James Hazlett Foreman

Category: Culture

Writing about pop culture, high culture, low culture, and middle culture.

  • Death

    “‘And what would humans be without love?’”
    ‘RARE,’ said Death.”
    — Terry Pratchett

    Death is a character in Pratchett’s work, and he always speaks in all-caps. He is a tender-hearted being who likes cats, but is very serious about his job, which is to help the dead get to their final destinations. He tends to be blunt. People who die in Pratchett’s work often encounter Death, who is usually sympathetic, but being a personification of a concept, can’t really relate.

    Terry Pratchett himself died recently, of Alzheimer’s. He got it much earlier than most people, and it finally killed him at age 66. That’s 24 years older than me. I have a history of dementia in my family. Alzheimer’s is part of that terrifying constellation of diseases that slowly, inexorably rob you of your ability to think. Many people think this is a worse fate than slowly losing your physical faculties and dying, infirm but aware of your surroundings. Having seen both processes of aging up close, I cannot say that I prefer one to the other. The looming, large, intractable similarity they share is that they only happen if you get old. We cannot overlook this.

    “Hard times? I’m used to them,
    Speeding planet burns? I’m used to that,
    My life’s so common it disappears.”
    — Paul Simon, The Cool, Cool River.

    Everybody knows someone who died young. Everybody knows lots of people who died young. It’s so common and tragic that most of us won’t traverse our childhoods without losing someone. But you can’t build an identity around it. It’s sad and it’s terrible. That’s not what this is about. This is about me.

    At the age of 42, I have succeeded in not dying young.

    I don’t think about dying very much. I don’t fear death. This is not a result of any experience I had. I’ve been ambivalent about death for most of my life. At some point I realized that dying is, at worst, going to sleep and never waking up. As someone who enjoys sleep, I am not bothered by this.

    A new wrinkle in my worldview has been the grudging acceptance that I might be wrong. Wrong about what? All of it. For most of my life (let’s say 13 to 35), I was convinced of the impermanence of the physical universe, that human beings are all happenstance conglomerations of matter that get to live for a few decades of interrupted nonexistence, after which we return to a state of not existing. The more time you get, the better. But, fundamentally, we are all animals. We are (mostly) hairless apes who managed to live long enough to receive the genes of our successful ancestors. Consciousness, rather than some kind of end goal of evolution, is a bizarre side effect of the combination of beneficial cognitive variables. Consciousness, sentience, self-awareness, is just a byproduct of the adaptations we developed to survive the conditions of the African savannah. We aren’t even the only ones — Neanderthals and Devonians were pre-human (or protohuman, if you’re feeling deterministic) that emerged around the same time we did, and likely had the same existential questions we do. The actual qualities of being Homo sapiens that made us the dominant hairless ape on this planet are lost to history and are far beyond the scope of the point I’m making which is this:

    I’m not so sure about that stuff anymore

    I don’t mean I question evolution, only that the physical universe is all there is to it and we hairless apes have the vast mystery of the universe all figured out. I don’t know what caused the spark of doubt in my own certainty. It wasn’t sudden, and it wasn’t the result of any singular moment. I experienced a slow skepticism of orthodoxy, all kinds of orthodoxies, that I could no longer ignore. My thirties were a decade of big changes for me, none of them very visible to someone on the outside, and none of them were spurred by astounding revelations. I just kind of thought about things more and found I was less certain of the old certainties.

    I learned more about Zen Buddhism

    It feels like a cliche but I was a white man in his mid thirties who got really into eastern philosophy. My doorway into this world was Alan Watts. I happened to be looking at videos on the internet somewhere and happened upon a video somebody made using a bit of one of his lectures. He talks about the fundamental Buddhist concept of existence as a function of being, and the nature of choice.

    Watts says this (emphasis mine):

    You do not know where your decisions come from. They pop up like hiccups.

    And when you make a decision, people have a great deal of anxiety about making decisions. “Did I think this over long enough? Did I take enough data into consideration?” And if you think it through, you find you never could take enough data into consideration. The data for a decision for any given situation is infinite.

    So what you do is, you go through the motions of thinking out what you will do about this. Choice is the act of hesitation that we make before making a decision. It is a mental wobble. And so we are always in a dither of doubt as to whether we are behaving the right way or doing the right thing, and so on and so forth.

    You have to regard yourself as a cloud, in the flesh. Because you see, clouds never make mistakes. Did you ever see a cloud that is misshapen? Did you ever see a badly designed wave? No, they always do the right thing. But if you would treat yourself for a while as a cloud or wave, and realize you can’t make a mistake, whatever you do, cause even if you do something that seems to be totally disastrous, it will all come out in the wash somehow or other.

