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Harold And Maude

‘Harold and Maude’ is one of my favorite movies of all time, in exactly the same way that I thought getting a red sports car would change my sex life. The time has come to lay the old myths to rest.

Please bear with me. This ‘blog might not make a lot of sense to someone who hasn’t seen ‘Harold and Maude.’ It should be noted that my reaction to the movie isn’t unique. I’ve talked to other folks who identified strongly with it.

When I was 23, I was up in the middle of the night, being a depressed insomniac. There was a movie on TV, and it was about a weird young man of indeterminate age, and his romantic affair with a 79-year-old woman. I identified strongly with the kid, the Harold of the title. The resonances and parallels were eerie.

I was going to see a shrink at the time, and these were the only times I felt free from whatever it was that confined me to my parents’ house. I identified my shrink with Maude, because she would say thought-provoking things, and treat me in a way that expanded my experience. We did not have an affair of any kind, but there was a certain sifu/student relationship which developed. Or perhaps I imagined it.

There were the times when my parents tried to encourage me to get out more, to quit isolating myself in a world of my own making. Go to school. Go to church functions. Visit friends. “Tell me, Harold. Do you have any friends?” “No.” “None at all?” Certainly, my parents can’t be faulted for wanting to help me in these ways, but they just didn’t fit. I felt that they should fit, and couldn’t understand why they didn’t. Of course I understand now, but that’s getting ahead of the story.

So I’m sitting there watching this movie, identifying with it, jazzed that someone made a movie about strange people like me. And there’s some hope. There’s a glimmer of a notion that maybe I’ll find a Maude somewhere, not necessarily to have sex with, but to help introduce me to the life I thought I could never lead. I was Harold. I wanted Maude, even if it meant I’d end up driving my car off a cliff at the end of the movie.

I became interested in Cat Stevens. I wore a wool jacket when I went out sometimes, so I’d be a little overdressed. If I could have gotten a Jaguar I would have. “It’s a PRESENT!” Luckily I found some balance about it, but there was one time when I went to a coffeehouse in the middle of the night, and there was this total stranger of a young woman, and she came up to me, where I was sitting alone at a table reading a book, and she said, “I don’t know if this will mean anything to you, but you remind me of Harold from that movie ‘Harold and Maude.’ I just wanted to tell you that.” And then she left.

And thinking back over the past few years, those days have been over for a long time, but only now, thinking about it consciously, can I say it:

I’m not Harold any more.

I have the movie on tape, of course. I can recite it. I know all the dialog and all the.. moments. Maybe I’ve reached a critical mass in terms of how many times you can watch a movie and still enjoy it, or maybe it’s true and I’m not Harold any more. Or maybe both.

Maybe I’ve rerun that part of my life for the world enough times that the world wants to see something different.

I still hold Maude in high regard, though, and if she comes around I’ll comingle with her sagging breasts and flabby buttocks any day. But, I became a little attached to that movie, and life has acted as a gentle reminder: Here today, gone tomorrow, so don’t get attached to things. Now, with that in mind…

Here’s a question, and I hope you can answer it.

Where’s Dick?

Have YOU seen Vice President Dick Cheney since his November 15th interview with the BBC and speech to the Federal Society Annual Convention? No one else has, either.

Lately I’ve been contemplating what brings people together. And I don’t mean stuff like a mob scene or an ad campaign or a rock show or a restaurant. That’s just about mutual interest.

I’m talking about Person A and Person B and they end up together, and they start thinking about how powerful the connection between them might be. They think about healing and/or comittment and/or love and/or cohabitation. Stuff like that.

So I think there are two distinct levels at which people co-create these situations. There’s a cultural level, and this is a level where people understand that they’re supposed to pair off and raise families, and they’re supposed to do it in a certain way, with certain expectations and with certain outlooks. This gives the proceedings some structure, which can be as helpful as it can be stifling. This level is where people do what is expected of them, and I don’t mean to demean it, if that’s what I sound like, but I do find it horribly boring.

The other level is, for lack of a better metaphor, chemical. You put two hydrogens and an oxygen in the same vicinity and you end up with water. You put Person A and Person B together and you end up with AB. It’s inevitable. It’s somehow natural, even if it flies in the face of social expectation, or even what a person wants. In a way, it’s out of control; it happens, and it can’t not happen. It doesn’t have to be about love or sex or romance, it’s just a function of potentials being actualized. It’s love of a different sort; it’s an intimacy that happens without bidding or preparation. At least, without conscious preparation. More on this later.

I once read a book by a guy called Antero Alli, called ‘The Akashic Record Player.’ It’s a novel about, among other things, Feng Shui terrorists (who break into your house and re-arrange the furniture for the better). But it’s mainly a love story, or at least a chemistry story. The author posits that the Earth is a living being that lives off of our interactions, and when this chemical sort of intimacy happens, it’s a culinary delicacy. The implication is that we can make our situation on Earth better by finding and cultivating these sorts of interactions. I like this notion of the planetary consciousness sending us to find each other so she can get a tasty snack.

But there’s something missing from that metaphor, and it’s this: We change potential over time, and I think that this mutable nature is more important than snack food for Earth, and is almost as important as the relationship itself. Relationships mutate, too, because they change us.

