Antigravity Dreams in Contemporary Chinese Cinema

 
Humanity's communal dream life is haunted by a sense of flying. Yes, you must be able to remember those nightly visions in which your body has floated free of gravity, letting you soar through the sky with a magical power that's both thrilling and taken for granted.

As has been pointed out by any number of observers, experiencing films shares a good deal in common with dreaming dreams, so it should come as no surprise that floating and flying feature largely in contemporary cinema. For reasons related to their long obsession with mystical martial arts, the Chinese are particularly likely to portray the human body as an Antigravitarian object.

I'll allow stills taken from one recent Chinese martial arts movie to represent and dramatize this trend. The movie is Zhang Yimou's Hero, which was released in 2002 and stars a perfect cast that includes Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Maggie Cheung, Jet Li, and Zhang Ziyi.

Here in Hero, the special effects suggest that you can slough off gravity at will, as you might dead skin, which always makes for a very satisfying fantasy experience:







Unfortunately, fascism appears to triumph at the end of Hero, which mars the movie badly. For fascism is not an Antigravitarian form of government. In fact, it's got the worst kind of gravity written all over it.
 

A Little Light Doggerel

 

If you act like St. Jerome,
beating heart with nasty stone,
you will never be happy,
wretched child of gravity.

Rise up, then, and greet the day,
throwing nasty stone away.
Let your heart and lips both smile.
Play with Antigravity a while!

 

Fashion World in Hair-Raising Struggle Against Gravity

 

Today'sTimes tells the tale
with pictorial precision:

Well, this is a consolation, I suppose.
The stock market may be down,
but feminine hair is enjoying
an unexpected ascendancy,
proving that the struggle
against gravity persists,
even in hard times.

 

The Sweet Lightness of Valentine's Day

 
When covering the Antigravity beat, you're bound to encounter messiahs, angels, gods, and saints, and this being St. Valentine's Day, I thought it wise to trot out the appropriate figure, with Antigravitational angels in attendance.

This image then, painted by Jacobo Bassano in or around 1575, shows St. Valentine baptizing St. Lucilla:


Admittedly, this is not everyone's idea of a romantic interlude, but let it be noticed that the angels hovering over this scene are extremely cupid-like (see my post of 12/25/08 by clicking here), and though Valentine did not, as near as we can tell, lead a sexually indulgent life before embarking on his career as a model of Christian virtue, his feast day, which the world has adopted as a celebration of earthly love, is said to mark the beginning of mating season for birds.


The latter claim holds some local interest for me, since I heard the mourning doves in my lady love's garden start cooing just two days ago--for the first time this year. Such song would suggest that some billing and other intimate behavior have begun to happen here in the borough of Brooklyn, as they may well have done in your neighborhood as well. At least in the northern hemisphere, the days lengthen, and the building of nests and the flowering of crocuses cannot be far away. So thanks again, St. Valentine: You do make a happy marker on our calendars.

As for St. Lucilla, she seems to have been a fairly run-of-the-mill martyr, which doesn't necessarily mean that her soul ascended to heaven in a run-of-the-mill sort of way. Martyrdom, let us remember, was considered a great blessing during Christianity's early centuries, for it guaranteed eternal life in celestial realms. (Does any of this sound familiar?) To reach back a bit to the mourning doves and the lyrics to a sentimental 19th-century song, Lucilla must have been happy to feel her spirit "pluming for flight."

Farewell gravity, hello heaven. What more could you ask for?

P.S. Sweet greetings to lovers everywhere. Please remember that true love is forever kind and courteous, speaking no word in callousness or wrath.
 

When Gravity Dreams

 

 

9/11: The Triumph of Fanaticism, Fire, and Gravity

 

But the abyss of gravity shall be
forced to release our dead,
and light supernal shall
shine upon them.

 

New Realms of Beauty

 

With the advent of technologies
that allow us to prevail over gravity,
we have entered entirely
new realms of beauty.

 

To Fly or to Die

Yes, sometimes it's actually that stark,
the choice between maintaining the power of
flight or perishing with the weight of gravity
pressing down on your useless wings,
as we can learn from the story of
the feathered but flightless dodo bird.

