HEAD IN THE CLOUDS

I've never lived in a place before where clouds touch the sky and the ground at one and the same time, but that's what happens here, in the mountains, in Baguio. Houses are nestled along a winding slope of mountain edge; the clouds, so close you can touch them, smell them, roll around and dwell in them, drift in and out and between the forest green of the tress and shrubs, dirt and rock. There was a moment, my first or second day here, driving down the highway, staring at the dwindling day through the passenger-side window, when I thought spotted fire. There was smoke everywhere, billowing and bragging its wares in drifting streams of off-shade white. Then I realized: Those are clouds, not smoke. The clouds mingle then merge with the land and the roads. They almost share the same space as us. We're neighbours with the infinite. We can live amongst the clouds and pretend that the real world cannot touch us here, that the clouds' mystical vapors can shield us and protect us from our own fragile selves.

BILL MURRAY IS A GOD -- AND SO ARE YOU

Groundhog Day is one of those films that I catch a few minutes of on cable every five or six years, never from the beginning, always in bits and pieces, and I'm reminded, each and every time, what an insightful movie it is. I saw it for the first time when I was in high school, and laughed at it, and enjoyed it, and forgot about it. Over the years it's gained a kind of cult popularity within spiritual and religious circles. It's not a movie that looks like a masterpiece; it looks, in fact, like what it is -- a Harold Ramis movie, directed in that competent comedy style by the guy who brought you Vacation and Club Paradise and Analyze This and Analyze That and Multiplicity and, lest we forget, Caddyshack. It's a mainstream comedy movie, shot as such, with nothing arty or pretentious about it. Given all that, I can also say that it's something close to brilliant.

You probably know the plot. Bill Murray (in a role not unlike the one he portrayed in the underrated Scrooged) plays a grumpy weatherman assigned to wait for the annual coming-of-the-groundhog one cold February morning in Punxsatawney, Pennsylvania. Only problem is, he can't escape the town; he can't leave; he wakes up each and every day and it's the same day, the day he got there, with everybody doing the same things and saying the same things and living out the same actions. He's stuck with them. He's stuck with himself.

Simple. A neat little fantasy twist that would make Richard Matheson or Rod Sterling or Stephen King proud. But it's not the hook that makes the movie; it's the metaphor. Here is a man who is not happy with his life or the people around him. His life is routine, boring, uneventful. The same shit happens, repeatedly. He can't escape it. He tries to escape it. No luck.

So what does he do? Tries to leave. When he can't do that, he tries to use his newfound knowledge about the rhythms of this one particular day to his own advantage; he learns about people's habits and moods and emotions, hoping that by knowing these, by using these, he can get people to love him. Doesn't work. So what happens? Frustrated, he tries to kill himself.

Even that doesn't work. And what's interesting is that the film clearly shows, after one suicide attempt, a few of the other characters commenting on his horrific truck crash. What does this mean? It means that the world does go on, without him; it means that other people can leave, grow, move on. It's himself that he's stuck with, and his own life. We are all the main actors in our own movie. I'm not entirely sure that Ramis had this existential offshoot in mind when filming that particular scene, so sly and subtle it is, but it works.

Even death can't claim him. He wakes, up again, in the same day, repeatedly.

Eventually, possibly out of sheer boredom and hopelessness, he begins to use his knowledge of the town and others to benefit the town and others. He starts doing everything for others instead of everything for himself. Instead of trying to impress the girl he loves, having given up on her ever coming around to his romantic point of view, he simply does good shit for those around him. Stuck in the same day, the same routine, he makes the best of it for those around him. After all, they, too, are entrapped in the same monotony; even so, he can make their lives better. Such selflessness thus causes the woman he loves to fall in love with him. Which causes him to magically, the next day, wake up, in a new day. Life has moved on, and he with it.

A simple story, really. The story of our lives, actually. Doing the same stuff day after day, trapped in routine, going nowhere. Trying to sideswipe such boredom by chasing after our own selfish desires will do nothing to alleviate such pain; only by inserting ourselves into others' lives and others' existences will we be to reach beyond ourselves. That's what the film is saying, in a comedic, Bill Murray-like way. It's utter unpretentiousness, its humor, its understated warmth and generosity-- that's what makes the film work as a better-than-average comedy, and it's also why so many Christians and Buddhists and Muslims have seen the film as embodying and embracing their own particular religious philosophy.

