Flicker, Flicker
I went and saw The Last Samurai yesterday afternoon after my final visit of the year to the doctor's office. Both gave birth to some thoughts which have been rolling around my head for the last twenty-four hours. The Last Samurai, which could have pitched as "Dances With Sushi," certainly didn't break any new cinematic or story ground, but it did its job fairly admirably and kept the brow-beating of the audience to a minimum. Tom Cruise did a decent job not being Tom Cruise which is about all that you can really hope for these days when a major marquee name gets involved in a film. And our latest Western attempt to summarize the samurai ethos in two hours handled itself well. Of course, I'm saying that as a Westerner, so take that with a grain or two of salt.
I may have been in a suggestible state when I went in. There's another grain. Though I'm not entirely sure why I'm trying to so hard to caveat everything. There's an artificial layer between what I'm saying and what I'm thinking. I don't know if it is a defense mechanism to put some distance between what I consider as my "self" and what I present publically in this journal.
Which also speaks to the other mental train I've been driving in circles around the yard.
So, here's the deal: I'm falling apart. Well, we all are; I'm just in bit more of an advanced stage than everyone else my age. My priorities have been fucked up because I've not been making my health as much as a priority as it needs to be. I'm not going anywhere anytime soon, and everything is controllable by willpower, diet, exercise, and medicine, but there aren't things that are going to go away on their own. It happens, you know, you stop being nineteen and indestructable.
The outward display of all this is that I've been dull. Not conversationally dull, but rather my brain can't quite make synaptic connections like it used to. I have a harder time finding the energy and power to create than I used to. I'm still dreaming -- which is good, they are as weird and colorful as ever -- it is just the conscious periods are marred by static and intractability. Which isn't good.
What Katsumoto and Algren seek in The Last Samurai is the assurance that their lives have been worth living, that they haven't just breathed and eaten and shit their requisite number of days before becoming worm food. It's not that they must do great things, but they must do something which they can look back upon and say, "Yes, that was enough."
Frank Miller once wrote: "This would be a good death. But not good enough."
Melissa wanders through the office and reads this over my shoulder. She has one edit because she dislikes me saying this the way I do. "You COULD fall apart," she whispers to me. And she's right. As mantras go, "you could fall apart" is much better.
Flicker, flicker. This flame is not out yet. And, in the end, what will I say about it? What will I tell Solomon when he is old enough to look at his dad and ask: why should I be proud of you?