    For someone who deals with anxiety and indecision as frequently as he breathes, this is a shattering concept. This is a shaking of the foundations. This is a tectonic shift.

    This is a revelation

    I hate to mix my religions, but I will anyway. The concept of the revelation is integral to Abrahamic theology. Sometimes the revelations are personal, and God speaks directly to the stunned listener (the listener, I imagine, is always stunned; nobody receives a communique from the divine and thinks “yes, this is exactly what should be happening”). More often, they are second-hand: an Angel, a messenger, comes down to earth and speaks to them for God. Even more potent, and I think more effective, is the public revelation, a kind of celestial music festival where the main stage is, for example, a guy handing out commandments.

    Moments of revelation are a reliable narrative device that gives me endless pleasure. I love when a character realizes something that alters the course of his life and, thus, the story. The music swells, the camera zooms slowly in, and the neurotransmitters for pleasure hit me like a brick. God, I love it so much. Here are two of my favorites:

    Luke Skywalker is a kid in over his head. A plucky rebellion short on able pilots gives him a rickety old star fighter because an old friend and one of their own can vouch for him. He is just one among an entire fleet, doing his best. He’s given the fifth position in a squadron of five, tasked with defending far more experienced bomber pilots who have to land the football directly into the arms of a receiver so far away and so small that even otherwise hopeful rebels can’t imagine hitting such a small target. Luke watches in horror as every other experienced pilot is put out of action and he, alone, can save the rebels from certain death. He can’t do it. How could he do it? He just watched veteran pilots try and fail. It’s hopeless. He squints into the unfamiliar bomb viewfinder. The galaxy is doomed to fall as the rebellion’s secret base is blown to pieces by the Death Star.

    Until a voice pops into Luke’s head. It’s the Jedi who just died at the business end of the sword of the guy who’s also blowing up all of Luke’s friends. We watched Obi-Wan Kenobi give Luke some rudimentary lessons on the true nature of the universe. It’s nothing very complicated. Use the Force. Luke knows what that means: reach out with his feelings, and don’t rely on what his machines tell him. Kenobi even tells him not to trust his own eyes, to trust his instincts, his connection to the universe, the energy field surrounding everything. It’s ridiculous, but it suddenly makes sense. It’s a counter factual, unmoored and against everything he was previously led to believe. So he turns off his targeting computer and trusts his feelings. [1]

    Watch it with me, won’t you? https://youtu.be/zR7CeC-rqiE

    That’s the first one. The second one is much more recent and not nearly as famous. It’s a revelation in a very religious sense, because it’s happening to a pastor who has lost of faith after witnessing the death of his wife. She lived just long enough after being struck by a vehicle to unleash a string of nonsense non sequiturs. The pastor interpreted them as the meaningless words of a woman dying a meaningless death in a meaningless universe and abandoned his faith. But the universe of the movie Signs is anything but meaningless.

    It’s not until the pastor’s remaining family is threatened by an intractable, deadly creature from another planet (!) that his wife’s revelation is revealed to him. They spend a terrible night in the basement, menaced by these beings who try over and over again to get to them. The pastor calms his terrified daughter with the story of her birth, the first of every person’s revelations, as the monsters close in. The morning brings hope that they lived through it, until the shocking reveal where we finally see one of these creatures in full view, in stark daylight, cradling the body of the pastor’s asthmatic son. Here comes the second revelation, as the Pastor flashes back to the meaningless babble of his dying wife, which now suddenly has context. One of her utterances was “swing away, Merrill.” The pastor looks over at Merrill and sees him standing below the mounted trophy he got for hitting a ball extremely hard for the longest recorded home run. We know from earlier conversations that Merrill was an unparalleled talent, but struck out more than he hit. “It felt wrong not to swing,” he explains in an earlier scene, unapologetically. The pastor repeats her words to him, and suddenly that night she seemed to speak nonsense makes perfect sense after all. These are three revelations in one scene. It’s like this movie was made for me. [2]

    Watch it with me, won’t you? https://youtu.be/bjv7CVhZXNs

    My own revelations

    I do most of my best work when I’m thinking, and thinking about Alan Watts‘s words was, I suppose, a kind of personal revelation for me. I had never heard what he was saying before. It made sense. It was an explanation of the universe that, to use a word heard most in creative writing classes, resonated. It’s tempting to use the word “resonate” because it has an attractive physicality. It’s an accurate description of the way a revelation bounces around inside you like an echoing musical tone bounces around inside the body of a violin.