It's one of those movies that may, in fact, upon reflection, simplify and clarify and embody the process of living itself more clearly and succintly and empathetically than any other film I can think of.

"I'm a God," Bill Murray says in the film, "not the God. I don't think."

There it is, the crystalization of the whole film, of human existence, right there.

If there's a more concise philosophy of life and living and how to approach our own roles in an uncertain universe than that, I haven't heard it.

THE SKY ABOVE AND THE GROUND BELOW

Cancer is a lonely word, especially for an agnostic. Sitting in the oncology ward of the Baguio City Medical Centre, chatting with a friend of Helen's, a cancer survivor, a Christian, a believer, I feel shame at my own uncertainty. She is telling me that God saved her, that God healed her, that she was spared despite the doctor's certainty surrounding her supposedly terminal condition, and that Helen can be spared, too -- and who am I to argue with that? She is here. She prayed; she survived. Shit, if that happened to me, I'd be a believer too.

But truth be told, I've never understood prayer. I understand the need for it, yes, the reaching out, the longing to be heard, the hope for redemption and absolution and change. But I've never got it. If God has a plan, then what good is prayer? And if His plan is to give a thirty-five year old mother ovarian cancer, then what kind of a plan is that? That's the best His power can do? There are times when I want to take God outside and confront him in the back alley behind the garbage cans and ask Him just who the hell he thinks he is, fucking around with us mere mortals like this. I can accept free will; fine. Let us humans fend amongst ourselves and screw up our own little lives. But I can't accept cancer, or tornadoes, or malaria. The older I get, the more I realize that the questions kids ask, the dumb questions, the why-is-the-sky-blue questions, the where-do-we-go-when-we-die questions, are really the only questions out there. Everything else is scenery.

And yet these very same basic, maddening inquiries are the ones that linger and fester, that make me feel like Allie Fox in Paul Theroux's brilliant book The Mosquito Coast, which was made into an equally compelling movie (featuring what is probably Harrison Ford's finest performance). Fox ranted and raved about religion and society and the stupidity of man; if I don't catch myself, watch myself, I could end up like that.

Still, cancer attacking someone you care about does that to you. Makes you ask the big questions, and then pisses you off when the answers don't come. And then you realize that cancer's everywhere. I reread the Afterword to Stephen King's Dreamcatcher and am reminded that its original title was Cancer, until his wife wisely told him that that was a bad idea, an invitation to doom. I read an article about the making of Rebel Without A Cause in Vanity Fair and learn that the director's mother died of ovarian cancer. I sit and wait in the oncology ward and watch the sad but patient faces of people with the disease, hoping against hope. Praying.

It is what it is. I will keep asking the questions and waiting for the answers. The consolation comes with the realization that, afterlife or not, master-plan or not, prayers or not, there is still today. Today is real and present. I can feel it, however fleeting. There is still the here and the now, the people around me and the times we share, the essential solidity of the sky above and the ground below, which may, in the end, by its sheer emotional, tactile, resonance, render any kind of heaven null and void.

WHEREUPON A TINY PORTION OF A DICTIONARY FINDS THE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT NECESSARY TO VALIDATE A LONG AND PATIENT LIFE

Entering a new country, living in a new country, I'm always struck by one simple, somewhat stupid observation: This has been here all along! All of this! The people and the cars and the mountains and the malls! While I was over there, all of this was over here! Going on! Ongoing!

We tend to think that where we are is where it's at. And it is. But there's all this other shit going on that exists on a simultaneous plane of existence, next door, close, but accessed rarely, if at all.

The same goes for words.

There's a lot of words I don't know. English words, that is. I'm not talking about Icelandic or Ukranian or Welsh or Finnish -- I don't know any of those words. It's one of my pet theories, the one about everybody being almost completely illiterate, because most people only know one, two, languages, but there's hundreds and hundreds of languages, so almost everybody is illiterate in most of them.

But let's focus on English. It's what you and I know best. But every now and then I come across a word that I've never heard before. Just the other day I ran into 'chiliastic'. This professor was using this word to compliment a book explaining why Vietnam invaded Cambodia, and all I could think was: You blowhard twit.

I mean, 'chiliastic'. Come on. I consider myself fairly well-read; I went to school. But I've never, ever come across the word 'chiliastic' in any kind of book, and it's one of those words that academics use to prove that they're smart and erudite. (That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.)

