Where have you gone,
My light and my friend?
Are you still near
Is it ever truly the end?

I want to see what you see
And hear what you hear.
I want to join you in the ether,
But I'm afraid I'm stuck right here.

To live without your voice,
To walk without your presence near
To swim alone against the cruel tide
It's just too much, my dear.

I stumble through the vapor
That has become my day.
I eat I sleep I talk I live
I can't go on this way.

No joy, no smile,
No confidences shared.
No plans for a future
My soul has been laid bare.

Where have you gone, my favorite ghost
What stories could you tell?
What friends have you seen again,
What wonders have befell?

Stay close by and watch me please
My dearest, dearest mother
That way when we meet again,
We'll be sure to recognize the other.

Review of "The Forgotten"

It's kind of ironic that I just wrote something for this blog called, "The Power of Memory", and then today I watched a movie called "The Forgotten" which ostensibly deals with just that topic, in particular the power of a mother's memory of her child. The coincidence seemed too coincidental to ignore, so I decided to write about the movie today.

Telly (?) Paretta is a woman dealing with the terrible loss of her son, who died in a plane crash fourteen months ago. She is in therapy and is on the surface at least, making some progress in dealing with her loss. She looks at his pictures less each day and is finally going to go back to work. Then for some reason, all reminders of her son Sam are totally eradicated from her life. The photos, the videotapes she has made of him; everything. At first she thinks her husband has done it to force her to forget Sam, but then he and her psychiatrist reveal an unthinkable truth to her; there never was a Sam, and her memories of him are all what the psychiatrist calls "paramnesia" (sp?). They reveal that she had a miscarriage fourteen months ago and she has constructed memories of Sam in order to deal with the stress of that event.

Telly is not convinced. She knows she had a son, and sets off on her own to prove it. Hooking up with another man whose daughter died on the same plane, and whose memory she forcibly brings to the surface, she begins a dangerous investigation into who or what is responsible for the erasing of her son's memories from all around her, all the while pursued by federal agents and shadowy figures that hint at something paranormal in Sam's fate.

This is yet another case of a movie that almost makes it over the top as a successful psychological thriller, but just misses due to some of its narrative choices. All the elements are there for a really engaging story about memory, loss, and belief. Julianne Moore is very convincing, as usual, portraying the kind of desperate determination to get to the bottom of things we expect from a modern female hero. This is no "Rosemary's Baby" (though there are elements of that film here, to be sure) and she is no Mia Farrow. She takes decisive action in her quest for the truth, enlisting allies and refusing to be talked out of her position. And the first half of the film navigates quite nicely between the possibility that Moore is correct and the chance that she really is just unravelling. And even if she is correct and there is something more than meets the eye, we don't quite know what that something is.

Unfortunately, about half way through the film seems determined to telegraph its true intentions and it loses the nice balance between the real and unreal it had built up. What started out as a truly open ended investigation into what is real and what is illusion becomes a suprisingly routine supernatural thriller with two many chase scenes thrown in. All the actors, Moore, Gary Sinise (as the psychiatrist), Anthony Edwards as the husband, Alfred Woodward in a thankless role as a sympathetic cop, and even Dominic West as the retired hockey star/dad Telly recruits, are fine and give their all, but the script just kind of winds down the mystery and creativity too early and leaves us with another "two and a half stars out of four" exercise that could have been so much better.

Wouldn't it have been more effective to keep the suspense going right up until the end, and only then revealing what the truth behind Sam really was? I love to be kept guessing, and though I do want some kind of answers and dramatic payoff, when it's presented this early I just kind of start going into a dormant state and watch the clock until the film ends. And I think they missed the boat a bit by not playing up the "mother's love of child" issue and all the psychological implications therein. This thread was touched on only slightly in the last half, and instead they placed too much emphasis on running away from all the various agencies and antagonists. I would have liked to have seen more quiet moments of thoughtful conversation about reality, memory and how the two sometimes are in conflict.

Then again, maybe I'm just getting old.

I'd recommend it for a rental, but wouldn't want to pay theater price. It's close, but no cigar.

April 14, 2005 "Ether"

What happens to what we are? I mean, what we really are. I know what happens to our bodies. I know what happens to our money, our posessions, etc. I'm talking about the animating force that we are, the thing that lives on in other people's memories, the thing that touches the world and changes it for the better or (most cases, and) the worse.

Scientists, skeptics and atheists would say that all that we are is contained in our body. When it ceases to be, so do we. Hmm, maybe, but I doubt it. It's so easy just to believe in what you can see and hear and feel. The more challenging task, and I would argue, the braver position, is to be able to see and think beyond the physical and look into "the real". By that, I mean the intuitive reality that we all feel but cannot really touch or confirm with any of our present operating senses.

