Television documentaries such as Jump Britain have described this activity as ‘urban ballet’ given the sense of ceremony or ‘Tai-Chi’ like deliberation which comes with the performed movements. On a more realistic level, and one away from the television cameras, however, it appears as a hybridized leisure activity – incorporating elements from gymnastics and break-dancing to enable elegant and graceful movement over ‘obstacles’ found in the urban environment. Having studied a group of Parkour enthusiasts for the past couple of years in Nottingham, UK (NottsPK) I have become as intrigued by their ‘sport’ as I have been with public reactions. Because Parkour takes place mostly in urban space, it has been seen as a kind of reclaiming of the streets. Although this is undoubtedly true, it is the reclaiming of the body which I find of particular interest and the implications this has for health. Before expanding on this further though, we should take a brief historical look at how the body has been used elsewhere to construct identity.

Many socially marginalised groups have positively employed the phrase, ‘The personal is political’ for celebrating their identities. Within sections of the gay community this is best exemplified in the ‘hanky code’ whereby different coloured bandanas signal individual sexual preferences and interests. Encoding sexual activities enables conversations to develop in which they are ‘talking’ rather than ‘listening’. I see this as a political act,  taking control of your own identity. The resulting sense of self is visual and proud and, in its defiant construction around sex, celebrates [and subverts] a common prejudice used to marginalise gay men.

Similarly the feminist movement in the early 1970s attempted to reclaim ownership of the body through the politics of abortion, ‘access’ and diet. Taking control of the body and using it as a boundary enabled a certain level of self-control, particularly in relation to identity.

By this logic, voluntary mistreatment of the body must also be thought of as political and personal expression. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the MTV spin off show Jackass. (1996 – ) The programme revolves around a group of men recording a series of humiliating and dangerous pranks on camcorder such as BMX jousting, shark hugging or being shot at. The group leader, Johnny Knoxsville, warns with subtle irony ‘Do not try this at home.’ This bodily mistreatment clearly struck a chord with the public as Jackass: The Movie (2002) grossed US $64 million.

While Jackass may be read as another example of the ‘levelling-down’ process, an analysis of the body in Jackass provides an alternative explanation. Using the body as a cultural text, self harm and mutilation give material expressions to certain cultural anxieties, like the supposed ‘crisis of masculinity,’ and are a basic inversion of the destructive machismo which epitomised 1980s classics such as the Rambo and Rocky films. Both explanations are plausible, but Jackass also entails a rational assessment of risk. As people encounter greater daily intervention into their lives from bureaucratic forms of governance, such as ‘health and safety’ legislation and the whole ‘culture of blame’ which this has created, the message of Jackass is simple:  This is my body and it is the one thing which you can’t control, so sit back and watch me smash bottles over my head and fire nails into my arse.

I situate Parkour within this tradition of bodily empowerment and as a more nuanced reaction to similar anxieties. In Jackass the body is treated with contempt, as something expendable, which could be seen as indicative of a wasteful capitalist modernity. In Le Parkour we see an inversion of these values so that self-preservation, finesse and agility are favoured. The goal is to move as fluidly between objects with the minimum of fuss and hopefully no injury. Through this experience a kind of oneness is achieved with the body, mind and environment.

Le Parkour can be thought of as an urban philosophy as it has a clearly defined manifesto but rather than having one specific ideology, it is formed out of multiple narratives drawn from a wide range of influences such as fantasies, escapism, cult icons, films, books, comics etc. It also extends into philosophies of self-improvement and self-awareness drawn from both the West and the East. In many ways this is emblematic of many new forms of modern identity which have grown out of internet forums and chat rooms; thus Parkour as philosophy is a kind of cultural sponge which is able to absorb information and influences without ever losing its shape.

This is possible because Parkour centres around emotive rather than factual language and thereby opens itself to interpretation and play e.g. one word which pops up more than others is ‘fluidity’, which itself implies the ability to change and transform smoothly. For fluidity to be achieved, participants must overcome four obstacles: mental, social, martial and family.

