Ze Pengwans

Saw the March of the Penguins the other night. Well done film. Very Euro. Had that whole Life Acquatic, Jacques Costeau, 1970s classroom feel about it--a little grainy, like an old school film strip.

Anyway, it was interesting on many levels. It was so fascinating to watch the audience identify with the Emperors (are female Emperor Penguins Empress Penguins? Are the babies Prince and Princess Penguins?). The Seals become "evil" for eating the poor penguins. Mother Nature is Cruel for sending her death-dealing frozen winds.

Still, however imperfectly, it occured to me that the audience identification might be part of the larger movement towards innate recognition and existence as The World Soul. The Penguins were so clearly endowed with s0-called "human" traits--e.g. love, misery, vengeance, arrogance and so forth. Better to see that humans are the Universe aware of itself thinking. Humans are, too, I gathered from the film, the Universe aware of itself Feeling, Emoting. Clearly the link is so obvious watching such a record of their exploits. It is just with us with are aware, self-reflexively so, of those thoughts and emotions. We can and do verbalize them, chew on them, analyze them (sometimes far too much).

One thing that is beautiful about nature is its simplicity. There is no tortured self-paralysis as with the human. The antelope simply rolls its eyes back as the lion's teeth tears through its flesh. There is a quiet dignity to the daily toll of life and death.

Or so it seems perhaps at first glance. Chimpanzees kill for fun. Kill their own. There is what Howard Bloom calls The Lucifer Principle--Thanatos, a Death-Instinct inherent in the Evolutionary Process. I've seen a mouse shake in death-gripped panic, sitting in the cage, waiting for the snake to strike.

They are all there, in degrees, from the bottom up.

Nevertheless, I observed a subtle shift in presence about societally. Documetaries are doing better and better, while the typical summer blockbuster fare grows more and more pathetic (I'm mean was Speilberg even trying with War of the Worlds?)

V.S. Naipul says the novel is effectively dead: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/books/review/07DONADIO.html

Then he wrote a couple more. That aside, point is the novel is/was a product, the symbol of the modern phenomenological move. The inner world of the inner self--who lives in an inner "private" room, with "private property", who records his/her thoughts in a "Private" Journal.

The postmodern "novel" or postmodern lit has been effectively suckass. Hollywood is losing its ability to craft stories (except for Hustle and Flow, well done). Rappas can't rap anymore. Except in Colombia. How many more old TV shows from the 50s and 60s can be cinemized? Or worse old movies re-hashed.

How would a piece of literature--call it a novel--quadarticize, depict the relative world of manifestation. Would the story be told from multiple perspectives of each character. How would those characters perspectives within the confines of the art form acknowledge and/or reinforce that those perspectives already come enmeshed in others. I mean how private can that world be, if the words in your private head are from a language you didn't invent?

Those forms must be transcended and included, otherwise they will continue to decline.

How to play and manipulate time and space with dead letters/sounds on a frozen canvas?