a false sense of their own excellence, only to be taught a lesson by the brutal world. Thus, despite the practical lesson of fight to kill, Biao chooses not to kill Frankie in the end, unlike most movies in the genre at that time.

While full of highlights, the final showdown is not my favorite fight in the movie. The first exchange between Lam and Frankie gives me a cold sweat. It's not just the speed and intricacy of both actors' movement but also the sense of impact when their hands and bodies connect that suggests the possibility of an instant kill. 

Sammo went on to direct more vicious fight scenes in movies that are entirely different from Bruce Lee's but nevertheless evoke a similar sense of lethality. 

The Story of a New Name (2)

From around Chapter 40 to Chapter 75, the author constructed a self-contained story that took place on the beach of Ischia, where Lila, Lenu, Nino, and, initially, Pinuccia and Bruno Saccovo spent a massive amount of time together. This takes up approximately one third of the book and is constructed like a novella within a novel. The location is limited almost entirely to the beach, away from the neighborhood with a large cast of characters who are always minding each other's business, and only 3 to 5 young people with raging hormones are hanging out at any given time. The confined setting intensifies the relationships and conflicts among them. More important, this story has its own arc of beginning, development, climax, and resolution. But don't worry, the larger novel also has its own arc, and an even more explosive climax comes after the story in the middle. 

It puzzled me for days why this segment has to take up so much space. Lila and Nino fell in love slowly. The girls spent the early days listening to Nino's endless political babbling. There were many ups and downs, hesitant touches, and half-hearted denials. The month on the beach seemed so monotonous, so interminable, as if time had stopped and the summer would never end. Only by Chapter 85 (after the end of the vacation) did I realize how massive Lila's choice to leave her husband for Nino was and why it had to take so long: In an insulated working class neighborhood in 1960s Naples, no one, absolutely no one, had even thought of divorce. A more likely scenario would have been murder (ie, divorce, the Italian style).

Even so, every reader knows, from the last chapter of the previous book, that Lila's marriage to Stefano could not last. It ended before it even started. Lila confessed to Lenu that she had felt numb and on the verge of (spiritual) death in her marriage. But she was only 17 and the most vigorously alive person in the neighborhood. If Lila were to submit to the social norms of the neighborhood, she would have to become another Gigliola or Pinuccia and kill her indomitable spirit. Well, that's not going to happen. So the marriage is doomed. Nevertheless, how to get there without making her look anachronistic or unrealistic could have been a real problem. A young woman of her time and background needed an enormous amount of drive to overcome not only her environment but her own conscience. Thus comes a catalyst to give her a reason to do what she had to do, sooner or later. The love affair with Nino became the impetus for Lila to finally leave Stefano, but the process has to be meticulously and convincingly laid out, at least for Italian readers.

It seems a little reductive to call Nino "a catalyst," but that is more or less the function of this character throughout the quartet --- not that the passions and suffering felt by all three characters were any less palpable or sincere.

For many years, the idea of people using people was taboo to me. It seems so despicable that I was afraid of even thinking about it. However, psychotherapy changed that and helped me see how people never stop using each other, often unconsciously and sometimes constructively. Relationship is not a zero-sum game. A person may not lose anything by being used, and both the user and the used may come out with more than they have had. People who love each other especially use each other all the time and both sides can derive pleasure from it.

A closer look reveals more patterns of characters using each other. When Lila first hired Lenu to accompany her on the beach vacation with a health-related purpose, Lenu agreed on the condition that they go to Ischia instead of another beach town, so that she could be close to Nino, because she knew he would be in the nearby city Forio. Here Lenu used Lila. Then Lila used Lenu's friendship with Nino to become close to Nino, which triggered everything that followed. While Lenu felt used and angry, she was spurred by her disappointment in Nino and Lila to pursue higher education at the free university in Pisa. Before this turn of events, Lenu had always been ambivalent about her future: to stay or to go away, to become just like her mother or to forever escape the same fate. After that, she no longer had any doubt. Unconsciously, Lila's escape brought about Lenu's escape. At the moment it seemed like a loss, but pain pushed both girls beyond what they had thought they were capable of.