The mental obstacle – and perhaps the most difficult of them all – entails conquering your fears and gaining the necessary mental strength and confidence to make a particular jump. As different movements vary in complexity and risk so too the rate at which strength and confidence are perfected depends individually. Working together as part of a large cooperative helps as each group member is able to guide and reassure the other. When one member performs a particularly risky jump it then motivates another to try.

Overcoming mental obstacles leads to a certain degree of confidence arguably will translate into other areas of personal life. It is for this reason that Le Parkour can be seen as a philosophy of self-help and realization. The underlying message is if you can make a jump which seemed impossible, what is to stop you from sorting out emotional and mental problems in other areas of your life.

It should be noted that some movements are clearly built upon physical agility and power and therefore easier for older, taller and more disciplined bodies to achieve. Self- confidence in itself is not enough. But the fact that you are able to realise these limitations of your own volition is important as it is only by emotionally relating to something that we are able to fully comprehend it. Far too often in life restrictions are imposed on people without allowing them to discover for themselves. It is perhaps for this reason that Parkour enthusiasts on forums such as Urban Freeflow, turn to the wisdom of movie idols such as Bruce Lee. ‘If you always put limits on what you can do, physical or anything else, it’ll spread over into the rest of your life. It’ll spread into your work, into your morality, into your entire being. There are no limits.’

Le Parkour is described as ‘the way’ on the UF website, which suggests that it is a particular way of perceiving reality. While Parkour’s ideologies are influenced by films such as The Matrix (1999) these may also have had a physical influence as well. One thing which The Matrix, comic super heroe’s such as Batman and Spiderman, and computer games all have in common is that the characters can do super human things with their bodies as they swing and fly through the metropolis. Technology has been criticised for creating inertia, obesity and an artificiality in everyday human existence. Yet could it not be the case that engaging in such fantasies has inspired individuals to redefine and expand the limits of human potential? Le Parkour in trying to overcome mental objects and achieve seemingly impossible movements seeks to reverse the potentially negative effect of technology while heightening human experience and the body in the process.

As Le Parkour is performed in public space, individuals must be prepared to overcome certain social obstacles or stigmas such as people staring, pointing, ridiculing etc. In letting go of inhibitions and ignoring negative comments by passersby (who are rare I should point out) can lead to more confidence in other areas of life. However, in my experience it is the observers rather than the participants who go through the real anxiety. On numerous occasions I’ve seen people try to coerce one of them down from a wall because they might injure themselves only to be shocked when they exit with such panache.

Martial obstacles come in the form of authority figures who move participants on because they’ll ‘cause damage’ or are unwittingly on ‘private property’. As frustrating as this may be, the group I studied never argued back or were rude. Arguing with authority figures who weren’t listening because they were ‘just doing their job’ was seen as a waste of time and stopped them from doing what they were here to do. It was easier to just move somewhere different.

Contemporary sub-cultures like Le Parkour are often described in terms of moral decay whereby social regulation has broken down, metanarratives have crumbled, and youth have been left to run wild. But Le Parkour clearly refutes such claims. In explaining their ‘art’ to law enforcement agencies, they are learning to reason. They are also learning humility, tolerance, and understanding, thereby re-embedding a sense of order in a supposedly atomised and increasingly fragmented society. Indeed, they are actively encouraged to show concessions towards authority figures in arguments over space as in effect they are ambassadors for this relatively new discipline. Failure to be civil could lead to the activity being banned in certain areas and thereby ruining it for other enthusiasts.

Perhaps the most formidable of hurdles to overcome is the negative attitude of relatives, in particular parents. This can be intensified by negative representation in the media which tend to favour the more extreme aspects of the discipline rather than the more everyday practise that I witnessed. But you only need to watch this group of kids working with each other to realise that everything is calculated risk and clearly well thought out and planned before anything serious is attempted. Similarly, there are endless videos and training advice on the UF website. As one member of the group once pointed out to me, ‘my mum’s just glad I’m not doing drugs or getting’ in fights’.