Or 'pulchritude'. This one I found in Jane Smiley's novel Horse Heaven. She's a graceful, elegant storyteller who, every and now then, throws in a word like this. I'm reading along, thinking I'm smart, thinking I'm sophisticated, and then I come across 'pulchritude', and I'm reminded once again that I'm a hick from St.Catharines.

Ah, but here's the thing. Here's the thing, goddamnit.

They're real, those words. They exist. I found them, whole and complete. They were there, in an old dictionary on the shelf where I'm living, the beat-up kind, the kind your grandfather keeps on the shelf in his den, way up top, above the stack of National Geographics. I flipped through the pages, and sure enough, there they were: 'chiliastic' and 'pulchritude.'

How long had they been waiting there, those words? Decades, I'm thinking. I would bet that nobody in the house I'm staying at had opened those books to find those words. Somebody, years ago, had proofread those words, and they had been inserted into the dictionary, and that dictionary had been typset, had been bound, had been released for sale, and there they sat. Those words. For years and years, nobody had looked for them. Nobody had asked how they were, or sent them cookies. They just sat there, in black and white. Waiting. Patient.

Until the day I liberated them. I flipped through those pages, and suddenly there they were, and their function in life, their purpose in life, had been validated. They were not meant to be forgotten in a dusty book on a rackety shelf. They flew up from the page and into my mind. They acquired a new life.

I felt proud of those words. They had attained the kind of glory they must have been seeking all along. They could now die a dignified death. They had been used.

I put the dictionary back on the shelf and looked at it for awhile. So many other words, waiting to be read. A parallel world that had existed next to my own for so long, invisible only because of my ignorance. Those words, all of them, page after page, weren't asking for much, really -- just a bit of time and attention. And yet, how could I validate them all?

I can't; there's not enough time. I had to turn away from that shelf and go back to my life.

There the book sat, and I could feel those words staring at my back as I walked away. We all just want to be acknowledged.

SIGNS, SIGNS, EVERYWHERE SIGNS...

Two different signs at two different points in the road:

Sign #1:

Welcome to Bagiuo City! The Cleanest City In The Philippines...

Sign #2:

Welcome to Baguio City! Smoke Belchers Will Be Prosecuted...


Now, this is what I'm thinking.

Is Baguio City the cleanest city in the Philippines simply because all the smoke belchers have been prosecuted? Are all these smoke belchers, felons that they are, crowded together in some dingy, needless to say smoky cell at the bottom of the police station somewhere?

Because goddamnit, if there's one thing I could never, ever stand, it was smoke-belchers. Don't know about you.

RECENTLY READ BOOKS; A RANDOM OBSERVATION

Some stuff I've read recently, if you're interested:

FAT OLLIE'S BOOK by Ed McBain -- McBaind (aka Evan Hunter, who passed away earlier this year) is the master of the police procedural, and this is one of his last few books. Great dialogue, familiar characters, a murder to solve -- what's not to love?

I'LL TAKE YOU THERE by Joyce Carol Oates -- Oates is one of the few 'literary' writers who is also a first-rate storyteller. Most of the so-called stylists, in my opinion, score an 'a' on theme and character and prose and metaphor but flunk out completely on narrative momentum. This book tells a young woman's coming-of-age in the mid-fifties with that philosophical grace and storytelling trajectory that Oates seems to have patented. And it has a final sentence that explains the title and confuses me even more, but because it's Oates, I'll forgive her.

LOST BOY, LOST GIRL by Peter Straub -- Straub could be called 'the thinking man's horror writer', and this book, supernatural in tone (or is it?) only further solidifies that claim. It's spooky and creepy and moving and strange. Straub is also a very, very clever and sly, subtle writer; there are two, count 'em two sentences in here, carefully spaced out within the text, that make me reevaluate the entire book as a whole. The book is told through an omniscient third-person narrator, and also through the journals of its protagonist, novelist Timothy Underhill. And yet at one point, in the third-person section, Timothy Underhill pops up to make a personal comment. Which leads me to suspect that the book we're reading is actually the manuscript of Timothy Underhill as he uses his fictional prowess to understand and dissect, for himself and his own sanity, the disappearance of his nephew. The greatness of the book is that it can be read and enjoyed whether you buy my premise or not. (But I think my speculation is spot-on, because in another book, Mr.X, Straub slyly drops hints that his first-person narrator is actually African-American. I mean, really slyly. I missed the clues completely, only to feel like a numbskull after reading an interview with Straub where he fessed up as to his narrative trickiness.)