Looking at my past relationships, it appears that I only really learn through repetition. I end up beating my head against the same general brick wall, thinking it will be different. It could be a function of whatever autism I might have, or it could be that I’m just a slow learner. I think Momma Earth is looking for some snack food from me, but hasn’t been able to line me up properly for a strong approach vector. She spins me towards the pair of hydrogen atoms, but I just miss, and no water slacks her thirst.

Or maybe a better metaphor would be someone driving a huge sedan trying to get into a tiny parking spot, having to do a ten-point turn. Back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and, OK, now! You can’t get to the now without the back and forth, due not to your own inability, but because of physics. In that light, a ten-point turn is remarkably skillful.

Hopefully that light won’t fade for a while.

I went to see ‘A Beautiful Mind’ tonight, which is about a schizophrenic math genius. It’s not a bad movie, but also not a great one. It only trivialized the plight of delusional schizophrenics a little bit, for forgivable reasons.

And I was thinking about those reasons. They’re predicated on the notion that this movie is not for the schizophrenic, but about them. In the way that nature shows on TV aren’t for nature, but about it; they trivialize nature by trying to show you its grandeur.

And that reminded me of this great web site:

The Institute for the Study of the Neurologically-Typical (ISNT)

(ISNT is a joke you might not get if you’re not autistic. Cut to the chase with this page.)

Some folks have expressed concern that perhaps I’m in the midst of emotional turmoil, given the last few posts. And while I’m flattered that anyone’s paying attention , I’d like to remind everybody that sometimes I just neglect to put the smilies on the ends of things.

The only thing I hate about myself at the moment is that I wasn’t able to talk about what I wanted to talk about in terms other than Buddhism and particle physics. Those are two topics that have been done to death, by myself and others.

Other moments evoke other self-hatreds, but those other self-hatreds are similarly-oriented. Like the realization that if my life were a movie it would be boring. Or the notion that the way I deal with some things would be comical if it weren’t so pathetic. I just posses the ability to deliver those kinds of pronouncements in a deadpan way, to where someone who doesn’t know me better would think I was suicidal or something.

I’m not. Being hard on myself is kinda funny, in the way that Monty Python sketch about the fat guy who continues to puke for ten minutes is funny. “Heh. Look. I’m being hard on myself again. Get the bucket.”

Sometimes the critical part of me is right. In terms of writing an essay for public consumption I’m totally content with, sure, it might have been better to use some other set of analogies. In terms of just writing a ‘blog, however, I’m happy with it. I did like the ‘history is in the now’ part, and that’s the central theme of the thing, so there it is.

And I was intoxicated.

Yes, that’s me, overly complicated and dense. Particle physics and Tibetan Buddhism? What’s this guy smoking?

History

People are the lessons they need to learn. What are we but a collection of ignorances? We learn things and those things are right at the time, but wrong in the present. What do we do but learn new lessons based on old ignorances?

If you want to think of people as information, and it’s not a bad analogy, then our minds are like computer programs that sort this information. The program is self-modifying; the way it sorts the information leads to new ways to sort new information. We program ourselves by learning lessons.

In the past, I’ve made mistakes I really regret. And I’ve done the right thing, and lived to regret it. And I’ve also been happy and pleased with what I’ve done, sometimes. Sometimes the happiness and regret overlap. Can the success of my self-computer program be judged by happiness or regret?

I think my program does what it does, and whatever it is that assigns happiness or regret is along for the ride. That judgement is just another way to sort through the information, and the ability to reach such a judgement, that is, to look at life, in memory and as it is now, and see what’s there, and make it mean something, that ability is the measure of success.

There’s a thangka (iconic painting) in our basement room, and it’s of Manjushri, or at least the Tibetan version of Manjushri. I can’t remember his name. Manjushri is a Buddhist saint. He’s depicted with a book and a sword, usually a flaming sword. Knowledge cleaves information. Wisdom cleaves understanding. Dharma cleaves bullshit.

I’m trying to understand the past. There was a moment in time when something amazing happened, and part of me constantly wants to recreate that moment. It’s as gone as a subatomic particle; the act of trying to find it means you can’t know where to look.

She was wonderful, in a strict meaning of the word. I wondered a lot; that was part of the charm. Physicists have assigned the word ‘charm’ to describe the interaction between quarks. There’s the B quark, and the T quark. Beauty and Truth. She was beautiful. She only told a certain kind of truth.

Who was I then? What was I supposed to learn? What did I invite to myself in her? The suffering of unrequited devotion, the madness of laying out your own trap, and then being snared by it. I wanted. I wanted so much that I could convince myself that it was real. That’s another thing physicists do. They think up new subatomic particles, and then they find them. Is it magic? Manjushri cuts you from the snare, from your own tethers, lets you jettison the past. His darma is the real darma, the Real.

And if Manjushri weren’t real, why, we’d have to invent him so he could remind us of all these things. Self-modifying computer program. What books have you been reading lately? What movies you been watching?

History’s in the now, just like everything else. You can’t watch a movie in the past, you can only watch it now. History works the same way. You play it for yourself. The memory is the VCR on which you play history, except it’s doesn’t have to be the same movie twice. The lighting’s different, the perspective, the dialog has different inflection and meaning. One time you watch it, and she’s astonishing and he’s romantic, and the next time you watch she’s just toying with him in his naivete. Either way it’s beautiful, and either way it’s true.

So what’s the risk in forgiving myself for not knowing? And what’s the risk in thinking I know now?

In the immortal words of P-Funk:

Funk ‘em, just to see the look on their face.

(Why I bring this up now is anyone’s guess.)

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