Pragmatism to Sentimentalism

                Anyone, including Sontag herself, must agree that pictures can be immensely powerful.  Rooted in inspiration, vision, or worldly emotion, pictures can evoke jubilant and sadness, anger and forgiveness.

American tourist offers his shoes to a Brazilian orphan

      Put in the hands of a skilled artist, photographs can be symbols of the human experience.  Although the photographs "will always be some kind of sentimentalism"(Sontag 24-25), in no way are they a source of "mental pollution"(Sontag 39).

        If anything, photographs are a source of mental purity, to see truth in a world too often filled with thick smoke and empty mirrors. To me, even the most horrible of propaganda through pictures is beautiful, not in its message but in its delivery.

        To see black Olympians raise their fists in solidarity, or to see liberated Jews during the Holocaust, is humanity is its raw form. Undying                                                                                         emotions are weaved into the pictures, and they                                                                                       move me in their cause.

Lone pacifist during the Tiananmen Square Massacre

          Photographs have got me thinking, "filling[ing] the blanks...of the present and the past"(Sontag 9-10).  I can recall the first time I saw the picture on the right.  Still young then, I remember worrying for the man in the picture, how it was such a dangerous, and borderline suicidal, thing to do.

          But over time, as I better understood the man's motivations, I realized that for those who would be willing to sacrifice everything for their cause acts of extreme courage came naturally.  It was still dangerous, but it was dangerous and brave.  One peaceful man against an entire army.

Protester offers a flower in 1967 Vietnam War Protests

              So in the end, I disagree, Sontag. Pictures don't distort our attitudes, they purify them in a raw wave of emotion.  To see clearly a cause, whether it be political or just human, is a photograph's greatest gift. A picture isn't just worth a thousand words--its worth millions of stories, woven together into an beautiful and often terrible history.

~Chris

Tommy Smith and John Carlos in the Black Power Movement

Liberated Jewish Prisoners at Farsleben

Consider the Human

           Although I found David Foster Wallace's essay Consider the Lobster decidedly very interesting, I did have a number of objections to the main point made in the essay. Per my understanding, the essay was about getting readers to simply consider their choice of high-class shellfish, and its implications in the human rights community.

           But when I speak now, I speak for the lobster lovers out there (my parents, not so much myself)--for many of the readers of Gourmet magazine, thinking about the "moral status....and physical suffering"(Wallace) is precisely what they don't wish to think about when biting into the tasty flesh of their favorite shellfish.  After all, to consider the "rabbit-like death scream"(Wallace) of the lobster makes it much less appetizing and palatable--or if it doesn't change anything, you may want to get your appetite checked.

            My parents have been to the Maine Lobster Festival before, and their retelling differs greatly, in connotation and in image, of Wallace's.[1]  Furthermore, I've also been to the lobster-eating-festival-party state that is all of Maine.  I mean, there is lobster everywhere. To the point of gluttonous excess.  Two weeks of lobster meals later, the smell of lobster is enough to make you break into a cold sweat. Not the excited kind either. In a situation like that, avid lobster fans seem even less likely to agree with Wallace's call to gustatory action.

           Of course, this may have been the overarching purpose of Wallace's essay in the first place.  In which case I applaud its boldness: for its incredible apophasis, as well as for the biting irony of the essay's context.

~Chris

[1] If any of you ever go to Maine, be sure to try their blueberry soda, or blueberry pie along with your lobster. If there's a place where good taste-buds go when they die, we have our answer. Its one of those things where you think you've lived up until the moment you eat it, but then you realize you haven't.

For Hours they Dissolved

For Hours they Dissolved

            After reading the book Mrs. Dalloway, and watching The Hours, a movie that's largely based on the book... 

           I wondered why the director, Stephen Daldry, had chosen the title of the movie to be "The Hours".  Although the motif of time is incredibly prevalent through the book, there are a host of other aspects that seem more significant at first inspection.  Perhaps Daldry saw Mrs. Dalloway as a manifesto against the incessant marching of time itself.  Something in the way that Clarissa so often "pursed her lips when she looked in the glass"(Woolf 37)--in a fleeting, yet impressing, moment of introspection. Something in the the old lady's walk, through the rooms of a lifetime--that gifted Daldry his final vision.  But of all the evidence, this dialogue in the movie hit me the hardest.

