Hi Anita,

What I feel about it?  I just had to mop up the inside of my glasses, I was in such a state of tears after merely reading the synopsis on Wikipedia.  I do remember watching it when it was new… but I was a very different person then, and I can remember no real reaction to it.  Might have had one, but it left no impression.  I’ll give it another watch and let you know if I survived.

Hi TeaK,

The reference to dancing was a metaphor, nothing more.  March: rigidly controlled motion with a definite purpose.  Dance: joyous, freeform expression of inner feelings through movement.  I know that a lot of people do like dancing, feel the need to express something through dance.  I’ve long felt myself ’empty’ or ‘hollow,’ like there’s nothing *but* the facade I project in public… like there is no ‘wearer’ of the many masks.  I’ve run into it in other areas: I’m reasonably articulate (if somewhat stilted at times), and I think I’d enjoy writing… but I find I have nothing to say.  Music is another means of expression, as are art, and dance, and poetry… and in each case, I find that there’s simply nothing inside that wants out.  Nothing to say.  When I play guitar, it’s almost always “covers,” and even then, all I like to play is the “hook,” the part that everyone instantly recognizes.  I’m a fairly good “artist,” in that I can copy almost anything (“human xerox” is what I’ve always called it), but no originality.  Calligraphy is the same: it’s more of a slavish devotion to a rigid style than anything that’s freely expressive.

I’m sorry for the gloomy image of existing within a body I painted.  I do take some pleasures from physical existence, I was mainly trying to illustrate how very alone we all are, within our ‘prisons.’  I can never know what it is to be *you,* just as you can never know what it is to be *me.*  The only thing we have to bridge this uncrossable gulf are words, writing, and art.  All descriptive, second-hand, never “first-person,” if that makes any sense.  What I perceive when I look at the universe is not the same thing you perceive.  Just as when police ask five witnesses to a crime or incident what they saw, they get five different stories (each witness focusing on different objects or aspects), so too when we look at things, or experience things, we each to do in a unique way.  I think part of it is that we never really objectively and dispassionately see things; we always filter what we see through past experiences, feelings, and thoughts/ideas about things; we bring different things to bear upon what we see, and so “color” the seeing, resulting in a unique “take” on that thing.  Superficially, when we each look at a tree, we see the same tree, the same object – – but our “experience” of that tree would be markedly different, I’m sure.  I’d remember my favorite climbing tree from my childhood, and think about the beauty of wood grain patterns in firewood I’ve split and wooden furniture and art pieces I’ve seen, and think about how when hiking the trees got shorter and scrubbier the higher I went, until it was just low scrub, and eventually no vegetation at all…. just this long list of associations and thoughts and recollections that comprise my “experience” of the tree we’re both looking at.  Same object, different experiences.  And we can neither know the others’ experience, other than approximations conveyed through words and/or illustrations or pictures.  In a word: together… but alone.

