Another Novella–Movie Group

Who are we? Who am I?

The stories we read, hear and see provide us with narratives of people’s lives—where they came from and how they lived. They are meaningful to us to the extent that we can relate them to our own experiences.

The stories that affect us the most, however, are the ones we tell about ourselves. Our own narratives become who we are in a very real sense.

Psychologists tell us that our memories—how we remember the past—shape our very perception of ourselves as people. We are more affected by how we remember our experiences than we were by those same experiences at the time.

It’s a truism that we are never finished. Our stories continue, and continue to evolve as narratives.

This is a story about a man who cannot quite remember something that was very important to him.

The Movie Group is a real group (probably one of many), an informal group that meets regularly to watch a film together and talk about it later. In this story, most of the movies mentioned are real movies, attended by the Movie Group. They were selected only for relevance to the story.

Otherwise, this story is fictional. Characters and events are not intended to represent any real persons or events (including the members of the real Movie Group). Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

Movie Group is available from Amazon.com, either in paperback or Kindle version.

Hallelujah for The City of New Orleans

Music affects me, sometimes unexpectedly. I clearly remember the first time I was aware of the moto perpetuo section of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. The familiar work was playing on our stereo and I was doing something I can’t remember now, when that passage just grabbed me. I began to really listen to it and to feel it. I suppose it was partly, at least, the regularity of the tempo, but even after fifty years it still demands my attention when it appears. The wiring of my brain carries its traces as indelibly as my own name.

A couple of decades later, Arlo Guthrie’s “The City of New Orleans” played as a video on the San Francisco public television station, and it grabbed me the same way. Suddenly, I was immersed in the music. A pop music piece by Steve Goodman that went along with all the nouveau-folk music of the Sixties, its lyrics and tune melded into something powerful for me—the rhythm of the train ride, even the mournful sounds suggesting a distant horn/whistle—amounted to a nostalgia for a passing part of American culture. And an emotional hook that has never left me.

Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” actually written thirty years ago, didn’t really come to my attention until just a couple of years ago when somehow I got a free copy of K D Lang’s version at the Vancouver Winter Olympics stored into my iTunes library. Her haunting delivery grabbed me the same way—I couldn’t experience anything else while she sang. That led me to a lot of Internet searching for the lyrics and for the stories behind it. Cohen’s emotional depths sometimes leave me scratching my head, but that tune and his equally suggestive “Suzanne” always stop me to listen and feel. And play over and over in my head.

Music bypasses our cognitive apparatus, even as we sometimes analyze what it is that we’re feeling, and perhaps dig out the details so that we can try to understand it. I happened to play Guthrie’s song the other day, and I keep waking up in the morning with it going on of its own accord in my head. Usually more given to analyzing than to feeling, I had to sit down and write about it. In the process, of course, I opened iTunes and listened again to it and to K D Lang, and in a moment will open Beethoven for another fix.

Something I Know

Written Thursday, October 24, 2013 12:18 PM

Generally, I feel that I've lived a pretty full life. I'm aware, of course that there are many things that I've never experienced. I can live (and die) with that.

Of my own experiences, foremost is that I have known the love of a woman.

I wish that for everyone.

Gut Responses and Rational Choices

The outrage this fall perpetrated by members of our Federal Government was for me a lesson: I want to know that my actions do not produce consequences that violate my deeper values. No matter how passionate I am about a particular issue, I don’t want to throw out the baby with the bath. I believe in the democratic process, which is often messy. But to risk catastrophe for the sake of an issue seems cynical and just plain stupid.

A recent review in The Atlantic magazine by Robert Wright (“Why We Fight—and Can We Stop?”) looks at the work of people who study why humans seem to drift into tribalism—the feeling of “it’s them or us”—when larger issues and commonly shared values are at stake. Some of it, at least, appears to come from the distant past, when people lived in isolated little groups. Identifying one’s self with one’s neighbors, perhaps threatened by outside groups, was an effective way to survive. In today’s world, we’re all too much mixed together for that to be fruitful any more. We’re all in this together, when it comes to living our lives in peace and pursuing prosperity. When a cell phone call to a friend in Nigeria is as easy as one to our next-door neighbor, our tribe—or religion or color or sexual preference—isn’t so important.

I live in a co-operative community. We in Centennial Farm are very fortunate to have had good, reasonable people on our boards of directors. They do not always agree on how to do things, but underlying their differences there seems always a sense of decency and compassion. They are, of course, elected by the community, and that says a lot for the decency and compassion among our fellow residents. Like them, we can disagree on details, and even make an effort to change things we feel are called for. Still, under those differences I feel a common sense of who we are as a community and the kind of place we want to live in.

In Centennial Farm we have two Phases, two governments, two boards, two political institutions. But we have one Clubhouse Committee, one Social Events Committee, one newsletter. Our Rules and Regulations—through the efforts of joint board meetings—are identical. Our by-laws are practically the same, even though they are legally distinct. There are no border crossings, no little signs to tell us we’re in Phase I or Phase II. (In my high school geography classes I learned that the United States and Canada share “the longest undefended border in the world.” I thought that was remarkable, even at that age.) You can see the border between Phase I and Phase II on a little map in our Directory of Residents, but there are no stakes in the ground. The Farm is one community. We all know it. And that knowledge makes a big difference in how we feel about the little problems that come up from time to time.

The big problem, Wright says, comes from the fact that we decide things more from the urges of our guts than we do from our rational minds, whether we know it at the time or not—and sometimes in spite of our knowing. I know that that second Grey Goose martini will make me loggy and unresponsive to people (I drink to feel good about being with others), but sometimes “more” seems “better.” Alas.

The problem goes from there all the way to whether or not we try to make other countries conform to our ideas of justice and compassion and cooperation and mercy. Winning is sometimes more satisfying than being at ease with differences. The old Peter Sellers movie, Dr. Strangelove portrays the problem well.

It’s tempting to wish that our federal governing representatives could think the same way. Yes, the desire for larger values is harder to hold onto with the huge difference in scale between my little community and the United States government. But human beings have that inborn urge to cooperate as well as the inborn urge to defend against “the others.” Whatever made us that way might be sitting and watching right now, waiting for us to choose.