    Alan Watts has a nice, English-accented voice with the bristly edge of a tobacco habit. A quick perusal of his biography shows a man of many dimensions, just like any of us. He died young (58, only 16 years older than me), of complications from alcoholism. Even a man who spoke so eloquently of the freedom from the chains of a mortal existence was bound by them. He addressed this in many of his lectures, so it’s not much of a revelation — we are all creatures of the universe, and that sometimes includes destructive habits. His choice to drink his heart to death (he died of heart disease, technically) was spurred by an addiction, but he made his choices. It is the rare person with a drinking problem who does not suspect that they have a drinking problem.

    Alan Watts, warts and all, gave me an excuse to not worry about things. He gave me a reason to stop the spinning brain cycles I spent worrying about things I could control and things I couldn’t. The solution to indecision is to decide. The cure for anxiety is information. Even more startlingly, the enemy of worry is action.

    Don’t sit and stew, plan and do

    The above is a quote from my therapist, who might have gotten it from somewhere else, but I learned it from him. It’s a nice summation of cognitive behavioral therapy. Rather than baste in our own juices, or masticate the gristle of our worries, devise a solution to your problems and execute it. When I learned this, when I really absorbed this lesson, it was likely the first of many revelations I would have in that office. This is how it works: you’re worried about that mole on your arm, the one that looks funny. You can sit in misery and worry about having cancer, or you can go to a doctor. This won’t prevent you from getting cancer, but it will eliminate the worry. It might lead you to additional worrying that you might die from the cancer you might have, but there’s a long way between a diagnosis and death. The point is nicely summarized by this quote from Alan Watts: “No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.”

    If I dig a bit deeper in my own biases, I can see a tendency toward Zen Buddhism specifically for its similarity to the cognitive therapy that has been responsible for so much of my personal growth. They both speak to the importance of reason and clear thinking. My life got measurably better when I started internalizing those concepts.

    Thank you for reading, dear reader. This is the longest one yet, and I hope I didn’t bore you.

    1. What we don’t see is another revelation — Han Solo changes his mind about the Rebellion and comes back to rescue Luke. He, too, trusted his feelings.

    2. People like to criticize this movie for the apparent plot hole that aliens vulnerable to water decided to invade a planet covered in it. I take issue with those who take issue with this because they’re missing the entire point of the movie: there are no coincidences. They picked a planet with water so they could be defeated by clever humans who noticed they were vulnerable to it. The Pastor’s wife had a dying revelation that her husband had to “see” and that Merrill needed to swing. Their daughter left glasses of water around the house specifically so Merrill had a ready supply of ammunition. Her brother had asthma specifically so his lungs would be closed when the alien unleashed its poisonous gas into his face. The unlikely coincidences of the final act of the movie are entirely the point the movie is making: there are no coincidences, and the universe might actually have some meaning behind it after all.

  • The James Foreman Unified Theory of Snobbery

    Everyone gets to be a snob about something.* You can certainly be a snob about more than one thing, but it’s easier to limit yourself to one, and when we identify the One Thing in another person, we should accept it as part of their personality. Like the right to speak freely without worry of violence and the right to worship whatever gods you wish are enshrined as basic human rights inherent to all people, so, too, is Being a Snob About Something.

    Before I get into what I’m a Snob About, I’ll discuss what I’m not a snob about. For one, music. My list of most-recently listened-to songs is made up of music I heard in commercials, on tv shows or in movie trailers. For instance, my most recent Favorite Song is Cosmo Sheldrake’s Come Along, which I first heard in an Apple commercial: https://youtu.be/d8LJXcQhD0k

    I like Metal

    A friend once asked me what music I was listening to lately and I said “metal,” and he, being a fan of the genre, interrogated this further. I listed mostly Megadeth and Metallica music over 20 years old, and he laughed at me. I don’t know if he’s a Snob about metal, but I’m definitely not. I know that there are people who would not consider the “metal” I like metal at all, or at least a very old and dusty version of it. I have listened to what metal fans listen to nowadays and I can affirm that what I heard is not for me.

    I am also not a snob about food. When someone asks me where I want to eat, I rarely have an opinion. I have yet to encounter a restaurant where the menu did not include at least one dish that piqued my prandial curiosity, so I’m agnostic about, for instance, where we’re going to eat tonight. I don’t care. You pick. I really don’t care. I’m not being difficult. I won’t shoot down the first thing you suggest. My claim that I do not have an opinion is true. Pick a place and I will go there, with no complaints. I will not blame you afterward if I don’t like it, because by surrendering the decision to you, I have also surrendered my right to complain. I understand this is a fact of basic social arrangement. If I have a preference, I will state it. Tonight, for instance, I crave the fast casual Indian food of Choolaah, and stated that preference to my partner. It is up to her to state whether she wants it or not, and negotiations can progress forthwith.