The Story of a New Name (1)

The first 30 chapters or so of the second book in the Naples quartet describe Lila's early stage of being the wife of Stefano Carracci, the neighborhood grocer and the son of Don Achille, the fabled neighborhood ogre of the girls' childhood.

After Lila's wedding, her clashes Stefano went to a mini-climax, when she "erased" herself in the enlarged wedding picture that was to be hung on the wall of the new shoe store that sold the Cerullo shoes but carried the Solara name. Although she failed to prevent the Solara brothers using her image or Stefano selling it to them, she covered her own face in the picture with strips of black paper, leaving only an eye and a hand and, of course, the shoes she wore. At the end of this self-erasure disguised as store decoration, the author spells out its meaning in the girls' discussion about her married name, Raffaella Cerullo Carracci:

"A custom. Everything according to the rules then. But Lila, as usual, hadn't stopped there ... She told me that she had begun to see in that formula an indirect object of place to which, as if Cerullo Carracci somehow indicated Cerullo goes toward Carracci, falls into it, is sucked up by it, is dissolved in it."

"She had been increasingly oppressed by an unbearable sensation, a force pushing down harder and harder, crushing her. That impression had been getting stronger, had prevailed. Raffaella Cerullo, overpowered, had lost her shape and dissolved inside the outlines of Stefano, becoming a subsidiary emanation of him: Signora Carracci." 

This summation comes at the end of a series of incidents in Lila's marriage to illustrate her point.  Before the wedding, she wanted to invite no one from the Solara family, but Stefano invited Silvio Solara, the patriarch, to speak at the wedding. She had to acquiesce and begged him not to invite the Solara brothers. Not only did Marcello and Michele brothers show up at the wedding, but Marcello had on his feet Lila's creation -- the pair of men's shoes that she designed, she and Rino made together, and then gave to Stefano. The betrayal of the men who loved her occurred on her wedding. When she refused to have sex with Stefano on their wedding night, he beat her and raped her. After they returned from the honeymoon, more compromises were made by Stefano, so that the Solara brothers opened a store in the fashionable district in Naples to sell the Cerullo shoes. The Solaras wanted Lila's wedding photo in the store as a model for the shoes. Lila refused, Stefano held out for a while, and then Stefano gave the photo to them anyway. She fought with her own body for months trying not to become pregnant and dreamed of going back to school, but she did become pregnant before the store opened. 

This is what the author means by Lila's sense of erasure, including the meaning of a woman taking up a new name upon marriage. When the wife cannot make any decision for herself --- her body, her work (shoe design), even her image no longer belong to her, and her husband can sell her off despite her objections, she does not exist any more as a human being, a free person, a person with her own identity. 

The "re-created" wedding photo in the shoe store was Lila's way of asserting her final bit of self presence, to announce her existence, to insist that she had not been fully devoured by the men in her life. Subsequently, she had a miscarriage, and the photo spontaneously burst into flames.

This was to be come a theme in Lila's life. She would tirelessly work and create something wonderful, and the men around her would try to buy it and own it and profit from it. Most of them wanted to own her body, except Michele Solara, who wanted to own her intelligence and creativity. Michele is the perfect capitalist that any worker today should appreciate; he's practically the Steve Jobs of Napoli. Isn't he a great boss? Lila did not think so through the end.

Being as yet unmarried, Lenu did not explicitly understand Lila in her role of Signora Carracci, but she was inspired to see the crumpled and twisted bodies of married women in the neighborhood for the first time --- worn down by not only the crushing poverty and uncompensated domestic labor but also the loss of their autonomy and agency, their choices, and their will to live.

