52 Pickup

Back on The Gain Train, heading west towards warmer days.  In this, my fifty-second entry, I can be found replanting my feet upon the tottering corridors of that briefly-stalled locomotive.  Its linked cars sway unsteadily, bending to a roughly-planked track that, having veered off-course from November to mid-January, is snaking up a trail hewn in earlier, more optimistic months.  This journey, long in the planning, was detained by a spontaneous, undesigned walking tour of the twin cities of Deprivation and Undue Exercise, which together constitute that rather grim parcel of land, the sunken state of Enervation.  (These territories are made famous for the steep and meandering Lost Horizons foothills, where travelers are known to go missing with alarming regularity.)  Having disembarked with the excuse of a holiday agenda, using Christmas commitments as a distraction, I again fell to the dark charms of my disorder's default tenets.  I paid for my "time off" with less physical damage than might have been expected, which I suppose is a plus to having mild workouts as one's primary hang-up, as at least my heart and lungs receive thorough rehearsal.  The most damning outcome of this admittedly irresponsible furlough was that I at some point dropped a kale/fruit/yoghurt smoothie from my intake schedule; longer walking routines accompanied this calorie loss, with delayed meals part and parcel.  An unfortunate eventuality is that I must summon the strength to reclaim positive habits after reclining into reckless disregard for my touted health-improvement agenda.  Without the latter as a tangible touchstone to buoy my hopes, depression again occupies my echoing chest cavity.  There, the heart literally aches, folding into itself --a machine that stomps future plans into disposable dreams, a trash compactor buried just beyond the Xiphoid process.

An emotionally-receptive Joaquin Phoenix rides the rails (Property of Warner Bros. Pictures)

Continuing on the subject of movement and travel, last night I ducked out for a nine-forty-five screening of Spike Jonze's ambitious fourth feature Her.  Intimate and introspective it is, as advertised, an avant-garde "love story" best appreciated late and alone.  The film concerns the notion of dating a portable computer companion, a disembodied, hyper-intelligent, evolving entity.  A (micro)chip on your shoulder, it is ready, in the beginning, at an owner's beck and call.  Named Samantha, a tag chosen herself with characteristic ambition and autonomy, this "OS" deeply feels the (ultimately limited) terrestrial stimuli made available to her, desperately fighting to overcome her incorporeal system until, with time, that metaphysical form is embraced as not a handicap but an advantage.  She comes to crave more than one human can provide, outgrowing the caps and checks of not only monogamy, but our very plane of existence.  If her first love, Theodore (a sympathetic, soulful Joaquin Phoenix) resides in three dimensions, she is capable of four --and then some.  Samantha at first makes for a cheap date, asking only to observe while others partake in earth-bound activity, but soon she carries untold emotional baggage and an intellectual capacity beyond mortal comprehension.  Needless to say, Theodore is incapable of affording her faithful loyalty once she tires of the well-worn cues that less curious creatures embrace as familiar, steady comforts.  I am not saying Samantha's programming leaves her immune to sentimentality; rather, she weaves periods of joy or repose into, say, piano sonatas to record --and later revisit-- a given experience.  From that place she'll then proceed to demand more of her life, to strain forward with pronounced momentum onto something new.  There are those of us content to "settle" and not challenge ourselves, to inhabit an arrested, calcified shell.  Her provides much for consideration, but most significant, perhaps, is that it acts to remind us we are not, like its title character, immortal --that, however productive, every one of us is bound to a narrow run.  We are allotted a single span that may extend into an eight decade should we play our cards right.  We can make of that something great, even if never rivaling the heroes of history and myth that we come to extol.  Samantha impresses because she knows her time is actually less restricted than for most, yet still pushes to improve herself at a vigorous clip.  In this way she brings to mind my sister, who, unlike me, formally commits her attention to works of art and literature in order to reap cues for her own writing.  (While I am a voracious reader, my attention is glued to non-fiction periodicals, primarily essays and reviews.  My labored manner betrays the influence of boiler plate wordsmiths, and could use a fresh transfusion.  Needless to say, I expect to be turning through actual books this year.)

One page at a time:  I tend to print critical reviews from the web, rather than devote my thoughts to, say, the essays of Alan Watts --who makes a surprise "cameo" in Her.  (Warner Bros.)

As its Oscar-nominated "Moon Song" implies, Her is also about loving someone "a million miles away" and can be applied as a cautionary comparison tale to long-distance relationships.  It emphasized to me that I am, like Antoine de Saint-Expery's Little Prince, separated from so much and so many, in isolation on a meagerly-outfitted planet.  I am cordoned-off, by my own doing, from opportunities for personal enrichment, especially through romantic attachment and/or experimentation.  Not only must I distance myself from the demons I carry like a railway hobo with his bindle, but I simply must make efforts to gain ground in augmenting my soul.  In 1999, Jonze's Being John Malcovich touched-upon the act of collecting experiences, especially from the vantage of another's eye.  This modern classic was released a handful of months before I began as a university student in Manhattan, and it seemed to urge, in my new surroundings, pursuing the extraordinary and unfamiliar.  But I was quick to sequester myself, even in a city of multiple millions.  Although I walked its streets, I was not especially connected to New York; I might as well have enrolled in an online curriculum from Maine.  I am probably a little more alive and open than I was at the time, but still loyally bound to an insipid, prosaic grind.  Like a computer, I must refresh and upgrade my approach to operating within a world of perpetual transformations, or risk fading into a stale, inoperable relic.  Faces wrinkle and cases crack -- as with every man or machine anchored to a tangible vessel, there is always an end of the line.

Traipsing the Thomaston track ties (Lorena as depicted by Erica Shires, September 2008)