The ability to persuade loved ones to trust and support the decisions you make with your life helps to develop communication and reasoning skills which will spread into all areas of lived experience. These may seem like a new set of values but really all recreational activities, in particular sports, promote a certain degree of friendship, fair play, respect, team work, problem solving etc. However what differentiates this urban sport from more traditional sports is that it is built around cooperation rather than competition.

Risk clearly has an important role to play in Le Parkour as it has to be managed to minimise injury and courted to fully enjoy the extreme experience. But what it really offers participants is the opportunity to draw a thick line between life and death. There are many false or thin risks in modernity which have made death appear ubiquitous: killer bugs in hospitals, terrorism, GM and processed food, overzealous health and safety intervention, etc. The list is endless – but such ‘risks’ make everything seem to be a potential danger.

Le Parkour reacts against this gross and perhaps inevitable trivialisation of knowledge. The constant intervention by the state and its systems ‘for our own good’ (and often it is), has meant alternative forms of expression and self diagnosis have emerged. As history has proven time and time again, how we use our body and the boundaries it enables us to make are as integral to our mental and physical health as they are to our identity.

I did not have a lot of opportunities to “return.”  My parents did not go back so often that my siblings or I would be able to accompany them.  When they did go back, the cost of a trans-Pacific trip was too prohibitive for my sister, brother, or me to be able to join them.  My brother was the first of my siblings to visit the Philippines, and he went with Dad after his sophomore year in high school.  He had a great time meeting our relatives but complained about having been a feast for the mosquitoes there.  After they returned, I told Mom and my sister that someday we would have to make a girls’ trip to the Philippines as this was only fair.  At that moment, my brother became one of “them,” someone who had “been back,” and I admit that I envied him.

I used to feel this interminable divide between Filipino-Americans like me who were born in the United States and Filipino-Americans who immigrated mostly as small children with their parents to the United States.  I often wondered if they were somehow superior Filipinos, and that they were somehow culturally predisposed to be more proficient in Tagalog and have an undiscerning taste for Filipino cuisine, no matter what ingredients and strange animal parts were involved.  Being U.S.-born, I felt that there was some ineffable, missing element that made me more of a poseur than a “real” Filipino-American.  In fact, for a time, I insisted on identifying myself as just “American” because I was born in the United States and did not see the point of placing my parents’ national origin in my own ethnic identification.  I also saw the label “Filipino-American” as something of a lie – how could I dare to label myself with a country I have never seen with my own eyes?

As originally planned, we Espineli women finally set off on our own Philippine journey on June 7, 2007 with the intention to canvass a selection of its thousands of islands in a scant two weeks.  Like some kind of strange time warp across the International Date Line, Mom, my sister Lauren, and I left Los Angeles for Manila in the early evening of a Thursday and arrived in Manila early Saturday morning.  The sixteen-hour plane ride was punctuated with many hot meals – an unexpected treat given the fact that all U.S. domestic plane trips no longer serve meals.  The hot meals were Filipino dishes which helped make it all the more real that we were finally going to visit our parents’ home country.   I remember feeling nervous about meeting my large extended family and wondering what they will think of us.  Mom is the fifth of nine children, so we had plenty of aunts, uncles, and cousins to meet.  Dad only had three siblings, all of whom are now in the United States, but his uncle had eleven children and his aunt had sixteen. So this makes for many more cousins, many of whom are scattered around the world (such as in Norway).