Childhood: I was a normal, happy, outgoing boy-child, growing up on an island connected to the mainland by a long, narrow road.  It was a paradise for a young boy, and memories of it have this ‘golden haze’ around them.  It was without question the happiest time of my life… and it all came crashing down when I was eight.  Dad went to work one morning, and shortly afterwards moving trucks appeared, and big men came into the house and started carrying *everything* into the trucks, and my mom told me we were going to live somewhere else.  When I asked when dad was coming, she said, “He’s not,” my life as I had known it was over.  A new life in a city, on a busy road, in a third-floor apartment of what we called “triple-deckers” in the day.  A new neighborhood, in a new town, in a new school, with new classmates and a new teacher.  I knew nobody, and my response to all this was to withdraw, retreat, isolate.  I became fearful and painfully shy and uncertain, and the differences from all the other kids did not go unnoticed by those kids… and I wound up the rejected outsider, teased and taunted and excluded.  Bad enough, but then not too long after that came along my new stepfather (the man my mom had left my dad for.)  As far as he was concerned, we kids (my sister and I) were the baggage that came along with my mom.  To have one meant to take the other, too.  A price he paid, but grudgingly.  He was not physically abusive (would have been easier), but he was emotionally abusive, losing no opportunity to compare me to HIS son, who was big and brash and popular and did sports… where I was little, skinny, wore glasses, read constantly and voraciously (all sci-fi – – Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, Norton, many others… in a pre-internet world, it was my only escape from an intolerable reality.  Libraries became my churches), didn’t do sports of any kind, had no friends… “weird” in a word.  He let me know, pointedly and repeatedly, that I would never amount to anything, using ‘cute’ pet nicknames like “horizontal” (from laying on the couch reading), ‘playboy’ because I had no ambition and never did much of anything, others as well.  This continued until he “invited” me to leave home at eighteen, after I graduated (barely) from high school.  So, from eight onwards, life and school were pretty much one unrelieved bad experience.  He wasn’t brutal or cruel… but he was also not understanding or kind.  I’m sure his taunts and dire predictions were intended to ‘motivate’ me, to light a fire under my “lazy posterior.”  Just served to cause further retreat.  High school introduced me to alcohol and street drugs, as well as other “outcasts” who I did drugs and drank with.  Alcohol and drugs became my goal in life; to get as high as possible as often as possible.  I would literally roll a joint before I rolled out of bed.  That particular “ambition” lasted into my thirties, when I put the bottle down (the first time) for over thirty years.  Threatened myself with AA if I couldn’t quit on my own.  Ironic, as AA is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.  Done more for me than twenty years of therapy and just about every anti-depressive in the pharmacology.  Although I’ve come to realize that I’m sure I wasn’t ready, then, to hear what AA had to say.  So “dry drunk” it was for thirty years, until I got hurt on the job, surgery, chronic pain, inability to work, loss of sizeable 401K, job, home, just about everything.  Managed to land on my feet (strictly through the efforts of my wife, who of the two of us is the only one that possesses a working brain and the drive to put it to use), but without my “identity,” as I was one of those guys who “was” my job.  I was what I did, and now I couldn’t do it anymore.  Wound up on opiates for chronic pain, and under their influence, decided that if anyone deserved a damned drink, it was me.  I quit for 30 years on my own, so obviously I wasn’t an alcoholic.  Right?   Nope.  Wound up worse than I had ever been, within a short period of time.  Wife caught wind and issued an ultimatum: AA or away.  AA it was, and I’ve never looked back.  They’ve done a lot to help me, to show me that alcohol/substance abuse was merely a symptom of a much deeper-seated problem (ME), and how to cope with life and difficulties in a more productive (or at least less destructive) manner.  Not always good at putting it into practice, but being aware of the problems is at least half the battle.  AA is where I met my lady friend, and came to love her… and in typical AA fashion, alcoholics being who/what/how they are (or can be, anyway), she kept relapsing, and ultimately went the route of “geographical cure,” or at least it seems that way for now.  Who knows if she’ll turn up again?  I’ll wait… but I can’t sustain it for too long, the damage is mounting, and I’ll have to let it go at some point in order to survive at all.

So that’s my life in a nutshell.

Hi Nar,

Wow… I’ve spent much time thinking along those same lines.  One of the things I dislike about my present situation is that I’m all too aware that when my wife sees me, she’s not seeing ME, not the me that I am at this moment; she’s seeing her mental composite of all the “me’s” I have been over the years, seeing me through the filter of long shared experience (good and bad… but she tends to recall mostly the bad).  Doesn’t help that she often manages to toss out little digs referring to some of these past ‘transgressions,’ reminding me… or not letting me forget, to be more accurate.  How does one move forward with a ‘partner’ who insists on holding on to the past?  She’ll remind me, literally every week, that “so and so” is going to be here, so I need to be aware of that, and “behave.”  In reference to an incident that happened once when I was drunk and “grayed-out” and she walked into the house from where she teaches next door, and caught me in a compromising situation.  Happened only once, and I was still drinking, and I’m just not who I was then, nor do I do the things I did then.  BUT… she never forgets a slight, and will continue to bring that incident up until one of us dies.  Makes me feel as though it’s not worth the effort of staying recovered, of bothering with anything at all.

I like your point that image is static (can be modified, but mostly is a “snapshot”), while a relationship is dynamic.  A “dance,” if you will.   Which is unfortunate for me… ’cause as you may have read… I don’t dance.

I try to practice mindfulness, especially when upset.  Simply seeing, or hearing, and letting the labels and descriptions come and go, without seizing upon them and pursuing them down a mental rabbit-hole.  I like to compare it to surfing (another thing I don’t actually do, but understand); the waves (thoughts) come, and they cannot be stopped.  I *can,* however, choose whether or not to drop and paddle frantically and “catch” that wave and ride it all the way into shore (leaving where I was, and wanted to be, far behind), or I can simply sit on the board, and note the wave’s approach, float atop it when it arrives, and watch it recede into the distance.  Choose to not engage.  Remain.  Float.

It’s calming, and it helps to see things clearly, without all the mental nonsense that wants to come with it.  It’s hard to carry into “normal” daily life, but it’s there when I need it.

I too enjoy haiku (and Japanese culture in general), especially basho, but there is a wealth of it to discover and read.  Again, Mr. “hollow man” has nothing to say, so writing any is an exercise in futility.  I enjoy the works of others, though.

Thank you all for your time and thoughts… helps to ‘speak’ with like-minded people.  Pushes back the lonliness.