This is the story of the jpeg found below which shows a silent film playing on my PSP. It’s also a petite tale of our age of terror and wonder.

Why was a silent film playing on my PSP?   Read on.

Years ago — never mind how many — I sat in my apartment drinking Merlot while lounging like Louis XVI.

Of course, I was trying to forget a woman. She had dirty blond hair, amazing legs and the curiously arousing habit of biting my neck in public. She practiced her neck biting fetish on me for a while and then decided to move to Utah, taking all the gifts Aphrodite gave her to that snowy outpost.

“Will you come with me?”

“Where?”

“To Utah, silly!”

Alas, the answer was no.

If only she’d planned to move somewhere distracting like Reykjavik, Iceland, we’d probably have 8 kids by now and be celebrating the fifth anniversary of our hot mess divorce by listening to Bjork.

Back to the apartment, and the Merlot…

On the television, a documentary was playing featuring the narration talents of Old Blighty actor Kenneth Branagh. The doc was about the history of Universum Film AG, or UFA, the national film company of Germany from 1917 to the Gotterdamerung year of 1945 (Did I tell you the story of my Grandfather? He served in a segregated tank battalion and rained fire on Nazis. “Grandpop, is it wrong to kill?” “Yes. Unless it’s Nazis in which case squeeze the trigger and reload as needed.”)

At one point, the work of noted director/screenwriter F.W. Murnau (the man who gave the world “Nosferatu”) was discussed. An extended scene from Murnau’s 1926 film, “Faust” moved on my tv screen.  Mephistopheles and Faust are riding on a cloud to the east as the world rolls beneath them.

It was a remarkable sequence filmed in a beautiful, silvery black and white. I longed to see the rest of this movie.

Years passed, wars were fought, beloved dogs died, loves’ labors were lost. I always remembered “Faust” and the scene which flowed like cinematic butter.

But would I ever see it?

The answer is yes, because it’s now in the public domain and available from Archive.org.

I downloaded it, merged in a subtitle file and converted the media type to a PSP compatible form of mpeg.

All of which gave me a chance to watch this remarkable film while riding on a commuter train. The woman sitting next to me leaned over slightly, glanced at the screen and smiled.

I wonder what Murnau would think of a West Philly boy who spent his youth playing pick up hoops with rats and turning to roaches for sage financial advice watching his movie on a science fictional device in a world in which the Americans are occupying Mesopotamia, a black fellow is President Elect, a space station orbits the globe, the Chinese are a major power and his movie is freely available at the press of a button.

Our world, and our mundane lives, are far stranger than anything dreamt of by Murnau’s UFA colleague, Fritz Lang, for “Metropolis”.

While it’s surely worthwhile and fascinating to uncover yet another Roman ruin, the sort of archeology that keeps all of us panting for more (like a strange breed of archeology loving dog…one that pants when there’s a new find) is the unearthing of the ruins of our past selves.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/fWMJ8mtAus0"" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350"/]

Do I mention this because I’m drunk? Yes, drunk on love, love of the insane things I wrote as a nebula-eyed teenage boy (I drank heartily from the cup of sensitivity and ate the meat of tenderness with the abandonment of a Viking – which is a paradox, or at least, a bad metaphor).

Here’s what I found in a decaying notebook:

“I want to make sexy maneuvers leading to astounding outcomes.”

What an ambitious pup. Why have I failed to conquer this globe?

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/agYrhmIx-w8" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350"/]

What an exhilaratingly terrible dilemma.

On one side, we have a strange gift – our imagination – which allows us to virtually leave real concerns behind through weightless thought. But on the other side, as entertaining and useful as this ability no doubt is it also acts as the doorway for what Zizek termed a “plague of fantasies” – a retreat from actual things into an imaginary world so powerful it compels us to redefine the real things and people we see, touch, hear, smell, etc. as markers on the map we drew in fantasy land. An unreliable but pleasurable guide (pleasurable, because our assumptions are kept intact, counter-evidence be damned).

Cervantes’ Don Quixote, a character viewed as heroic, then pathetic, then dangerously delusional and finally, in the end, sadly self aware surely walked with a heavy step, burdened by just such a malady.

This wandering brings us to the moment when our melancholic, tender and misunderstood youth, having abandoned his previously cherished fantasies of angelic perfection and grown tired, as the years stumbled on from the mid to late teens, of the woe-is-me role, hatches a sitcom style scheme to remake himself.

Like the part machine/part human hero of the 1970’s American television series, the “Six Million Dollar Man”, who, through advanced technics, is transformed from a broken man – limbless due to his last act of Cold War heroism before beatification via machine, (the doomed piloting of an experimental aircraft) – to a wonder of speed, strength and titanium reinforced determination, our young man undergoes a fantastic reconstruction.

But his goals aren’t as lofty as those of Quixote and Colonel Austin: no, our boy only wants to get laid.

Well, not so fast…because of course there are also reveries of soft lit romance but these are tightly bound with fevered dreams of guitar sound tracked, porn-esque sex. A double helix of wishes. 17 is the age for confusing sex with nearly everything, including, but not limited to, freshly squeezed orange juice.

The goal is settled upon but the method has yet to be worked out.

If the angel is dead or rather, somehow, through a trick of the mind transformed into a demoness, the proper response is to go on the attack.

The method takes shape like a jinn twisting into solid form from curling blue smoke: the boy decides he must become a lady killer, a dragon slayer.