As per usual, Lauren and I procrastinated about packing, and we each ended up each packing a huge suitcase, a decision we regretted as soon as we landed.  In addition to all of our suitcases, we had a huge cardboard box, filled with gifts and supplies for relatives.  If you have ever passed the Philippine Airlines counter in the international terminal, you have probably seen many passengers waiting to check in huge cardboard boxes called Balikbayan((“Balikbayan” literally means “returnee” or someone coming home after an extended stay.)) boxes.   These boxes are a long-standing tradition which also adds to the cost of a trip to the Philippines – because you can’t just go there empty-handed.  We brought old clothes, little gifts and souvenirs as well as foodstuffs like instant coffee, corned beef, and Coffeemate that are very expensive and hard to come by in the Philippines.

As we deplaned and made our way to the baggage claim, we felt the profound humidity engulf us as we tried to find our bearings.  So this was what the tropics really felt like.  Our first trip to the bathroom was an experience!  We had to tip someone in the bathroom when we finished using the facilities…the last time I encountered this was going to the bathroom at a nice hotel so it was a bit unexpected in an airport.  Thankfully, we had been warned in advance to bring our own toilet paper as this convenience is very much a Western one.  As soon as we gathered all of our luggage, we needed to find our connecting flight to Tacloban.  Our first stop on our journey was to go to Mom’s hometown of Calbayog on the island of Samar.  Samar is part of the middle region of the Philippines known as the Visayas.

As we dipped beneath the thin layer of clouds, we got our first peek at the lush greenery that awaited us.  I had seen some photos of Mom’s hometown but they were mostly of people and of buildings so my imagination forgot to fill in the fact that it was enclosed by all of this amazing nature!  I wondered why my mother never mentioned this…then again, it was probably something she saw as normal and not something worth pointing out to us.

Fortunately, we got help in acclimating to our new environment.  Our uncle Tito Ecot (Mom’s brother-in-law) and our cousin Francis met us at the airport in Tacloban.  Tacloban is on the island of Leyte and is best-known for being the humble birthplace of Imelda Marcos – this was a factoid with which we were immediately supplied.  Tito Ecot and Francis hired a van for the day to pick us and our luggage up since it was a five-hour trip by car to Calbayog.  I think that our luggage outweighed us so this was good planning.  Tito Ecot warned us that it would be a bumpy road, but that was an understatement.  The potholes in some places were so deep that the driver would drive on the dirt shoulders which were actually smoother than the roads themselves.  We were amazed that this was the main highway of Samar!  When we asked why the roads were in such a state, Mom explained that due to political corruption, the funds for public works were siphoned off to more personal interests.  This got me to thinking about how much I took for granted in the United States.  Despite the frequent potholes I encounter in the Boston area, I don’t complain about them anymore.  Having a road in good repair is not a right but a privilege in my mother’s home province.

When I asked about whether they would ever do any repair on the road, my uncle and cousin laughed.  They explained that the road had been and would always be dangerous to travel and that they avoided taking this route when possible.  Our cousin Francis also mentioned that there was a possibility that Calbayog’s airport would soon offer flights to and from Manila (it does today).  It was great to see Francis, having only known him through photos and relatives’ stories.  I knew he was a little older than me and that he and his twin brother Terrence were both married with kids.  I looked forward to connecting with him and all of our cousins.  I could not help but wonder what we would talk about, if we had any interests in common, and what they would think of me and Lauren and our American ways.  It was a nice surprise to discover that he had so much to share with us about the Philippines, including local attractions and historic sites that he wanted us to see.

Before we started out on our treacherous five-hour journey to our relatives’ hometown, Calbayog, we took a quick trip to a nearby monument.  General MacArthur’s words, “I shall return,” was one of the few tidbits I remembered learning about the Philippines in my high school world history class.  It was a surprise for Lauren and me to learn that we could go to the exact spot where General MacArthur had indeed returned with forces to liberate the Philippines at the end of World War II.   The monument’s statues of MacArthur and his officers looked to me like performance artists standing in water.  It was meant to duplicate how MacArthur and his men waded through the Pacific waters to return to the Philippine shores marking the fulfillment of his promise of his famous words.

