Friday, April 2, 2010

Adaptation

The film Adaptation (2002) seems to encompass a myriad of the themes discussed in our course. Most recently we have been discussing, The Alchemists. One definition of Alchemy, as we have said, is the transformation of the human soul. Through a process of intense introspection and meditation men can awaken themselves to their true selves. Or at least that is the idea. And why shouldn’t it be? We are born completely shit-mashing ignorant of ourselves. We are ripped from our mothers and forced to suck the dirty air of this cold blue world – from one matrix to another. The transplantation from our mother’s womb to the rocks and dirt – consequently the organic remains of those who have weathered this process before us – is too much for some individuals. They collapse, digress, shrivel like a culled flower without water, like a symbiont want of its mate, they disfigure, disorient – they Adapt. Now you say, wait! Adaptation is a good thing! Not to mention it is in direct contradiction to a few of the listed terms! To that I answer, YES! Correct! Absolutely! Without question! However I also shout, NO! Definitely not! Never! It’s out of the question! I say all these things simultaneously, and you label me insane. I assure you a list of concurrents is easily complied. But that is beside the point. In Biology Adaptation is the language of survival, it allows for the perfect pattern of overlapping web of self-fulfillment. Everywhere in the world is found beautiful harmony, where one plant or animal has learned to live with and thrive off of the achievements of another species through a perfect expressive dance of love and sex and birth and death. It is as if they have access to a map hidden by our ignorance if only we paid more attention we would find that the answer to all life’s questions lay under our dirt-encrusted fingernails. So that’s it. Adaptation is most definitely a good thing! Oh if only that were true, and perhaps it would be if only we spent more time admiring our dirty fingernails and less time biting them down to the bone while we ride a financial rollercoaster. But, (and this is the biggest contradiction ever constructed) humans have mysteriously removed themselves from the biosphere, at least in their own minds. Adaptation is no longer an admirable quality, or seemingly even a necessary one (though it still is). In the human mind adaptation is giving up (only when strictly speaking of humans, of course). Adaptation is refusing to grow beyond your microhabitat. It’s a sign of intellectual incuriosity – only people void of grandiose desires adapt to their surroundings. Can this possibly be true? (And here is where I’m returning to the themes, I promise). Those who adapt will most likely never leave their place of birth, meaning they will never go on the journey necessary in learning to appreciate those things, in our back yards. Dolce Domum is at the core of this debate – T.S. Elliot, that bimbo Dorothy, and as reluctant as I am to admit it, Paulo Coelho stand at the apex of this philosophical and more concretely biological confluence of opposing ideas. Dolce Domum my ass. I’ve lived in this place for 18 years, and I want nothing more than to run screaming mad into the night never to return. After all these years my home seems the antithesis to growth. Yet here I remain drying up like a beached whale in the hot sun. Well, I’ve done it again. I somehow managed to write myself into my work again, how narcissistic! Ok, I’ll make peace with that (for now). Here is my contention concerning Dolce Domum. The idea of home cannot be a geographical location. Otherwise bumbling little Dorothy would never have returned to that flat empty wasteland they call Kansas. Home must be a feeling or sentiment we compose within ourselves – a mixture of nostalgia and loathing for a time that possibly never existed. So many of our memories and feelings we associate with a place turn out to be false. The postcard is always more attractive than the actual view. Dolce Domum – or some sense of longing for home – is something we must all confront. And in the face of terror a decision is made – will you adapt or fade away?

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