Simple human to human contact appears to be out of the question. The wounded have declared a strange and common sort of war. The imagined prey becomes the predator.

When you’re a clumsy lad, the sort who wears an ancient army jacket (which, according to the salesman at the Army/Navy surplus store, was of Korean War vintage – complete with real bullet hole!) desperately in need of a haircut and generally a bit dodgy when it comes to your self presentation there’s a very high probability your dating life will be a valley of thorns.

In an imaginary, non-sexist world, one in which women were not by turns of degree seen as paragons of virtue or monstrous succubi (the history of the idea of the succubus is interesting indeed – see, for example, the Malleus Maleficarum) You might conclude the problem was something you were missing; some mistake you were making as a splasher about in the dating pool. Or, if you’re too young to put all that together – the brain not being completely wired at 15 – a usefully wise adult might point out your missteps.

But in a sexist world there’s always an easy explanation handy, waiting to be pulled off the shelf in case of emergencies: women (or girls, in this case, though the idea persists well into the age of rent and mortgage payments, echo cardiograms and baldness) are difficult, sinister, controlling, all powerful yet powerless, irrational yet calculating. Such comforting fantasies can only be maintained by a delusional support system.

With the machinery of sexism roaring at full power like a Ferrari Enzo it’s smoothly possible to settle into a sort of melancholia of the stupid in which you lament supposed harsh realities: your perfection is under appreciated, unnoticed, unsung. Surely the girls around you, being flawed creatures, are to blame for your sensitively felt loneliness.

This is the predictable evolution of the angel motif of an earlier stage – the cynicism that naturally follows idealism as ice follows water when the temperature drops. In an imaginary non-sexist world, the inevitable frustrations associated with mating might take a different form. But with sexist ideas as common as the air you breathe it’s simpler to accept there are no “good girls” available to tenderly minister to you.

These ideas are so powerful that even those who’re very successful daters express them.

The real question at the end of the day is this: what is possible and what impossible when it comes to human thought?

Perhaps the root of sexism is the belief that women are ‘Other’ and, therefore, rightly excluded, because of this separate status from the fetishized male norm, from being considered simply as human beings; with all the good and evil that means.

Our ideas about women evolve within a sexist framework: even types of thought that seem celebratory, such as elevating women above the supposed muck and mire of life – idealization – are weighted by the seed of their opposite (you surely can’t have a madonna archetype without a whore for derision).

At around 13 years of age, probably a typical moment for the first flowering of conscious feelings of desire as desire (and not the fragments we experience as children, not yet directed and molded by dominant memes and biological maturity) I experienced my first serious crush on a girl my own age.

The details are mundane and familiar to those who’ve experienced or observed American style courtship at its earliest stages (clumsy attempts to get noticed, make out sessions in places like church basements, misunderstood poems from your love, the inevitable tearful breakups).

What fascinates me now about this Jurassic period are the girl-centered reveries that filled my awkward hours: girls, not as fellow creatures whom I found attractive, but as angels.

The angel leitmotiv was quite powerful and defined the ‘otherness’ of girls as I understood it at that stage. I, as a boy, was part of a bumbling, noisy tribe, not fit for polite company. But the girls, ah…they were the ones who smelled like a doorway to heaven had been opened for just a moment, allowing the fragrance of divinity to tantalizingly reach mortal senses. Even at that undeveloped stage I was a bit of a sensualist, admiring the curve of a foot, the small of a back…

This idealization was mostly nonsense of course. The girls were children too and just as likely to behave absurdly (or appropriately, considering what we were…kids) as the boys. Yet, in my thoughts, they floated above humanity like goddesses.

At 13 this is harmless enough (if it’s left behind with ‘why was I born?’ soliloquies) but it formed the core of an entire way of seeing that would alter its surface characteristics but remain essentially unchanged as the teenage years rolled on and into my twenties. Until, that is, it did change, but that’s another tale which comes later.

At the original moment of desire as consciously realized the idea of woman as Other – in this case, an object of worship – was fully in effect.

But the excessive admiration of beauty is only a kiss away from a fear of the beast. As I grew slightly older, reaching my mid teens, the angel theme morphed into another motif: women as cruel figures of immense power. Note how the basic, workaday humanity was still missing.

Which will be discussed.

Next.

altered Arnolfini Portrait via Something Awful…

Among other things, Foucault was concerned with the history of knowledge – how information, over time, arrives at the elevated plateau of being meaningful and important. Of course, I’m not Foucault (there’s a temptation at this point to insert clockwork mechanism jokes about not being bald, or French or, well, dead but these are all unfortunate and only merit parenthetical mention as signs of my imperfection). Still, the idea of applying a sort of archaeological tool set to the question of knowledge – or perception – is very appealing.

It’s particularly appealing after three glasses of wine. One more glass and the appeal may wane like horniness after a porn film has served its true purpose.

Even the most mundane and ordinary areas of life, such as how one came to have a particular set of ideas about romantic love (a relatively new concept, we’re told) and not another can be poured through this filter.

Doing so allows you the pleasure of pretending to be icily objective while simultaneously (and narcissistically) rolling around in the kids-toys-strewn-haphazardly-about-the-room details of your life.

But these are idle musings; it’s time to walk backwards, then forwards, then sideways, then through walls, into and yet out of a personal history of love’s labors and the beliefs that evolved as a consequence.

Fun awaits.

Monday.