Just as I had once felt awe standing  in front of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris where so much of the history of that city had taken place, I felt chills about what a momentous occasion this moment was for both the United States and the Philippines that had only happened 63 years previously.   Now here were my sister and me, making our way to the country that our parents left behind to pursue a brighter future in the United States.  Would they have left the Philippines behind had MacArthur not returned as promised?  The Philippines would never be the same and still struggles with the repercussions of that moment today.  Gone were its Japanese oppressors and in came the democratic saviors.  But at what cost?  Did the United States seduce the Philippines with so much of its culture and language that we first-generation Filipino-Americans feel even more of a disconnect between our ethnic origins than other first-generation Asian-Americans?  I couldn’t help but think of all of the implications that MacArthur’s return had for both the Philippines’ destiny as well as my own.

We crossed a bridge connecting Leyte to the island of Samar, and I was blown away by this island of palm trees.  It looked completely untouched by human hands as the palms grew thick and wild to the very ends of its shores.  How many islands were there like that in this archipelago of thousands?  In crossing this bridge, it made me think of the threshold I waited for so long to cross – to be one of those Filipino-Americans who have been “back.”  Of course, I did not feel any differently, but I knew that thereafter, I would never be the same.

(Sheila Espineli’s travels in the Philippines will be continued in a later issue)

Describing the Spanish that we used as “broken” is like saying water is wet. Our mangled word pronunciation, notoriously bungled syntax, and grammatical non-sequiturs were linguistic train wrecks in the making every other second that we opened our mouths to “articulate” our breathlessly pidgin Spanish. In contrast, Nona and her adult children spoke a sturdy and grammatically flawless Spanish. So all things considered, our grandmother had a world of patience for the linguistic disasters that we sent crashing her way during our everyday conversations with her.

There was one exception. In Peru, the term for grandmother is “mamavieja,” an affectionate if rather formal compound title comprising four syllables that translates into “Old Mother.” My older brother by nine years and his contemporary cousins enunciate this word perfectly. Alas, “mamavieja” was at least three if not four syllables too long for us latter born “americanos” to ever come within a Peruvian kilometer of pronouncing even semi-correctly.

So here our grandmother, one of the most practical people I have ever known, intervened at a point in time before I myself was out of diapers and drew the line with the then present and all future grandchildren. “Nona,” which means grandmother in French and other cultures, was so comparatively easy to say that not even we could blow the pronunciation. So “Nona” her title would be, and “Nona”she always was to us, even after her death in 2002.

Being that my grandparents lived with my mom, my brothers, and me, in an extended family household until I turned sixteen, Nona played a towering role in the world that I grew up in. Because my mom worked the night shift during my early grade school years, Nona was the one who got me up for school in the morning, and Nona was the one who waited for me when I ambled home from school, as my mom got in what rest she could before she would be off again to her night time job.

Nona was old school strict and old world tough.  She grew up in the 1920s on a wind swept and isolated mountain ranch located in the nether reaches of the northern Peruvian Andes far above Peru’s second largest city of Trujillo.   The glorified hamlet of about 150 people that was her ancestral hometown carried a Quechua name, Paranday.   Paranady in the 1920s more closely resembled say, Fargo, North Dakota circa 1890 than the relatively antiseptic 1980s era California surroundings that I walked out to every time I left the family house.   In fact, Paranday was so geographically and technologically shut off from the rest of the country that its entire location, along with all of the surrounding mountain ranches like Nona’s, were completely inaccessible by car until after 1981, nearly sixty five years after Nona was born.  Until that year any hardy soul trying to reach Paranday from the nearest sizeable population center had to do so Old Testament style, traveling twelve hours by donkey just to make it to the town limits.

Nona’s upbringing was forged in the crucible of this frontier like environment.   She grew up living a utilitarian and hard-scrabble life that put iron in her blood.   Six of the seven children she gave birth to were born right on the ranch she grew up in, without the benefit of epidurals or any other kind of modern anesthetic.   All things considered it is safe to say that Nona brought her frontier values with her everywhere she went and this was as true in how she raised me as it was for anything else. One thing that meant was nothing ever went to waste. Let me repeat: Nothing. Wasted. Ever.