The dodo evolved from a normal flying pigeon
and settled into flightlessness because
it encountered no natural predators
after it had flown across the Indian Ocean and
taken up residence on the island of Mauritius,
which is found off the east coast of Africa.

Dodos tended to become overweight,
with adult birds eventually tipping
the scales at around 50 pounds.


In spite of that, dodos were doing pretty
well until some unnatural predators in
the form of dogs, pigs, and cats eventually
arrived in the company of the Portuguese
and Dutch sailors who reached Mauritius
for the first time in the 16th and 17th centuries.

No chance then to fly away to live another day!
Instead, with its limited locomotion and its
offspring vulnerable in nests on the ground,
the dodo's eventual doom was sealed.


Not even its inclusion in Lewis Carroll's
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
could bring the dodo back to life,
but the bones of the birds are still
being discovered and studied,
so that, although the dodo is extinct,
we know more about it today than
at any other time in history.

Unfortunately, that's not much of a
consolation prize when you've lost
the battle to survive. If I'd been
a dodo, I'd rather that my lineage
remain alive, and my choice would
have been not to die but to embrace
the Antigravitational solution,
which is to fly, yes, to fly.

Open Skies and Wonder

One reader writes:



The eloquent little cartoon
in the corner of this message
brought to my mind something
that William Blake wrote in a poem
called "The Marriage of Heaven & Hell":

". . . man has closed himself up,
till he sees all things through
narrow chinks of his cavern."

Sadly, being closed up is pretty
much the human condition
in a commercial era like the one
that we inhabit, so it should come
as no surprise when we yield
to the force of gravity and find
ourselves missing a sense
of closeness to God.

How, then, can we open back up?
How can we restore ourselves
to our birthright, which is to
experience the joy of living in
an endlessly fascinating universe?

In order to do that, we have to notice
that life is going on everywhere
around us, and that most of it
is sweet and even astonishing
in its richness and spontaneity.

When we widen our vision,
we see open skies and wonder,
and we understand that the dread
and loneliness that we sometimes
feel is only a mood that
overtakes us when we lose
the power of spiritual vision.

Fortunately, the psyche tends
to be a self-correcting system,
and sooner or later we begin
to remember that our blessings
far outweigh our troubles.

If I had to reduce this bit
of encouragement to several sentences
that would fit on a note card,
I'd guess I'd come up
with something like this:

And maybe if we rallied our forces
and shook ourselves awake,
we'd quit staring at our knees
and start to focus on something
that's far more interesting
than our smaller selves
and their earthly cares.

Such things abound--you know?

Of course you know!

The First & Second Births

Giotto's vision of St. Francis
ascending into heaven:

The first birth is into gravity.

The second birth is out of gravity, into Antigravity.

For gravity is of the flesh,

but Antigravity is of the spirit.

Upward to Imagination

With some help from the sword
of young David, the head of
Goliath prepares to surrender
to the force of gravity
(as painted by Michelangelo on the ceiling
of the Sistine Chapel, Vatican City):


We like stories that have suspense.
Such stories keep us suspended,
up in the air, eager to hear more.
Such stories free us
from gravity,
allowing us to float
up into the realm
of the imagination,
where all things
are possible,
up there
in the
air.

Gravity's Crueler Cuts

 

Here are some lines from
Robert Frost's poem, "Provide, Provide!"

The witch that came (the withered hag)
To wash the steps with pail and rag,
Was once the beauty Abishag,

The picture pride of Hollywood.
Too many fall from great and good
For you to doubt the likelihood.

Die early and avoid the fate.
Or if predestined to die late,
Make up your mind to die in state.

Make the whole stock exchange your own!
If need be occupy a throne,
Where nobody can call you crone.

Think gravity's not your enemy,
that your fate's different from Frost's Abishag?

Then consider another example of fallen pride,
Brigitte Bardot before and after
an extra fifty years of gravity:

And then there's an old guy
named Arnold Schwarzenegger,
who was once as tall and muscled
as Conan the Barbarian:


Sad to say, even his carefully colored
hair can't completely hide the ravages of time.

