Tuesday, October 05, 2004
three ideas in my head now.
one: between Bush and Cheney, I think they have all the characteristics covered that Oswald Cobblepot and Max Schrek (sp?) shared, in Batman Returns, as well as the essential of that relationship. I wish I had figured out how to post pictures, because I'd love to post one of Cheney alongside a specific sidelong glare from The Penguin from that movie; that is certainly one physical aspect. Though Bush did a great job last Thursday night, and one of those powerless hatred looks he gave would serve almost as fine. And is it that hard to see in Bush's personality and life-trajectory something of Cobblepot's attempt to claim the family birthright he was denied and exemplified? The constant propaganda of his election, the up-is-downism, the hiding of an alliance of capitalist and fascist under a cloak of civic and moral goodness?
I don't know how much that movie (which, I think, patterned itself on the rise of Nazi-ism) was meant to be a general patterning of how politics is played against the civil body (sort of a Joseph Campbell-esque metamyth of democracy), but it did a pretty good job, as far as I can tell, given where we are. Eerily so, frankly. And while Kerry is only just now coming out of his mild-mannered millionaire fop disguise to do earnest battle against those who've done their best to goad/neutralize him by attacking his heroism with their own self-image, he didn't do such a bad job of filling that role of hero out--at least from my perspective. I hope he keeps it up. There was no Robin in that movie, but I can stretch it to put Edwards in as.
And can't you just see Cheney, enraged by some wounding of his facade during the debate tonight, lunging across the table and biting into John Edwards' nose?
Two: I remember an idea I used to have, I think it was the same time in college I read the idea of phylogeny recapitulating ontogeny (disproved, I think). My idea (if solid enough to call it that) was that just as, at conception and for some time after, a fetus is undifferentiated cells dividing and dividing until, based on no one knows what (or didn't), they begin to differentiate--some into skin, some organs, some brain, some bone, and so on--yet some remain original, those stem cells, undifferentiated, all potential available, so a poet is someone like the stem cells, someone who has maintained the imaginative ability to travel into any path and yet is dedicated to none, kind of a negative capability idea. So that's what I used to think a poet was.
three: I don't remember. I think maybe it was more than adequately answered by the Milosz quote I linked to in my previous post.
