Hegel’s dialectic theory defines skepticism as a sort of paralysis where people give themselves to their deepest despair. It’s sometimes described as an abyss in which all certainty is swallowed whole, leading to a feeling of decay about the world due to an inability to affirm any positive value. This seems like a fairly cerebral explanation for why most of us, through internal or external conditions, probably experience bouts of crippling deficiency. It’s as if the universe demands it of us to fasten our grasp on what's real. And as I review the events (or lack thereof) of 2005, I begin to understand just how much of it can be attributed to the laws of ontological principle rather than some long prison sentence for yelling blasphemies at homeless men singing Christmas carols. (I know. I’m appalling.) At any rate, we can jerk off all we like and gloat lofty theories that tell us how the world works. But ultimately that doesn't separate us from the world. For every big/little catastrophe I experienced last year and will keep experiencing in my paltry, saltspeck of a life, I will continue to ask myself: “Why is this happening to me? What have I done to justify this?” And most of the time, it isn't my place to know.
The reason I pontificate like this is because for a long time, I have felt very far-flung from the present, as if the world outside is coming to me from a tapedeck and I’m unable to find the appropriate moment to interject. I even catch myself occasionally pre-scripting job interviews, fake anecdotes, conversations with friends and family over the telephone, just to restore a sense of self-discipline to a mind which more often than not resembles an overactive, reeking glob of mayonnaise. It’s really no wonder that my sense of humor has dulled considerably, since where else does laughter begin but in a spontaneous heart?
It’s no secret to most of the people who know me that I live daily in a state of critical dread. It has nothing to do with being a quacking lunatic. (That's not to say I don't have my moments of hysteria, but I try to pass them off as being endearing.) In fact, aside from loathing all the Tom Cruises and imitation-June Cleavers of this world, I actually find myself feeling pity for them. Okay, that’s a lie. But I do wonder how it people can evaluate the state of the planet in which they live and manage to resist the urge to stick their head in the oven call it a day. The environment turning against us; it’s possible that within only a couple hundred years the world’s water level will have risen to the point that most of human life will be destroyed. We’re living in a nation of marginalized people run by a neo-fascist Rodeo which appeals strictly to fundamentalist urges, arousing enough international fear and resentment to where the U.S. isn’t going to have to worry about history, because simply isn’t going to be any history to worry about. And so, for the time being, we engorge ourselves with dissimulation, driving our attention spans into quicksand, roaming the city alone and afraid, sparing our compassion to safe, limited circles as we coerce ourselves further into isolation. Nobody knows on another anymore. And I doubt we’ll see an improvement. Why doesn’t this drive anyone else crazy?
My most recent project, UPSIDE DOWN MOON or BALI SHAG NIGHT takes place in the summer of 1973 in Boston. The son of a Libyan ambassador jumps of the rooftop of the St. Excelsia Hotel after having been disowned my his family for spending his first night out of boarding school with a transsexual prostitute. A week later, The Bali Shags, a radical faction of former members of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) gather on the same rooftop to stage a public orgy both in his memory and the up-and-coming spirit of the sexual revolution. Their inevitable arrest inspires numerous copycat events from youth all across the city, but their intent seems thwarted after the prostitute comes to them having experienced an incident of anonymous public molestation in the alley of a Chinese restaurant. In spite of everything, it is a comedy with a lot of racy humor to counterbalance its ultimately heartbreaking themes of youth-based revolutionary disillusionment and the struggle for faith beyond younger, larger-than-life principles without succumbing to the world’s self-destructive logic.
Maybe this is what Kundera writes about when he refers to: “a suspended theme… the theme that thickens, maneuvering you through old age.” And then, the moment you forget that it’s even there, it let’s you go…
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