    Gimme the Garbage

    More important than accepting what Someone is a Snob About is accepting what I will call accepting what Someone is Extremely Trashy About, though I don’t want anyone to think that I’m denigrating Trash. Trash is beautiful, wonderful, delicious, amazing. Artificially cultivated trashiness is often detestable, because many of the people who would do so also look down on actual trash as beneath them. I am here to say that trash is not beneath any of us and that we must think about our own visceral reactions to what we consider “trashy” and ask ourselves whether we’re missing something that somebody else might enjoy.

    Here’s a for instance for you.

    My friends were once enjoying the outside air of Pittsburgh and encountered a small family, obviously tourists, who asked where the closest Olive Garden was. They were told about the incredible delectable delights available at the International Food Festival occurring mere blocks away from their current location, full of authentic Italian food from families that probably still spoke Italian in their homes and definitely would never use a microwave or reheat frozen pasta, as Olive Garden does. But this family was completely disinterested in the Festival or authentic food. They wanted the Olive Garden. How trashy!

    Indeed, I understand the instinct to reduce these people to hick tourists from across the rivers who probably lived in the suburbs, of all places, and had such unsophisticated palates that they could not enjoy the authenticity of actual Italians producing actual Italian food. That was my first instinct, also. But that interaction has stuck with me, much like the Rule of Snobbery, and thinking about it made me think about how snobbery and trash are simply social codes for how we relate to what we consume and the value we place on them.

    Tell the man looking for Olive Garden that Toyota trucks and GMC trucks are basically the same (a perfectly valid opinion for someone who has no use for a truck), and you’ll probably find out that this person is actually capable of an informed, nuanced opinion about something. It just isn’t about Italian food, or maybe food of any kind.

    The family looking for Olive Garden isn’t looking for a challenging dining experience. Their relationship to food is different from mine. They don’t really care about how authentic their dinner is, or how Actually Italian their Italian food is, they want a familiar experience. They’re traveling and are probably not in a comfortable emotional space, so the familiarity of an Olive Garden is an oasis of easy expectations. They don’t have to worry about choosing the wrong thing, or making some social faux pas, or accidentally being rude to a culture unfamiliar to them, or stress about navigating streets they don’t know. They just want some breadsticks and some soup and pasta that probably has a lot of butter in it. Can I really blame someone for seeking comfort when they need it? Never.

    The unironic enjoyment of trash is a freeing step to take. Remove the idea of “guilty pleasures” from your mind and simply enjoy things without guilt.

    Enjoyment is not binary.

    Siskel and Ebert used such a scale for their movie reviews, and sites like Rotten Tomatoes continues a version of that tradition, but it does not work as well in practice. I propose a scale.

    At the top of the scale of enjoyment is Snobbery, an indelicate term for an indelicate perspective. I am a snob about science fiction and fantasy. I have a high basic expectation of stories in those genres and I will judge harshly a story I find lacking. I can’t simply turn my mind off and enjoy a bad or unoriginal science fiction or fantasy story. It has to have something redeemable to me, as a snob, in order to enjoy it.

    That does not mean I don’t enjoy trash in those genres, because I do! There is nothing original about the movie Soldier, but I still love it. It features mid-career Kurt Russell as an obsolete super soldier discarded to a planet of garbage, where he finds himself finding new purpose as a defender of a community of marginalized refugees. I love the movie with no shame and will happily defend it, but I freely accept its flaws. It’s probably Trash. There is nothing original about the story, but it is executed in lean, myth-like segments. The journey of the main character is telegraphed and predictable, and this is what I enjoy about it. I admire a good story told well, and Soldier fits the bill. https://youtu.be/4g2G5POuZCY

    I had the opposite reaction to 2009’s Star Trek movie. While exciting and well-made, it had nothing of what I love about Star Trek while also emphasizing aspects of Star Trek that never belonged in it. Star Wars is about fathers and their legacies, but Star Trek is not. The 2009 movie included James Kirk’s father, and had a character lament that he was not more like his father. The biological destiny implied by My Father Was a Great Such and Such So Therefore I Must Also Be is a sad remnant of feudal, middle-age thinking that has no place in the optimistic, egalitarian futurism of Star Trek. That is just one of its many sins that I won’t bore you by writing about.