THE SWEET FOREVER by George Pelecanos -- A gritty crime book set in Washington, D.C. in the mid-1980's. I've read three other books by Pelecanos, all featuring African-American P.I. Derek Strange; this isn't a Strange book (although secondary characters from the later series pop up here), but it shows that Pelecanos' fascination with the urban underworld of his hometown, and how good people try to survive in a fucked-up environment, has been on his mind for quite some time. Read this book to see how to stretch out three days of narrative action to three hundred pages.

THE ALL TRUE ADVENTURES OF LIDIE NEWTON by Jane Smiley -- A fictional first-person memoir of a young woman roaming her way across American in the nineteenth century. Like so many books I've read by American writers recently, both 'popular' and 'literary' (god, I hate those terms), this one centres upon race, and the timebomb that slavery set off for whites and blacks alike. Smiley is a hell of a writer, and I had to keep reminding myself that it was fiction. She nails the dialect and tone and emotions of her central character perfectly. (I'm assuming, not having been around in the nineteenth century.)

PALE HORSE COMING by Stephen Hunter -- Hunter is the Pulitzer Prize winning film critic of The Washington Post who just happens to write crime novels on the side, many them of featuring Arkansas sherriff Earl Swagger. This book, too, centres around issues of race and respect, albeit in the fictionalized Arkansas of the 1950's. Gritty and grim with lots of guns. But a moral core at its centre, I think, that the best crime fiction always seems to possess. Thoughts on morality and conscience are often more palatable when squeezed between the gunshots and mysteries of a good thriller, in my opinion.

GENERALISSIMO: CHIANG KAI-SHEK AND THE CHINA HE LOST by Jonathan Fenby -- An account of the battle between the Communists led by Mao and the other side, the ones fighting against communism, led by Chiang Kai-Shek. Like most biographies of famous wartime people, it focuses less on the personality and more on the events in which that personality was formed. Fair enough. I learned a lot about the internal conflict of the time within China, the war with Japan, the divided nature of the Chinese state -- but there's a lot of 'this happened, and then this happened, and, oh, then this happened, too...'

DOUBLE PLAY
STONE COLD by Robert Parker -- One of the things that ticked me off about my
WIDOW'S WALK Creative Writing classes was that they never allowed any 'genre' stories to be written for submission to the class -- no mystery, horror, sci-fi, romance, thrillers, comedies, etc. The dirty little secret of English departments is that few of the teachers have ever read outside of their own narrow clique of classics. The shame is that they miss out on fantastic, clean, concise examples of the kind of writing they're trying to teach -- writing exemplified by Parker, who has a minimalism that makes Hemingway look verbose, and a sense of pace and theme and tone that is haunting and wise and always, always fresh. And the story remains boss.

DISPATCHES FROM THE SPORTING LIFE by Mordecai Richler -- Richler was Canada's best-known novelist when he died a few years back, but, truth be told, I think he's a far, far better essayist and critic. (We all read The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz back in high school, and it's a great book, but after that? I don't think his stuff is all that great.) Funny, savvy, sardonic, sarcastic writing here, but a sense of humanity runs throughout as he writes about hockey and baseball and fishing and African safaris.

On the shelf, waiting to be read:

RUN by Douglas E. Winter
SPEAKS THE NIGHTBIRD by Robert McCammon
HORSE HEAVEN by Jane Smiley
FIDDLERS by Ed McBain
THE PORTABLE FAULKNER by William Faulkner
HARD REVELATION by George Pelecanos

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I read something in Esquire recently that stuck with me. Something about experience. About diving into life. And it mentioned the fact that you if you choose to go out and experience, well, experiences, then you can't complain about the kind that you find, or the kind that find you. Everybody always says things like 'Oh, that'll be such an experience!', usually accompanied by a wide grin. And yet the assumption is that this 'experience' will be magical and wonderful and akin to eating a yummy chocolate muffin. But once you exit the shallow end and enter the deep end, anything can happen, and probably will happen, and will most definitely fall under the bold-type heading of 'experience'. We have to accept that which happens, even the experiences that leave us shell-shocked and weary. Not because it's God's plan, or even our plan, but because it happened, period -- to think otherwise is to invite only further grief and confusion.