My Brilliant Friend

 

After re-reading the Southern Reach trilogy, I decided to re-read the Naples quartet. In fact, I had not read the first book, My Brilliant Friend, at all. I was introduced to the quartet through the first season of the TV adaptation. Even before the first season, based on the first book, ended, I could not wait any longer and began to read the second novel, The Story of a New Name, just to find out what would happen to all the vivid characters that held my attention with a death grip. In the following few weeks, I inhaled the rest of the quartet.

So now I have gone back to read the first book. Many readers have complained about it --- too many characters, too many families, the names are hard to remember, the relationships are hard to entangle. I have the advantage of having been acquainted with most of them through the TV series, which have been released through Season 3 by now, and knowing what have happened to the characters. I can spend all my energy on parsing the relationships among the characters and the subtext of the events and the milieu.

One theme that is constantly brought up in all (I do mean ALL) reviews is the rivalry and jealousy between Lenu and Lila, the pair of central characters who grow up in the poor neighborhood in Naples from the 1950s through the next few decades. When I rushed through the novels from the second entry, I accepted this interpretation. However, a closer look at the text from the beginning has modified my opinion.

Observing the meticulous, extremely candid, and sometimes brutal dissection of Lenu's feelings and motivations from childhood, I am certain that this character is highly realistic and, assuming this is a portrait of a real person, her psychological profile is of a child with an ill-defined sense of self. She was shaped and molded by feedback from other people, including good grades at school, praises from her teachers, social expectations for a girl, comparison with other girls in the neighborhood (for example, the question of when one should have a boyfriend), opinions of boys and parents. She sought and was nourished by other people's good opinions. First and foremost, however, it is Lila who inspired and helped her to construct a clear sense of self, through not only their friendship and emotional intimacy, but also Lila's shadowing of and feedback on Lenu's academic pursuits. From the elementary school up to at least middle school, Lenu was often drifting into her family's and community's attitude: It's meaningless for a girl to get an education. The motivations that kept Lenu going were Maestra Oliviero's encouragement and intervention and Lila's competition. It is Lila's talent and competition that spurred Lenu to work harder academically. Through competition and comparison with Lila, Lenu felt more grounded and real as a person and strove from increasing self-realization. Even after Lila was forced to drop out of school by her father, her voracious reading and learning gave Lenu the motivation to keep going in middle school, until Lenu formed a solid enough self-identity as a good student (through academic success and professors' praises) that she could motivate herself to keep going and no longer needed Lila's drive. Even so, we should do well to remember that the title of the book, the brilliant friend, refers to Lenu, in a quote from Lila, who was urging her to pursue higher education, "You're my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls." 

I'm not a psychologist, but it is a fairly common psychological phenomenon that some people have difficulty forming their own self-identify and rely on other people's reflections and feedback to define the edges of their own sense of person. This is why comparing oneself with others, or "keeping up with the Joneses" is so common. Humans are born with a soft brain, and the question of "who am I" takes a long time in development to answer, sometimes never solidify. 

I am also convinced that the development of self-identity is a major theme in the quartet, as it is also symbolically and, perhaps more precisely figuratively, described in Lila's dissolution. Throughout the quartet, Lila is always the stronger character. She knew what she loved and hated and wanted. She had conviction even as a girl and drove much of the decisions and actions in relationship with others (Lenu and boys in the neighborhood). Nevertheless, she described again and again a sense of disintegration, when the boundaries between herself and other people around her or the environment dissolving into nothing, leading to the disappearance of her being. In the end she does disappear. Therein lies the mirror image and the irony of the two friends: one starts diffuse and solidifies with the other's help, while the other starts hard and unshakable and later dissolves into thin air. It is built into Lila's character early on that she is more tightly bound to the community, the neighborhood, and the people there than Lenu is. This may not be her predestined path. If she was able to escape the neighborhood early on, like Lenu did, she may have developed a taste for the wider world. Or maybe not. We will never find out. 