    These themes, as I said, are perfectly apt in Star Wars, which is steeped in fairy tales and Arthurian myth. I liked the second movie in the new trilogy, The Last Jedi, because it subverted and deemphasized familial legacy so common in fantasy stories and added a little note of the much more exciting and modern idea that Anyone Can Be Great. Both ideas can coexist in Star Wars, and that movie was full of new ideas for Star Wars while also rhyming with bits and bobs from the movies that preceded it.

    Finally, Here is the scale I propose:

    • I’m a Snob About This

    • I Love and Defend This But I’m Flexible

    • I Have No Strong Opinion About This, But I Usually Like It

    • This is Fine, I Guess

    • I Have No Appreciation For This But That’s Fine If You Do and I’m Interested in Hearing You Talk About It

    • I Don’t Like This At All But I’m Glad You Do and Please Don’t Try to Get Me To Like It, I Already Know I Don’t and I Don’t Enjoy Hearing Anyone Talk About it, But Please Don’t Take it Personally

    • This is Terrible and I Hate It

    This scale is not intended to be exhaustive. There are many thin layers between these discrete levels, and some of these layers might be different for different people. For instance, one layer I could add to the above would be “Talking About This Around My Sister Will Make Her Leave the Room,” and “I Like This a Lot But Please Don’t Tell My Cool Friends.”

    Also note that this is not meant to cover political opinions or things that matter to you on a different level from what you consume for entertainment. Those values might factor into what you’re a Snob about, but this scale isn’t meant to cover anything you might vote about.

    Relationships

    I touched upon this briefly earlier, but I think it bears further examination. An additional aspect of the scale of snobbery is the idea of one’s relationship to the object in question. It’s important to acknowledge these tendencies in ourselves so we can see them in others and, I think, gain a better understanding of why someone might like something we consider Trash. For instance, my relationship to Marvel comic book superheroes goes beyond whatever surface qualities might exist.

    I began reading about those characters as a child, and carried a love of their stories into adulthood. My relationship to a character like Captain America goes beyond the simple, escapist enjoyment of his adventures. They were my companions through the most difficult and the most joyful times of my life, and some of some of them helped me process aspects of my life that were too complicated or nuanced to wholly encompass with my little mind. Captain America, for instance: while you might see a goofy ultra-patriot with an A on his head, I see the best parts of my dad and the values important to him: honesty, honor, truth. It’s not as simple as “me like when man punch other man.” I’m bringing my own beer to the party.

    When people ask me my opinion of something like the newest Marvel movie, I give my most objective opinion possible, but with the caveat: I cannot judge these movies objectively. I’m going to enjoy watching Spider-Man fight Mysterio, full stop, so don’t rely too much on my opinion to figure out whether or not you’re going to like the new Spider-Man movie. My relationship to these superheroes is such that movies about them can commit many crimes that I will happily overlook because there is a loud, boisterous child in me that can’t stop bouncing up and down in his seat just at the sight of Spider-Man fighting Mysterio. I have a childish glee about the Marvel superhero movies, but I’m not a mindless consumer. I can excuse a lot of Trashy aspects of the things I love, but only if the soul of it is intact. The 2009 Star Trek movie was Trash, but it also showed a lack of understanding the very things I love about it.

    Finally,

    Writing these newsletters is always very illuminating to me. I learn more about myself when I write each one. Self-analysis is an important part of being a functioning human in our society, I believe. It’s important to check our biases and preconceptions. Sometimes we need to stamp them out, sometimes we need to embrace them, but we always have to give ourselves permission to have them.

    This is the first newsletter I’m publishing in the new year, but I wrote most of it piecemeal over the last few days. I’ve always been skeptical of traditions based around arbitrary dates, but I have also come to the conclusion that everything, in the end, is arbitrary, so why not celebrate one? So while I still eschew the New Year’s Resolution, I will happily celebrate the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020. My fondest wish for you and for myself is peace, joy, beauty and understanding.

    —
    Footnotes:

    1. When I was much dumber, I used to read Penny Arcade a lot. It also used to listen to ICP. Enjoyment of either one was not ironic in any way, and I’ll defend my liking them both at the times I liked them as Better Than You Think but definitely emblematic of my headspace when I liked them. I feel an intense need to defend my liking the things I like, which is a sideways way to approach the topic at hand: being a snob. My theory is based on the idea I first read about in something Penny Arcade wrote or drew, but I can’t find it anywhere. Anyway, I wanted to make sure that they were sufficiently cited as first tossing the idea into my head, where it has rattled around for years and I am only now examining.