RonPrice
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Jan 4, 2008, 12:08 AM
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Fitting Movies Into My Memoirs
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This autobiography suggests, exemplifies, a psychological reality that opposes and withstands the plague of popular fantasies that bombard consciousness in these epochs. My identity is not merely an image, ultimately empty, a symbol of another's demand on my life in an image-conscious society. I accept that image has become a central aspect of life today; indeed to some extent I revel in it. I play the game, but realize it's a game. I know that much of my desire I have been taught through my only partly avoidable immersion in society's realities. I have been hooked, as we all have been in varying extents, by the "aesthetics of consumerism." "Coolness" and "glamorousness" I am aware of in some symbolic world that I inhabit in a depthless realm of masks, of images and brand names whose cache and status inevitably change, revealing no stable core at best or no substance at all. But I know my reality is not this.
The movies I have seen are entertaining but have only what some writers call a secondary reality. Consequently, I am plunged into and forged by a sea of signifiers which, while stimulating my sensory emporium, ultimately signify something approaching nothing. I am conscious of body image but I get no sense of identity from my body. My psyche, to the extent that it is filled with electronic media products, is a void because that environment is an abyss, and the inner world, if one can call it that, which it recreates in this narration is just as depleted. This subject, which I have alluded to here only briefly, is a long and complex one. But I shall leave it here.
Throughout my entire adult period I was able to use my mind first as a student, then as a teacher, then as a lecturer and finally as a writer-poet. I was able, by the 1990s, to make poetry out of human life, out of a human life in which I had ceased to want to play such an active part. TV and movies provided a secondary reality which was pleasing to my mind. The words of the poet Shelley were pertinent here:
Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses,
But feeds on the aerial kisses
Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses.
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But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of Immortality.
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(don't worry folksif the above few lines of poetry are too complex; this is often the case with poetry...poetry often suggests rather than tells...)
So much of the movies have had to do with violence and war. The following comment provides some perspective on the 100s, no 1000s, of hours watching such movies on video, at the cinema, on DVD, etc.
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MANY KINDS OF WAR
Carl Von Clausewitz’s On War which he wrote in the years 1817 to 1829, aimed at an understanding and clarification of the principles of conflict, of war. The nature of war seems to be changing, certainly for me and my daily life and most of my contemporaries in the half century, 1958-2008 since I began high school. In my lifetime the nature of warfare changed a great deal. But all the wars I fought were in my personal life. Even here the principles of warfare outlined by Clauswitz were relevant. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 9 February 2003.
It’s a different war these days
than the ones my father, his father
and fathers before went to with guns
and uniforms and marching, marching.
Marching. A tightening in the gut, real
fear, morning after morning, wanting to
run away from this stoney, narrow and
tortuous path, learning to love it, slowly,
slowly, slowly--well, most of it....this new one...
It’s the kind of war that wears you down,
year after year as you learn to keep your
forces concentrated-that simple law of strategy-
and keep faithful to the principles you--and he--
have laid down.1
1 These were the first two principles laid down by Clauswitz in his book.
Ron Price
9 February 2003.
(updated for TV Forums)
married for 41 years, a teacher for 35 and a Baha'i for 48
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