Which is not to neglect the fact that
some younger people are also feeling
gravity's less smiling aspects:


As for finding a throne or
making the whole stock exchange
your own--forget about it!
In the long haul, the only answer
to the assaults of gravity is to cultivate
a soul, preferably an eternal one.
In short, embrace the Antigravitational
solution for all its worth.
Because, like it or not, that's what
life is really all about.

 

Ghost Story

 

Space, time, and gravity will all fall away--
it matters not how deeply trapped
we are in them today.

The English war poet Wilfred Owen
shortly before his death in late 1918

While Wilfred Owen was serving in the trenches as a Royal Army infantry officer during World War I--and simultaneously winning great fame as a young war poet--his brother Harold became a naval officer. Harold was aboard a Royal Navy ship in the Atlantic off Africa when he heard in November of 1918 that the war had come to an end, but at first he found no relief in the good news: "It bothered me that I could not, to myself, account for my restless unease. I felt horribly flat."

He quickly recovered his spirits, however: "I stared out over the incredibly blue expanse of glittering sea, and perhaps something in the limitless stretch of water and sky affected me. I realized with a surge of happiness that the war had not broken my own family. My brother Wilfred must be all right now; he was safe, and so was I."

Wilfred Owen may well have been safe, but the place that provided him with safety was no longer a part of the reality that the living share from minute to minute and day to day. Shortly before the war ended, he had been killed by the Germans at the front, a fact that did not, apparently, stop his spirit from traveling through the ether to visit Harold Owen on his ship.

Harold carefully recorded his experience of ghostly visitation:

"I had gone down to my cabin to write some letters. I drew aside the door curtain and stepped inside. I felt shock run through me with appalling force. I did not rush towards him but walked jerkily into the cabin--all limbs stiff and slow to respond. Looking at him I spoke quietly, 'Wilfred, how did you get here?'"

For there Wilfred was, sitting in his brother's chair at his brother's desk in his brother's shipboard cabin. Harold Owen recounted the scene with such detail and clarity that it seems impossible to dismiss it as a dream:

"He did not rise and I saw that he was involuntarily immobile, but his eyes which had never left mine were alive with the familiar look of trying to make me understand; when I spoke his whole face broke into his sweetest and most endearing dark smile.

"I felt no fear--I had not when I first drew my door curtain aside and saw him there; only exquisite mental pleasure at thus beholding him. All I was conscious of was a sensation of enormous shock and profound astonishment that he should be here in my cabin . . .

"I must have turned my eyes away from him; when I looked back my cabin chair was empty. I felt another power in senseless, absolute loss. I knew with certainty that Wilfred was dead."

Harold wasn't able to confirm the paranormal perception that his brother had been killed until days later when his ship arrived in England. But dead? Isn't "dead" a rather strange word to use in this context? Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that Wilfred Owen had slipped the bonds of flesh and gravity and found the freedom to move through time and space at will, rushing along the spiritual pathways of his compassion to bring a message of conquest over death to those whom he loved best?

 

The Love That Is Not Love

 
The love that is full of light is the hope and glory of the world. It is the love that comes freighted with gravity and egotism that is destructive, the love that is no real love, the love in the name of which endless crimes have been committed.

Henry Fuseli, "The Nightmare," 1781

 

Sunrise with Om

 
When the power of Antigravity is enclosed in a single sound, that sound is symbolized by this Sanskrit letter-word:

There is a special chanting pronunciation for this word, a deep and drawn-out drone that can be represented, if a little ridiculously, by this string of letters in English: Ahhhooohhmmm.

People who repeat this sound correctly or learn to chant mantras in which "Om" holds a central place are well on the way to rising to the highest
realm of spiritual experience.

Om is, in short, a proven gravity-buster, for it was the sound that hummed through the primordial universe before gravity came into being and everything was still light.
 

With Wings or Without?

From the beginnings of civilization and back into prehistory, divine beings were often depicted with wings to show that, like the birds, they were creatures of the sky who observed humans from on high and could hide and frolic among the clouds. Their wings also allowed them to move rapidly from place to place, which explains why one devotee could experience their divine presence at one location and another devotee, far away, could apprehend the same divinity only a short time later.

