Treasure Island

I recently finished Treasure Island, mainly cause it was a book I feel like I should've read already. And indeed, I probably should've read it when I was 12--it makes a good primer for youthful imagination, a gateway to higher reading perhaps, but it's not exactly mind-blowing literature. A competently-told adventure story I suppose, and mercifully concise, but possessing none of the epic grandeur of a masterpiece.

I will say this though; the ending was much more melancholy than what I was expecting--for I do recall watching various cinematic adaptations of the tale growing up, all of which portrayed Treasure Island as a coming-of-age tale, emphasizing the relationship between the bright-eyed Jonathan Hawkins and the pirate-with-a-heart-of-gold Long John Silver, all set against the exotic backdrop of a swashbuckling adventure on the high seas.

But in the book itself, I beheld no coming-of-age self-awareness, no bildungsroman narrative of a boy becoming a man, no sudden moral awakening; the island itself is not lush and tropic and paradisaical or Eden-esque; the pirates are not romantic, adventurous scallywags--no, the pirates are filthy, cowardly, and despicable; the island is a hotbed of typhoid and extreme solitude; and the narrative leaves none morally awakened or mature, but rather leaves most everyone dead and the survivors damaged.

Hawkins himself has no romantic memories of the island or the pirates, but only nightmares of Long John Silver, and remembers the island itself only as "accursed."

What's more, none of the characters seem to exercise any real agency; everyone just gets sucked into the treasure hunt seemingly whether they want to or not. As soon as the characters, whether pirate or British, learn of a treasure, they all just head after it, mindlessly, without a moment of introspection. There is no noble purpose for the hunt--no mother's inn to be saved, no orphanage to rescue, just treasure to be dug up, for its own sake.

The treasure itself is a zone of negative energy, a sort of black hole that sucks everyone into its orbit against their will, destroying lives both literally and metaphorically; Silver loses a leg, Pew his eyes, Ben his sanity, the pirates their lives, and Hawkins his pleasant dreams, all in the pursuit of a treasure that is recovered as an afterthought.

All in all, if any lesson is to be gleaned from Treasure Island, it would seem to be a negative commentary on the pursuit of riches for their own sake.

Lawrence of Arabia

Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that the phrase "lightning flashes" is tautologically redundant, and is indicative of a central flaw in Western reasoning. That is, lightning doesn't cause the flash, it doesn't give the flash, it is the flash. Lightning cannot flash because lightning is, by definition, a flash. Nietzsche claimed we in the West commit the same mistake with people; we say "people act," when in reality people are the acts. We don't produce acts, we are them, we are made up of nothing else. We are what we do.

Nietzsche's thought has been on my mind ever since rewatching Lawrence of Arabia over the weekend. What stuck out to me is how much each character is inherently performing an act--Prince Fiesel, the British generals, the American reporter, the Arab chiefs, TE Lawrence himself. Their actions are all very deliberate, calculated--and concealing. The British are just as wary of revealing their true motives as the Arabs are. Every act is a concealment. The symbol never corresponds to the referent. In one telling scene, Lawrence is walking along the top of a toppled train, his shadow is cast by the sun, and the camera makes the people appear to be following a shadow, not a man; people are never following a person, but the shadow, the image. The image is more important than the man, for the image is the man.


But it's more complicated than that; for after a stretch, one gets the impression that though the signifier is unstable, there is also a lack of a referent behind the signifier. That is, the signifier alone becomes the thing that is important, not what it is supposed to represent. Hence, Lawrence's guide is killed on sight because he's wearing the clothes of the wrong tribe; flags are always displayed prominently for each tribe; the British soldiers are always portrayed in ceremonial stances; Lawrence, who saves a man from the desert to prove that "nothing is written" must later kill the same man to prevent tribal warfare, and a chieftan says simply, "ah, then it was written," signifying that the word is more important than the referent; the American reporter writes stories about Lawrence--for different motives than Prince Fiesal, but then the story itself becomes more important; and the chieftans refuse to have their picture taken, for the photo is a signifier, and the Arabs understand that the person's acts themselves become the signifier, and hence resent being replaced by another symbol of themselves.

In each case, repeatedly throughout the film, the signifiers replace the person itself (especially as Lawrence himself becomes a legend, and refuses it but can't), but then, the signifiers are the person itself. The lightning is the flash, the person is their acts. There is nothing behind the flash, there is nothing behind the person.

But then, there is nothing in the desert itself; it's emptiness is the point of it. It's utter lack of signification is the source of its significance. Perhaps that's why Lawrence says he prefers the desert "because its clean;" there is not significance. You are not the signifier any longer. All that is left is the sheer beauty itself, desolate, clean, over-whelming. The beauty of the movie itself is all that is left to consider.