That's what I'm trying to convince myself of, anyway. Not sure if it's working. I prefer the 'yummy chocolate muffin' type of experience, myself...

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THE PASSION OF THE SHATNER

I've been thinking a lot lately about Captain Kirk and Mr.Spock. Specifically, about Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trekk III: The Search For Spock. Other people, more cultured and sophisticated and holy, may turn to the scriptures or the lord for their advice; I turn to the holy shrines of Shatner and Nimoy. We are who we are.

In Star Trek II we learn about the Kobayashi Maru, a simulation program at the StarFleet Academy wherein the young cadets were presented with a no-win scenario, a possibility that every captain and crew might very well encounter. Admiral Kirk (his position having been elevated in this film from that of a mere captain) lectures the young Vulcan Saavik (played by the young and impossibly slender Kirstie Alley) about the necessity of such a role-playing scenario. The only snag, of course, is that Kirk is a hypocrite; he was the only student in the history of the academy to actually beat the Kobayashi Maru situation, by secretly sneaking into the computer system and reprogramming the scenario so that there would be, in fact, a way to win. A way to live. Why did he do such a thing? As Kirk states later in the film: "I don't believe in a no-win situation."

Ah, but the genius of the film is that it presents Kirk with his very own 'no-win situation' later on in the film: the death of Spock, who sacrifices himself for the crew, who saves the lives of everyone on board the Enterprise but gives up his own life in the process.

Star Trek II may very well be placed on the same shelf as the Koran and the Bible in future times, if only because it is a metaphor for life itself. We are all stuck in a 'no-win situation'; none of us are getting out of alive. How we deal with that scenario, how we are forced to deal with it, in the lives of ourselves and others, is the crux of this film. And the crux of life. Hence, Star Trek II's celestial genius.

Not that I'm shortchanging its inevitable sequel, Star Trek III. Of course, in some ways Star Trek III is a colossal, monumental cheat; it subverts the wonderful sentiment of the previous film by essentially saying: "Actually, you know what? Vulcans can beat death! They can come back alive! They can rise from the dead!" Say what? That's not what we learned from the previous film -- that life was long, that aging was painful, that death was final, that hope can be relearned only at a great and painful price.

Granted, the filmmakers were clever enough and canny enough to hint at a possible salvation for Spock in Star Trek II, but still -- one can't help but feel a little bit sideswiped by the fairy-tale nature of Spock's resurrection in Star Trek III.

And yet.

The film redeems itself. It does so by highlighting the courage and compassion and essential goodness of Kirk and his crew in their quest to bring Spock back to life. They need to bring the remains of Spock back to Vulcan; they need the Enterprise to accomplish such a goal. Kirk goes to Starfleet command to ask permission; Starfleet, naturally, says go bleep yourself.

"The answer was no," Kirk tells his crew. "We are therefore going anyway."

Without a moment's hesitation. Without a pause. Kirk (and his crew, lest we forget) knows that by essentially stealing the Enterprise he is forfeiting not only his salary and his career but his entire reputation. He is violating dozens of laws, risking death himself, throwing to the wind everything he has ever worked for and dreamed of, and all of this for the mere shred of a chance that Spock could, in fact, come back to life due to his and his crew's efforts.

What would you do for a friend? What would you give up? What do you consider honorable? What do you consider noble?

These are the questions that Star Trek III asks, and answers. It is not as good a film as its immediate predecessor, no, but the questions it raises and the themes it explores have a weight and a density that I only dreamed of as a child. Thinking back, I realize that the values it espouses are good and worthy for children, and they are ideas I picked up on without realizing it. Watching Kirk and his crew casually throw aside their careers and reputations for the sake of (possibly) saving their friend, I was taught that your job is not what's important, that honor and dignity mean nothing if they are not put to some sort of real-life test, that it is worth sacrificing all that you hold dear for the needs of the one, rather than the needs of the many.

I've never watched The Next Generation. Or Deep Space Nine. Or Voyager. Or Enterprise. As a child, when I saw the bald captain of the new crew, I pledged allegiance to Kirk and his bridge. The kind of pledge a child makes, as if betraying a fictional character would actually have weight in the real world. Funny, the shit we think about, and the shit we ultimately turn to for solace.

For some people, all they really needed to know they learned in kindergarten. For me, I'm starting to suspect that I could just watch Star Trek II and III over and over again, and call it a day.