            It might just be me, but when Richard said those lines, it was incredibly gut-wrenching.  His words stood for the bitter nature of his personal infliction, and they also hinted at the shattered pieces in all the characters--Clarissa's mortality, Woolf's mental isolation, among others. They conveyed that no matter how comforting the characters can be to one another, and no matter how much they promise to hold "parties" to fill the void--they are ultimately alone to face their suffering for eternity.

           If anything, the movie granted me new understanding of the leaden circles.  For as long as the clock strikes over cloudy London, the "leaden circles"(Woolf 4) weigh down on their victims, binding them to cruel reality.

~Chris

Mrs. Dalloway's Party

             This week, we finally finished Mrs. Dalloway!

              Reading those last few pages, I had a flashback to the scene in the movie, Les Miserables, during the repose.  In the movie, all of the characters, good and bad, alive and dead, return in a dream-like scene.  They sing the last lines of the song, a reprise of "Do You Hear the People Sing", and their voices ring out from behind imaginary barricades.  By bringing these characters together, the movie finally brings together symbols of unity and revolution.

              During the party scene of Mrs. Dalloway, I had a similar feeling.  Finally, characters like Dr. Holmes, Clarissa, Peter, Hugh, and Lady Bruton come together. Even characters like Sally, until now fixated into memories in the past, "reprise" their roles in the present. And just as a passed Jean Valjean looks on proudly from the crowd, Clarissa watches over the party, pondering over the notion that "If it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy"(Woolf 184).  But there isn't all pride and happiness in this quote, and in Mrs. Dalloway's reunion. Clarissa thinks about this "young man [who] had killed himself"(Woolf 184), Septimus, and wonders if his death was the best option.  She thinks that through death, Septimus's societal pressures are relieved, unlike the most superficial of English society.  I compare this event to the death of the French revolutionaries in Les Miserables.  Like Septimus, they gave up their lives struggling against authority.

              Perhaps the aim of Virginia Woolf, like Director Tom Hooper (of les mis), shared some key components.  They both seeked to bring together their characters to create a sense of union in their work's final moments. They both juxtaposed characters good and evil, hinting that in the end, these conflicting forces in society remained inseparable, and were bound to struggle eternally.  But perhaps most importantly, both artists suggest that in the end, there is hope for humanity, despite the pain of the world.
~Chris

It's About Time

"'The time, Septimus,' Rezia repeated. 'What is the time?'"(Woolf 70)

          As I read Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, I can't help but draw an unlikely connection to these characters from their struggle to grapple with time.  In the book, time, as an overarching motif, heals and wounds: it makes for a more introspective Clarissa, and also creates a more broken Septimus.  Taking this immense polarity off the page, I began to see the entire spectrum of effects time could have, and already has had on my life.

          From my earliest moments, time seemed to be an exploration.  I would dream and wonder, of the day so many years later, when I would finally take my first drive as a race car driver; when I would take my first flight, my first spacewalk, high in the sky.  Time seemed to be a promise, always there to be fulfilled.

         But just like the Big Ben striking, an ambivalence to the effects of time hit me first like "a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable"(Woolf 4). My first day at school, a first of a mundane many, struck me as endless. How many days left until I can put on the spacesuit for the first time? Months? Years?  The idea of time became magnificently double-edged, as I lay fascinated but fearful.
         Like the characters, though, the cold reality of time finally served to teach me.  Clarissa sees time as an endless march, and Septimus sees it as stream of endless, haunting reminders.  Time was "frail, quivering...an ancient spring spouting from the earth"(Woolf 80), and it constantly conveyed to me my own mortality; but for the first time, time didn't seem quite like a sword.

         Instead, time was more a mirror, reflecting back to you what you already know. It reminds you of a state of being, in all the ecstatic, and in all the distraught.  It is biased but at the same time unbiased, letting your own attitudes create your own self-perception.  Paradoxically, it is by showing you your own psyche that time creates change.

        Time constantly gives us the choice to create ourselves anew, positively, or negatively.
~Chris