We have all had the experience, for example, of thinking of someone and then having them immediately call soon afterwards. And I would bet that most of us also have at least one story about a strange coincidence regarding the death of a loved one, i.e. timing, something prophetic the loved one said or did, etc. Many of us have even had the experience of seeing something they can't really identify using any known classification. It could be a UFO, a spiritual sighting, or some kind of strange, unknown animal. Whatever the case, my point is that most of us have the sense that there is more to our reality than is readily accessible to our current senses, but have no proof, or means to provide proof, of its existence.

That is where faith comes in I suppose. But I think faith is often too soft a term to describe belief. Faith conjures up images of sheep fawning at the knee of a master, or primitives bowing in awe of the thunder. I guess I like the term "belief" more because it is at least grounded in something. Belief, to me, connotes, evidence on one side and counter evidence on the other, and someone making an informed decision to choose between the two. The power is in the individual, and is not imposed from without. We are free to believe whatever we want, and that is an important distinction. Now one could argue that one is also free to have faith in whatever you want, but again, faith seems to connote belief without corresponding accountability. Faith always seems more like "wishful thinking" than belief, which places higher demands upon the believer, at least in terms of responsibility. If I have faith that my loved one will get better, that seems to ignore the possibility that they might not. Belief says, "I believe my loved one will get better", which to me requires a bit more; research, consultation, mediation and prayer. Faith seems more like a get out of jail free card than a hard fought for spiritual conviction.

All of which brings me back to my original question, where does what we are go? Is it enough to say that we live on in the minds of the people who remember us, in the physical and emotional changes our lives have brought to the world? Or is there truly something more, some kind of essential "us" that slips between the bonds of this earth and resides in a realm we cannot reach? Obviously, no one on this planet can definitively answer that question. I guess for me the most important thing is to keep an open mind. I don't presume to know the answers to much of anything, let alone this age old question, but I do leave myself open to all possibilities and listen with interest to stories that seem to point to evidence of life after death. Can it all be just wishful thinking, humanity's inability to accept its eventual non-existence? Am I projecting my own hope that someday I will see my loved ones again, so many of whom have already left this plane? I recognize that as a possibility, while at the same time noting that millions of others have had experiences that lend credence to the belief in life after death.

In the TV show, "The X-Files", Fox Mulder has a poster that says "I want to believe". I guess that's true of me, as well. I won't believe out of sheer need, but there is a real hope that there is something more, something beyond this life. This theme informs much of my thoughts, my writing, my day to day living. I don't think it all ends at the grave. But the larger question involves what form that afterlife takes. Are we angels, ghosts, viewers of this reality through a dark, misty glass wall? Do we see, hear, feel, talk? Do we have bodies, or are we just pure energy, pure thought? These are the questions that haunt me, and challenge me.

None of us will ever know the answers to these questions, at least not until we die. The quest to understand them, however, is something that we cannot avoid in this life, no matter how futile that quest may seem. Perhaps the only way to find peace with our "unknowing" is to realize that we are all in the same philosophical boat, all seeking answers to the same questions and all doomed to have to wait for the answers.

April 13, 2005

In an effort to please my therapist, who insists that writers write every day (who would have guessed), I'm just going to jot some random stuff down. I don't have a theme or an overriding idea, just stuff.

April was and has been a terrible month for my family. My mom's mom died on April 5, 1961. She was born 95 years ago today, April 13th. My uncle Ernie died on April 13th, 1994 at the age of 86. And even though I hate to put this in the same category, my cat Peeper died on April 6, 1997, age unknown.

Sometimes I just get tired of fighting. My mom has been gone for nearly a month now, and I just feel like I am slogging through life, no purpose or energy, just kind of a blind, meaningless trudge like they did in Stephen King's novella, "The Long Walk". I get up, get dressed, go to work, eat, come home and do stuff, boring stuff, eat again and go to bed. It's kind of like I did before, except now there's no wind in my sails, no fire in my belly. I exist rather than live. I think of a dozen things a day I have to remember to tell Mom, only to remember quickly that I can't do that anymore, or that at least she can't answer when I tell her. I have bills, people to meet with, things to wash and matters to attend to. But to what end? At the end of it all, I am still alone and alone in a way that isn't likely to change very much. It's sad to think that I expect anyone else to be like my mom was to me, and I don't, really. It's just that after an entire lifetime of experiencing a certain kind of acceptance, love and security, you kind of get used to it. And you don't really know what to do in its absence. I can't look to others for that type of relationship, that's unrealistic. But I can't just deny that that has been a big part of what has made me who I am today; what do I do, then? Just sit and howl at the moon in agony? "Why hast though forsaken me?"

