Bird on a Wire

Human beings are perennially vulnerable to the temptation of arrogating divinity to themselves. It is a temptation manifest in the refusal to accept finitude, creatureliness and dependence – what Ernest Becker has called the 'causa sui project', the delusion that the world is my world, a world controllable by my will and judgement. But it is no less manifest in what we call the apocalyptic delusion, the belief that we can stop, reverse or cancel history, that we can assume the 'divine' prerogative of acting with decisive finality in the affairs of the world, that we can 'make an end'.

― Rowan Williams, "Resurrection: Interpretation of the Easter Gospel"

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Dear Kate,

We are all utterly vulnerable to the exploitation of each other.

As to who is the "most vulnerable" among us, let's not get scientific about what has nothing to do with science, which is, scandalous enough to the ears of technocratic denizens we all are, true about almost everything we find ultimately significant in life.  The blindness to our perennial human problems speaks as well about our vulnerability.

My opening statement above, a "hook," as you have learned from your high-school English class, might sound cynical enough for you to consider it a sort of exploitation, probably from a factory on the "Right" side of the political spectrum, deemed very suspicious in light of what I've been writing about lately.

Well, you can get them out of your head, girl, the words you've been hearing all your life about Left and Right, Type A or B, Myers–Briggs and mortar bricks, just wipe those words from the faces you see everyday before you write the faces off for good.

Last night I finally got a chance to watch Ken Loach's Kes on Blu-ray, blue rays of warm stream came out of me as I locked my hands together, clasping, pleading for mercy, for an ending different from what I knew to be inevitable.  My prayer was answered.  This time, finally, I saw it: there's nothing fateful, fatalistic about where Billy, the "angry young man," arrived at in the end.  The camera was too generous to close him in, trap him like a bird.  Ken Loach has made the most heartwarming, peaceable and joyous angry movie ever.

Watch it and learn.  Learn from how the camera steps back and observes.  There is no "acting" in this movie, just as there is no artificiality in it.  Mr Loach, a self-styled "secular humanist" (I wonder if he is still happy with living in that cage) might have tried to "make an end" to, or at least to signpost a stage on Billy's coming-of-age journey in a world of endless victimizing, but the generosity of his mise-en-scène sets his most angry instinct free, like a bird.

Kes reminds me much of my childhood and adolescence.  It's exhilarating to watch a movie about you that finds no reason to explain yourself to you.

Yours, Alex