Knot Too Sure

I have yet to watch "Parasite," but I know it's about the desperation of late capitalism. It has made history at the Oscars (again, a popularity contest) and justly celebrated as a piece of cinematic art.

I am sure no one is celebrating the desperation it portrays. I hope.

Actually I am not too sure. In real life, I am not too sure.

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Dear Alex,

In headline or cinema, the desperation of anything portrayed is sure to ensure more desperation elicited from the viewer. You see what you want to see. Twisted knots, consequences of choices, deliberate or desperate, I am not too sure if we dare see beyond the celebration of self.

Rowan Williams deconstructs our desperation towards exposing “the human young” to “some of the pressures of adult choice” inclined to value the consumer more than the consumed. He invites us to nurture “a space for fantasy, a license for imagination, where gradually the consequences, the self-defining knots, of adult choices can be figured, fingered, experimented with”. I am sure no one is celebrating the desperation he portrays. I hope.

Actually I am not too sure.

Desperation acted out, called forth and middle-fingered, pays dividends. The story spices up and scrutiny strips down to centerfold sensationalism. The context, pretext or syntax of humanity is slashed to a hashtag. The reader and movie-goer come at a price and will not leave without a prize. It feels good to be sure the despairing remains aghast at bay and to insure yourself against such despair. Surely this is an assuring piece of cinematic art because in real life, I am sure no one is celebrating the parasitic pandering to the host “naive when he preaches about his own innocence with not enough self-awareness and even less self-criticism”.

You can have a skunk on your back and magically smell good too in caption.

By now I am almost done reading “Ghosts of Gold Mountain” by Gordon Chang, the first scholar to narrate from tertiary sources the lived experiences of the 20,000 Chinese men who built with hammers and chisels the most grueling Western tracks of the first transcontinental railroad from 1864 to 1869. In his seminal photograph above, Alfred Hart, restrained by the limits of technology at the time, preserved for us the image of twisted knots and turbulence in solid granite being gutted out by the “Railroad Chinese” during the course of their desperate toil to complete the Summit Tunnel through the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

No journals, letters or any text documented by these workers have been found. And their lives in written history have remained invisible over 150 years until Chang resurrects their identities in breathing bone and blood in his book published last Spring:

“They were laborers, foremen, contractors, masons, cooks, medical practitioners, carpenters, interpreters, and teamsters. Thousands more Chinese associated with them as friends and relatives, as part of their immense supply chain that provisioned them for years, and, away from the track in their off-time, as gamblers, opium smokers, prostitutes, and devout worshipers of the gods and spirits who watched over them in their perilous work.”

Be sure to not be too sure about the headline or cinema of anyone.

Yours, Kate