Decisions that I don't want to deal with beckon. Do I stay here, in this house, in this town, at this job? Do I go back to school? What for, exactly? Do I drown myself in activity, or do I fall back into my familiar pattern of introspection and brooding, and hope to decipher some type of meaning and direction from that effort? Most days all I REALLY want to do is just lie in bed and sleep. I don't even want to dream, because I dream of the way things were before and then waking up is so painful. It's like a splash of cold water on your face, or more like a hard punch to the gut to wake you up. My mom was security blanket; she used to say it was me and her against the world. She was right, I think. I just wish we both had had more allies because it was inevitable that when one of us was gone the other was going to be overwhelmed by the task of facing that world alone.

It's nice out tonight, maybe I'll take a walk. I love cool sunny nights. My mom got to where she did too. I'm a lot like my mom in a lot of ways. Most of the good things about me I got from my mom. That's not to say all my dad's stuff was bad; I attribute most of my bad qualities to no one other than myself. Everyone's parents screw them up a little and do right by them a little. It's unfair to blame too much of the way you are on them. God knows both my parents loved me, and tried their best to be good parents. That's a lot more than I can say for a lot of parents. I've heard the saying that 90 percent of life is showing up; my parents certainly showed up. They made me too big a part of their life, but I suppose that's preferable to having me be too little of their life.

Well, I gotta go pay some bills. Maybe I'll be back.

The Power of Memory

I remember thinking very clearly when I heard about it that Johnny Carson's passing was really a perfect example of a hallmark in time, a reminder of how different the world has become in just the short time since we saw him every day. He had only been off the air for about thirteen years, but it might as well have been a lifetime. It made me remember summer nights and Fridays on the couch, just letting the night melt away while my mom and I put the day to bed and finished it off with a nice relaxing mixture of comedy, interviews and escapism. It's the type of memory I guess we're all supposed to devalue now in this age where anything that happened earlier than yesterday is automatically dismissed as irrelevant nostalgia.

But I do not dismiss it, and not just because I am getting to that age where nearly everything old seems more attractive than everything new. There is a deeper, more powerful force at work here, and it is the force that transforms childhood, creates memories and in so doing, provides a template for a better future.

Mighty heady stuff for the old Tonight Show, you say? Well, maybe. But consider the largely ignored power of memory as it applies to this instance. Johnny Carson hosted "The Tonight Show" from 1962 to 1992, a time span that included some of the most volatile moments in American history. Vietnam, Watergate, the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK, Kent State, Watergate, the energy crisis, the Iran hostage crisis, the end of the cold war, the Gulf War. Through it all, no matter how bad our day went, Johnny was there at the end of it to metaphorically put us all to bed in a better mood, to make us think that tomorrow would be better. My personal memory of watching Johnny was mostly with my mom, as my dad had retired much earlier. It was a quiet time where Mom had a snack, or read quietly with Johnny on, and I laid sleepily on the couch and let the long, carefree day just kind of unwind into me. Johnny was smart, quick-witted, truly interested in his guests, and genuinely funny. It was like going to an oracle for truth at the close of an arduous journey; things would be OK, because Johnny made it feel like they would.

Is there anyone today that even remotely has the same effect on us? Letterman is probably the closest we have to Johnny in terms of sensibility and style, and yet even he seems remarkably self conscious and prickly compared to Carson. The rest, Leno, Conan et al, are really just copies of copy, unable to summon even a fraction of the style and grace that Johnny showed, choosing to emphasize their own personalities rather than let the comedy and the guests take center stage, as Johnny did. In doing so, they sacrifice that type of genuine connection and identification we all felt with Johnny.

So we are left with only nostalgia, drawing comfort only in the increasingly distant memory of how Johnny and his show made us feel. But is it truly "only" nostalgia? That is, does something that exists only in memory necessarily have less resonance than something that is occuring contemporaneously? Hardly. For me, the power of memory is that it reminds us (and empowers us) not just of how things were, but also of how they could be again, given sufficient effort. Johnny's hold on me is not just that he helped create some wonderful memories for me to draw upon, but also that he gave me an blueprint of how I would want my children to feel about the world at the end of a hard day; comforted, entertained, enlightened and always optimistic. The fact that he has been off the air for thirteen years, even the fact that he is now deceased, does not and cannot dim this ability.

Nor does this power, obviously, limit itself to "The Tonight Show". You could apply it to practically any show, any song, any cherished memory at all of a place you felt safe and protected. Far from being some sort of mental "recycle bin" where old irrelevant material just sits waiting to be permanently deleted, fond memories are in fact completely relevant source material upon which to draw to actualize one's own dreams. If a certain song made you feel happy, why not write a similar song that will make other people feel the same way? If a memory of a loving family that helped and supported each other is a positive part of your past, why not work toward creating the same type of environment in your own current family?

The past, no matter what is fashionable in contemporary thought, is not without purpose and importance. Through it our dreams and impressions of how reality can and should be are formed, and it is through the past that our future is effectively shaped. "The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson" may be long gone, but it's memory and the effect it had on all of us serves as strong evidence of the lasting power of all that we have experienced and all that we can dream.