Cloud Atlas Review: Time for Love

*audio recording here*

Every November 5^th I start off with the intention of watching V for Vendetta. I’ve seen it maybe a dozen times and it never gets old. Perhaps that’s because the films central message is that ideas can never die. That’s a powerful message for sure. It’s true and harsh and beautiful. But I think I might have found a movie for November 6^th: Cloud Atlas.

I went to the theater last night with my dearest friend Kailey Mo Becker. I hadn’t seen her in almost 9 months and it was so wonderful to see her again. Once the movie started it took me a while to figure out what was going on exactly, in fact it took most of the 2 hours and 50 minutes. There are several main plot lines spanning four hundred years of history, many of them overlapping. But it was fun trying to fit all the shifting pieces of the puzzle around and put them together. This movie definitely requires you to use your brain, and for that I am glad. During the first half I was attempting to find the plot line for each of the stories while trying to figured out how they are all connected through time; and ultimately through love.

The acting was superb. Halle Barry plays several prominent roles as is completely redeemed for that whole Cat Woman thing. Tom Hanks (Castway, Lost in Translation, Larry Crowne) stars in just as many roles and displays a wide array of talents as an actor. Timothy Broadbent (Mulan Rouge, Harry Potter), Jim Sturgess (Across the Universe), Ben Whishaw (Skyfall), and the lovely and powerful Susan Sarandon ( Alien, Avatar, Political Animals) all performed so well in there many roles. It was a wonderful experience to see all these amazing actors play so many uniquely different roles throughout the various plot lines.

It is sort of serendipitous that I had a conversation with my parents the other night about reincarnation. My stance is (was?) that it really doesn’t matter. Past lives, eh, you can make that stuff up. You know how it ended. But if you look at the cyclical nature of things i.e. the water cycle, the carbon cycle, bird and fish migrations, the turning of the seasons –that sort of thing- then yes, I’m pretty sure we, our souls if you will, go through some sort of recycling/reincarnation thing. And that’s cool but there isn’t much I can do with a past life. I’m here now, doing my work, living this life. I have different objectives than I did in a previous life, different cells, different genetics, and different experiences. The only thing that truly matters in being the best person I can be today.

So what I loved what most about Cloud Atlas was this idea that those whom we love and those who we hurt get carried with us throughout our lives. Our circumstances change. The time we live in today is different. The technology advances but the essence, the souls of those we impact, get carried with us through time and space. It’s beautiful really. If not real than profoundly poetic to the point that its message can only aid us in our understanding of how we relate to each other. I’d like to think of the people who I’ve met in my 23 years of (this?) life that as people whom I’ve met before (maybe this is why I say “See you later” instead of “Good-bye”). Maybe my best friends were past lovers. Maybe they were family members who I had a grudge against. Bullies I elementary school were once co-workers or bosses. Friends of today and tomorrow might be my brothers and sisters in some distant future.

“From womb to tomb, our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.” Sonmi-451.
-David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

It’s nice to think that with all the chaos life can bring and all the transformations around us (environmental, political, economic, temporal and special) that there is a tethering –a bond of love -that we carry with us as we live and move and have our being. That no matter what happens after we pass over, if this reincarnation thing is true, if we get recycled and get to experience the joys and sorrows of an earthly existence once again, that we are still bound to one another indefinitely. In love, in pain, through it all, we will find each other time and time again.

This is most profoundly felt when Sonmi-451 (Donna Bea) is being interviewed by the Archivist, played by James D'Arcy (An American Haunting, Master and Commander) towards the end of the film. This is when all these plot lines and all the threads from all the different stories finally come together, Sonmi-451 is asked if she fell in love with Hae-Joo Chang (Jim Stuggess). She says she is still in love with him, would always love him. We are shown their love does not transcend time but flows through it, with it. We see every incarnation of their love through time. It was beautiful and lovely and yes, I cried a little.

