On Beginnings

The messiness of beginnings always arouses feelings of uncertainty. D. Graham Burnett calls this uncertainty a messy and startling hubbub. Michel Serres speaks of headwaters; the birth of flows which resemble noise. James Joyce, perhaps most famously, recounted his birth and continual (re?)-creation. We are given many opportunities to fill space, or step-aside; the sum of these decisions results in the creation of time.

The Rum Diaries examines the creation of Paul Kemp. An adaptation of a similarly-named novel by Hunter S. Thompson, we wonder to what extent this is a a recounting versus a fictionalization of the Good Doctor's younger years. But if we have learned anything from Thompson (and Jann Wenner hopes we have) it is that the truth is an arrival of the reporter and the reader; an emergent creation of spirit and event. If "turbulence is an intermediate state between redundant order and pure chaos" (Serres 1995), then life is lived amongst turbulence. We create ourselves and the world between the known, which helps to guide us, and the unknown, which we pursue into the distance. In other words: the creation of time.

Movie Stars in Space!

Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity sets the familiar faces of Sandra Bullock and George Clooney adrift above the Earth. Wheeling freely around the shuttle Explorer, our own minds take flight with them. What would it be like to feel the effects of weightlessness, to at once glance across the Sahara and contemplate the ice-caps? Space. Into the reaches of dreams.

Such dreamy-eyed reflections are necessary because Cuaron too relies upon them to hook us in. Feeling the kinship of common humanity within the barren vacuum: like those courageous astronauts, we too are looking for purchase, something to grab a hold of. But of course, it all goes terribly wrong.

Alone. Stranded. Beyond all vestiges of hope. Death closing in fast.

That grim friend has already smiled upon too many. A survivor's pangs demands a body count. But why this woman? That's the crux really. Woe to he who could not identify with his fellow man - even in a vacuum. Nevertheless: what about Sandra Bullock demands our fealty? So we summon our common humanity to invest in survival - so what?

When Tom Hanks was lost at sea on Christmas Eve in Cast Away he was able to, over an hour, draw us into the vivid world of one. With Sandra Bullock racing against the clock (and the oxygen, and the fire and Russian space debris) we too are scarcely left with time to breathe - maybe that's the point. Nevertheless we are left with what often feels like simply being chased by a rolling boulder. Woman desperately trying to escape, and survive, circumstance. The fierce urgency of circumstance.

Yet the thread is lost at the precise moment common humanity takes over. No, that's wrong. It is revealed that the thread was never achieved. Are there angels in our midst? Dense apparitions? Light-headedness? What is drawn to save lonely man? It could simply remain unclear. Worse: it is realized as uninteresting. That is a vexation which creates distance. In the paradoxical claustrophobia of space the one thing that cannot be abided is such distance.

Beautiful, certainly. A woven tapestry hung in front of us.

If we are not all astronauts, what then, is a movie star in space?