Perhaps Rain on Your Wedding Day Really Is Ironic?

Over the years, Alanis Morissette's 1995 song "Ironic" has taken a lot of flack for not actually being ironic, e.g. the line "It's like rain on your wedding day" is merely inconvenient, not actually ironic per se, goes the argument. The running joke has become that "Ironic," by not actually being ironic, is itself an act of irony.

While no great Alanis fan myself, I can't help but note the word ironic is itself difficult to pin down; the on-line dictionary merely lists ironic's definition as:

1. Characterized by or constituting irony.

2. Given to the use of irony. See Synonyms at sarcastic.

3. Poignantly contrary to what was expected or intended

Needless to say, the first definition is purely tautological, the second only gives a synonym (which starts the referential cycle all over), and the third is broad and vague, inclusive of all forms of disappointment and contradiction.

So, really, if you were expecting sunshine and rainbows and puppies on your wedding day, naive as that may be, might rain coming instead be a precisely-inverted violation of your expectations, and hence sincerely qualify as ironic?

Also, I think if you paid for a ride but then found out that it was free all along, you would indeed relate the story to your friends later as an ironic incident.

And if you were to have a thousand spoons, but really only needed one knife (presumably to cut a box open or something, for which your curious over-abundance of spoons would be unhelpful), you might indeed sigh bemusedly and mutter, "ah, the irony!"

I'm not saying these are all clear-cut examples of irony; for example, meeting the man of your dreams and then meeting his beautiful wife, while certainly frustrating, perhaps even tragic, I'm not sure can quite be stretched to qualify as "ironic." But that's just the thing--what does qualify as ironic? How do you define it? If you can't precisely explicate its meaning, then perhaps you are unqualified to determine when a song is ironic and when it is not.

All I'm saying is that perhaps Alanis Morissette has the last laugh; the irony isn't that the song is unironic, the irony is that it is ironic, and we've been misunderstanding it all along.

Ashes to Asher

He should’ve been a member of the landed gentry, maybe two, three hundred years ago. I’m thinking somewhere in western England, maybe near Wales, though most anywhere in Western Europe would’ve suited him fine. There, he could’ve happily sat alone in his room, daintily drinking his tea, awaiting dinner, waited on servants and maids older than he, surrounded by whichever eccentric books and art alerted his fancy, entertaining visitors (and I do mean entertain), perhaps occasionally patronizing the traveling minstrels and puppet shows that passed through his country hamlet, inviting them in to delight and amuse him. He'd have given them his sincerest applause. And in that state he could’ve lived gloriously useless (and that at a time when to be useless was a compliment), fulfilling the sole function of carrying title, him and his wife of arranged marriage, happily all the days of his life.

Not that I’m saying we should bring back the landed gentry, or that that was somehow a nobler era. Good riddance to 'em and God Bless America, says I. I’m just saying that that one era in history, that one social class, would’ve been a perfect fit for him.

Mom probably would get mad at me for saying so; she'd have told me that back in those dark days, he would've been locked up in some sick asylum, filthy with disease and rats and ticks and such, in stone-cells dank and damp, where sadistic, shifty-eyed doctors in powdered-wigs would poke and prod him mercilessly while self-righteous priests, grown fat on indulgences, cast devils from him, beat him with stripes and called him wicked. Or something.

But this isn't three, two, or even one hundred years ago, and we have social security now and clinics with compassionate, competent professionals and entire academic disciplines dedicated to help with cases as him. I've even edited their dissertations. Sincerely, I'm not dissing on them, I'm just saying that all things considered equal, he should have been of the regency. I think his fastidiousness nature would have made him a perfect fit. He'd probably have made a delightful character in a Jane Austen novel.

But the thing about the past not being the past is that the future will come soon enough, and after we've lowered his casket into the ground and drive home I'll probably unthinkingly put on David Bowie's "Ashes to Ashes," and I'll half expect him to suddenly appear and ask with a big ol' grin on his face, saying, "What if Weird Al did a parody called 'Ashes to Asher,' about Pokemon, huh? Do you think that'd be funny?" and that thought would occur to me right when Bowie belts out "I've never done good things/I've never done bad things/I've never done anything out of the blue..." and the tears would stream down my face like the rain from the Washington sky...

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Quite frankly, he'll probably outlive us all. He called me once just to tell me that he'd almost been hit by a car but was ok now. Texted everyone he knew about it. He'll be the one listening to Weird Al himself while I'm off to meet my Maker, to be interrogated on how I treated the humblest of God's creations.