So I think the lesson her is be kind to one another. Love one another unconditionally. Freed or enslaved. Love with all the open space a heart can have, which is, as big as whole of time.

Reality Check

I need a reality check,

    a list of what is real,
    and where it is placed.
A diagnostic for life,
    these moments
    their coordinates in space/time

the air temperature and pressure,
the phase of the moon
the dimensions of a 5 bedroom town home.
the velocity of muscles reaching for jam.
the decibel level of a bus at 7:44 am
the parameters for programming alarm clock

What is the length of space between here
    and where I am going?
How long will it take to get there when caring
    1K + 85K + dreams?
Will I have enough liters of fuel to get there,
    if I don’t calculate in every variable?

What do we do with ‘matter out of place’
Do we right it and call it good.
Give it the blessing and go to sleep
Is it forever out of place,
calculable but always in a different place
moved for the moment and knowing
energy can never be created or destroyed

only transferred (perpetual motion)
And hair brushed once will have to brushed again
and muscles stretched, toned, torn,
will have to be worked again, and again, and again
until the heat death of this body in
two thousand seventy something.

[November 2011]

The Verb: to Write

What is a myth

but a creation story told at slant;
a skewed eye speaking through its iris;
all the spectral colors of a rainbow
dancing through a space/time matrix
colliding with a web of well formed
malleable, plastic, electric rope mass
we call a brain.

What is a story
but a tale told over fire;
a groove carved into the earth;
an archetype with a thousand faces;
a goat track that everyone can follow
but is fully traveled by those who really know
the words by head and heart and hoof.

What are words
but A,E,I,O,U,
(and some days Y)
strung together with consonants
fastened with punctuation
meant to pierce the skin
and vibrate the flesh.

What is a plot
but catabasis or anabasis;
a series of descents, accents,
and single points
on paper and on air and on the lips of time,
written on the horizon of space;
an old woman with her old dog
wrapped in an old blanket speaking
I feel that’s all I have to say
               for now.

[2011]

Because you are a Shooting Star

*Please excuse the momentary dredging up of my intestines (which is really a string of metaphors), my stomach (really a bag of similes), my pancreas (a producer of personification), and my lower organs (these are just my testicles) for your reading pleasure*

I can’t bare this anymore. I see you all false and with out direction; like the illusion that is the aura borealis which secretly wants to be a solar flare or part of the deep space nebulas. No! This is too heavy for gravity, this need. No, it’s not a need, not a want, not even a desire. It is a wish.

Like a shooting star in the night sky of my life. All hot and bright and fast for less than a moment. You are not an expedition to mars or a fleet of mining ships that extract iron ore or diamonds in meteors. These are wants, these are desires. You are just a shooting star and shooting stars are just wishes incarnate.

Not a comet are you either. Comets are my reoccurring lovers who enter my orbit, penetrating my atmospheric layers for days. Shooting stars are quick and they punch and burn up all their helium and oxygen in my nitrogen rich aura. But shows of orgasmic creation can not happen in a vacuum. No new worlds to explore are in a shooting star. No vast caverns which formed in the great blackness of space in which to play. I can not. I will not pulse my way through the empty space.

How I do wish to reach out across the universe and touch that icy hot tail, that speck of cosmic dust in process of using up everything it ever was. But it is to quick, not sustainable and my blazing iron core will never make journeys through space/time for something so fleeting.

Will you someday crash into my crust? Will it require such force that you cram a creator into my surface, a mark, a forever? Can you reach my skin and kick up green earth and bury yourself past my blushing red mantle and merge with my core? Do you have the strength to endure my gravitational field?

Perhaps not. Wishes burn too quick to have the desire to met a solid planet. They’re only cause in space is to be peaceful, glide through a void and one day, when the time is right… Pop to life with brilliance all their own. With the last atom of carbon or magnesium or phosphorus release they’re final thought: they hope someone, somewhere below was there to bear witness.