1. A year ago, when I had my annual eye examination, Dr. Miller could see that cataracts were beginning to form in my eyes. Today, a year later, the vision in my right eye has deteriorated quite a bit and the time has come to have cataract surgery. Before too long, I will get a call from a scheduler to set things in motion for the eventual surgery.
I thought a lot today about how much trust I'm having to put in medical professionals these days. I am trusting that any number of these professionals have my best interests in mind as I seek to be listed for a kidney transplant at Sacred Heart, as I think about surrendering myself to the operating table, to the transplant surgeon, to receive a transplant, should that time come. I am trusting (and have trusted) any number of other internists, nurse practitioners, radiologists, cardiologists, phlebotomists, a future pulmonologist, and nephrologists to accurately test my body, insightfully interpret their findings, and help me determine the best way to go to help me live better. I put a huge amount of trust in my dentist when I had extensive dental work done and I invested a great deal of trust in my dental hygienist when I consulted with her regarding what she thought of the treatment plan I submitted to. And now I will be giving myself over to an ophthalmologist to help me see more clearly and, I hope, see better at night.
Some days all of this is overwhelming. I do my best to rationally contemplate my mortality, to keep in mind that with aging comes deterioration, that this is an inevitable fact of life that I have limited control over. Surrendering to the medical profession also means I've decided to try to extend my lifespan. I am putting a great deal of trust in the hope that with clearer vision, improved dental health, and possibly an improved kidney that not only might my life last longer, but it will also afford me some degree of happiness in the enjoyment of my marriage to the Deke, of my closeness with Christy and Carol, of my many friends, and the enjoyment of my continuing pursuit of experiencing beauty in the world and nourishing the life of my mind.
2. I ended the day by going next door and watching the Zags play the Texas A&M Aggies with Christy and Everett. Several Gonzaga players performed very well: Zach Norvell, Jr. is kind of a cardiac player, a streaky shooter, who can give me mild heart attacks when his shot is off, but then can test the strength of my heart as I get excited when suddenly his shots begin to drop, usually in bunches; I love seeing how much Rui Hachimura's offensive game has diversified and how his patience has grown as he works to get off the shot he wants and as the variety of ways he can score has grown; Brandon Clarke is proving to be a strong player on the inside, both on offense and defense, and I like his persistence, his willingness to do the unspectacular work of playing strong defense, rebounding, and scoring inside; I also enjoy seeing how Corey Kispert has matured between his freshman and sophomore years and is able to score from long range and also create shots around the rim. Gonzaga's team looks strong, quick, unified, and, at times, explosive. I'm eager to see how they perform against the stiffer competition they will face next week at the Maui Invitational, beginning with their game against Illinois.
3. Before I went over to Christy and Everett's to watch the Zags, I watched the movie Blow Up (1966).
Not long into the movie, I realized this was not a movie driven much by plot -- and it makes sense that it would not be. It focuses on a short span of time in the life of a fashion photographer, Thomas, who is accomplished in his work but leads a disconnected, alienated, barely purposeful life. He drifts. The movie drifts. Much in Thomas' life is casual -- sex is casual, he casually gets high, he drives in circles, somewhat aimlessly in his Rolls convertible, and he treats the models he photographs with casual contempt. They are barely human to him and disposable.
Whereas All About Eve was shot mostly on sound stages and brought a stylized script to life, Blow Up is a much less structured movie, shot in location around parts of London, and the characters speak artlessly, naturally, and really have very little on their minds. Thomas does absurd things. He buys an airplane propeller at an antique store because, well, why not? Two aspiring models persist in wanting him to photograph them and he never takes their pictures, but goes with the flow in his studio and they have a lifeless orgy together. It's clear to me that writer and director Michaelangelo Antonioni invites us into hedonistic corners of London in the mid-1960s was a way of exploring how meaningless and exhausted the lives of the characters populating this particular world are.
So, the movie requires the viewer to make a commitment to seeing almost nothing happen and to see little connection between the things that do occur. It's not an exciting movie. It's a study of ennui. Ennui lacks kick. It's draining. The world is full of color and occasional music, but it's mostly window dressing for a milieu of boredom and burn out.
(I am now going to discuss some plot details and the movie's ending. This is a spoiler alert.)
If this movie has a center, here's where to find it: Thomas goes into a park and photographs a secret love affair. Back at his studio, he blows up the images and discovers an apparent murder -- I'm leaving the details vague on purpose. Temporarily, this discovery snaps Thomas out of his stupor. Developing and cropping some of the pictures he took, blowing them up, examining details in the pictures with a magnifying glass, possibly discovering a crime animates him, but he's not really concerned about the murder as a violation against another person nor is the corpse a source of shock or outrage to him. When he finds the corpse, he regrets not having his camera. He wants a picture of the corpse. It will increase the (shock) value of an art book he is creating.
Blow Up flirts a bit with becoming a thriller, a kind of existential who done it. But, for Thomas, the discovery of an apparent murder and the corpse becomes another island in his life to drift onto and soon drift off of and as the crime and corpse, which was gone when he returned to photograph it, drift out of his mind, the question of how this man died drifts out of the movie.
Near the scene of the crime, the movie brings a group of young people back into the movie who have appeared at the movie's beginning and periodically throughout the movie. They are activists. They are costumed, heavily made up, and are out "RAG-ging", that is, out creating scenes with noise and theatrics and protest signs as a way of raising money for charities. (RAG is an acronym for "raising and giving".) This group of boisterous fundraisers takes a break from asking for money and two members of the group mime a tennis match. Thomas watches and involves himself. This miming struck me as a metaphorical way to conclude the movie and solidify an idea it had been exploring. This had been a movie of what T. S. Eliot called in "The Hollow Men" paralysed force and gesture without motion. We've seen Thomas move through this movie miming his life, gesturing, not really moving, generating little force, living a kind of paralysis.
The movie's last shot is of Thomas alone in a field of green as the camera moves up, up, and away. Thomas grows smaller, the expanse around him grows larger, and we are left with an image of Thomas' isolation and estrangement.
One last thought: it's been a long time since I've watched the movie River's Edge. But if my memory serves me at all correctly, it, too, was a movie about estranged youth -- Generation Xers maybe? The characters in this movie are also confronted with a murder -- I believe it was committed by one member of the group against another -- and a corpse -- and, as in Blow Up, these characters, if I remember correctly, are numb to the gravity of the death. I'll have to watch the movie again some time, but thinking about these two movies together made me think about how alienation, numbness, purposelessness, drifting, and disconnection are not experiences tied only to any single generation. In other words, Blow Up is not so much a movie about the "Swingin' London" of the mid-1960s and River's Edge is not so much a movie about Generation X so much as both movies are about the recurring reality of the human capability to live purposelessly, to drift, to become alienated from that in life which gives it vitality and from feeling the shock of awful things that happen. I'm not sure either movie really examines the cause of this alienation, but both movies unfold what kinds of things can happen as a result.
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