However, in the Western tradition God's powers are seen to be so overwhelmingly great that he defies gravity at will, as dramatized on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Michelangelo fresco known as "The Creation of the Sun and Moon." Our Father, according to this vision, is definitely in heaven, but he needs no bird-like appendages to keep him there; wings are for lesser beings like angels, not the Lord of the Universe. Obviously, this article of faith has evolved far beyond the one that likened the gods to glorified eagles.

The absolute difference between human beings who are earthbound and a transcendent God who floats about in ultra-reality at will is a reminder that we should cultivate humility. Michelangelo's magnificently famous "Creation of Adam," also on the ceiling of the Sistine, may reveal the Creator and his human creation as approximately the same size, but there's no question about which one claims immortality, keeps celestial companions, and possesses the life-giving touch--and which is an utterly dependent creature without clothing, shelter, full consciousness, or, as yet, a single companion.
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What's Wrong with Gravity?

Do you think it's strange to diss gravity,
to make it the villain of a universal melodrama?
Do you wonder what could be wrong with the
gravitational glue that holds the universe together?
If so, you haven't considered black holes.

Blacks holes are the perfect symbols of everything that denies us life and freedom because their gravity is so intense that not even light can escape from their overwhelmingly massive interiors. All things that approach them, even entire galaxies, are sucked into oblivion, into an extinction beyond the darkness of death. They provide the best example of why we are and ought to be Antigravitarians.

Black holes are far and away the most formidable and frightening things in the universe. They are the ultimate in death imagery, and they represent the unfathomable disaster that occurs when gravity goes unchecked by Antigravity, which is the force that holds the universe in balance and allows us to live and not die.

Closer to home (which is to say, our home planet), gravity erodes and eventually destroys entire civilizations. While the 19th-century painting of the destruction of Sodom (below) by the English artist John Martin makes the end of an ancient city look like the work of a nuclear holocaust, the actual historic process that reduces entire civilizations to stark stones and dust and ashes is gradual yet still phantasmagorical, and the ultimate result of decadence and defeat is dramatized around the world by the presence of splendid but desolate ruins where there were once thriving metropolises.

Jerash, Jordan (Photo by Robert Teague)

These are the ruins of a Roman city
that once flaunted its high roofs at the sky.
Thus the power of gravity,
of which we need to be aware,
of which we need to beware.
:

Lighten & Rise

 
If you ever need proof of humanity's distrust of gravity, consider the billions of dollars that Americans spend annually on weight-reduction products.

We use terms like "beer belly," but the real force that presses down on the extra weight that we carry around from consuming beer or comfort food or sweets or whatever is gravity.


Losing weight is not just a matter of making ourselves more attractive. "Slenderizing," becoming slender, is a mass cult, and reveals the central human desire to lighten and rise. Fat may help us float when we're swimming, but the ocean that we'd really like to be more comfortable in is the ocean of air.

Think of all the young athletes and dancers you've seen whose feet have kissed the earth goodbye, whose lithe bodies rise in long, lovely arcs. Yeah, to float like that, to lose enough weight to float like that. Yeah, look homeward, angels.

The rest of us just have to suck it up!

 

Admiring the World

When down under gravity,
consider these uplifting quotations:

"Stand up straight. Admire the world."
--John Cheever

"Keep a green tree in your heart and
perhaps a singing bird will nest in it."
--Chinese proverb

"Self-pity is not box-office."
Hollywood proverb

"We have no right to have no hope,

because if we have no hope,
there is no hope."
--Jacques Monot

"Noble deeds and hot baths are
the best cures for depression."
--Dodie Smith

"True serenity comes
after knowledge of pain."
--Marya Mannes

"Anything awful makes me laugh.
I misbehaved once at a funeral."
--Charles Lamb

"No life that breathes with human breath
has ever truly longed for death."
--Lord Tennyson

"Surviving meant being born over and over."
--Erica Jong

"It's never too late to have a happy childhood."
--Tom Robbins