Reading the novel made me realize how much the TV series sanitized the everyday, casual, pervasive violence in the domestic life. The audience collectively gasped when they were shown Lila being tossed out the window by her father over education and Lila showing up with a black eye after marrying the nice guy Stefano, but they never saw the many scenes described in the book, Lila being beaten and slapped by her father and brother pretty much throughout her adolescence, especially when she refused to accept Marcello Solara's romantic pursuit. For her, violence against her and other women like her is just another normal day in the neighborhood. 

Acceptance: The Distance Between Stars and Hearts

By the end of the Southern Reach trilogy, I was sobbing as hard as I have ever done from reading any book. The series began with the extreme isolation and desolation of the biologist (which, as we learn later, was not entirely a spontaneous and voluntary mental state), and ends with the heart-breaking letter from the director of SR to Saul Evans, the lighthouse keeper, who were friends when the director was a ten-year-old girl. Even in the strange new world of Area X, under the probing alien eyes on every organism and every cell, when all hope is lost, there is still love. 

I was going to sort out the "secrets" of Area X in the text, such as the long-dead alien race and their planet in ruins, or time-space portal(s) opened by a splinter that pricked Saul's finger, or the long-fought battle between Central and Area X. But not now. 

A much-quoted review in LA Review of Books by David Thompson argued that Area X is a hyperobject (a concept put forth by Timothy Morton), which is supposed to mean events or systems that are too vast and complex to be understood by humans, something like that, I'm paraphrasing. Like black holes or global warming or the Internet. An alien machinery that transforms a patch of land on earth, for example. To which I would add: the human unconscious. 

Even from the start of Annihilation, I thought that the journey into the tower is an allegory for plunging into the darkness of the human mind. The breathing walls and the living, glowing words on them just felt inevitably inward rather than alien. The flashbacks of the biologist's life before entering Area X, however sparse and reserved, are highly specific and permeate a melancholy. In Authority, Control's mental world is similarly detached from his parents, especially his unreachable mother. The probing and manipulation by Lowry, representing Central (a mirror image of Area X), might have been Control's journey into the tower. The tower does not provide us with any psychological insights per se, but the reader nevertheless gets to feel their longings and regrets and emptiness. 

In Acceptance, we are treated with several human connections that somewhat reverse the first two books, including the relationships between the director and Grace, between the girl Gloria and Saul, and Saul's love affair with Charlie, even though everyone still carries their own scars and pain. Even inside Area X, there is still hopeless warmth among the characters on their journeys. 

I thought about the source of the melancholy throughout the trilogy and recognized it between the subject and object of observation. One of the motifs in the novels is the sense that the creator of Area X, which supposedly is not the alien species but their machine or portal, is constantly monitoring and observing every organism on earth within and perhaps even outside Area X. The same practice occurs in the biologist who watches organisms in nature, such as a tidal pool or just a puddle in a parking lot. Or perhaps the same can be said about Lowry, who ruthlessly manipulates and controls and experiments on SR employees' minds. And yet we get the feeling that no two organisms truly understand each other. We can watch a starfish do its thing, but we will never feel what a starfish feels, and vice versa. We cannot even see the entirety of the internal world of another human, and this includes parents and their children. The distance between two hearts or minds is as vast as that of two stars. 

And what about the distance between the conscious thoughts, armed with abstract thinking and language, and the dark tides of the unconscious? They are a few centimeters or even millimeters apart, but they might as well be two species living under one roof. Between the cortex and amygdala or hypothalamus --- take any part of the limbic system --- there is so little understanding and sharing, that the cortex makes up stories, constantly, to pretend that it knows what is happening underneath. It doesn't, not really.

While I will never know whether the human unconscious was intended to be one of the many allegories of Area X, Jeff VanderMeer did say that he let his unconscious guide his writing of this series. So it's by definition true that the novels are indeed about the unconscious. In the adventure into Area X, VanderMeer's unconscious has given us alienation, vulnerability, regrets, longing, despair, and mysteries, endless mysteries. In the end, however, it also gives us unforgotten love.