This was most especially true in the area of food. Nona’s rural upbringing, which meant she was intimately familiar with the back breaking manual labor involved in cultivating agricultural products, and Nona’s legendary cooking wizardry in preparing her home-cooked meals, combined to form in Nona’s heart an exalted appreciation for the sanctity of food. Thus, for Nona, throwing away food was akin to an insult against God’s benevolence and an affront to the starving Ethiopian children depicted in what at the time felt like an infinite loop of World Vision television commercials.

In my early grade school years I was often Nona’s captive audience for one of her home-cooked meals. Ever faithful to her Spartan values and rural heritage, Nona naturally considered me morally obligated to eat all of the food she served on my plate. This stayed true even if the designated meal-time consequently tumbled into an overtime period of interminable length because of my passive resistance to what I then considered Nona’s culinary tyranny.

Those endless meal times often devolved into a test of wits between Nona and I. However, school morning breakfasts were especially perilous for my second-grade self because Nona insisted on serving me a daily bowl of Quaker Oats oatmeal, and there was a school bus to catch, so I was up against a clock, in addition to Nona’s formidable resolve.  Now, Nona always mispronounced this non-Spanish word for oatmeal as “Quack—errr”, dutifully left out the Oats part, and she saw it as her grandmotherly duty to make me ingest this particular kind of breakfast meal down to the last soggy oat. As for me, I was just as determined not to. In fact I felt I had a sacred responsibility to my kid palate not to drink the despised Quack–errr to anything like the bottom part of the bowl, where all the doomed soggy oats submerged to rest in watery oblivion.

However, I could not argue this point with Nona directly. I never did, as I had been raised not to. At this particular point in my family’s immigrant experience the rules were so strict that young children could never for any reason so much as say the word “No” to any responsible adult. So despite my kid’s eye view of the tragic injustice involved, no way and no how was I going to start the soundtrack of “No” with Nona around the consumption of Quack–errr.

Instead I employed subterfuge and tactical misdirection wrapped up in a metaphorical falafel of non-violent resistance. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. organized historic sit-ins for racial integration. John Lennon choreographed a televised 1969 bed-in for peace. And at age seven I began staging spoon-ins for escaping the de facto jail that Nona’s kitchen table was to me.

You may ask, what was a “spoon-in”? While Nona watched (or more accurately stated, pretended not to watch) me “finish” my breakfast from the business side of the kitchen (where the oven was), I dramatically and repeatedly buried my spoon deeply into the tilted bowl and pretended to scoop out every one of the surviving oats to eat them all, and thus in Nona’s eyes justify my getting off the kitchen table. My goal was to sustain my spoon-in pantomime just convincingly and long enough so that Nona would soon be distracted by a phone call or a bathroom break or some other minor miracle that would result in me being outside her line of sight. This in turn would allow me to jog sight unseen to the kitchen sink and flush the offending Quack-errr oats down the drain before Nona would be the wiser.

My spoon-ins were occasionally successful but in truth, Nona usually achieved her goal of making me eat everything she set on my plate.   She could and often would wait me out my spoon-ins because right after breakfast she walked me straight to the school bus stop.  Even at age seven I knew the school bus waited on no one, not even anti-Quack-err kid crusaders like myself.  And seeing as how Nona physically stood in the middle of the only possible route to the kitchen sink, unless Nona was distracted or otherwise called away from her ambush spot, my spoon-ins were doomed to fail.   Of course, the quiet irony is that at this current point in my life I would gladly trade any number of material things in exchange for being able to again taste any and every part of Nona’s cooking and to hear, even if only one more time, the soft grandmotherly laugh that she would so often share with me at the beginning of our meal times together.

Nona had a wonderful meal time laugh, I assure you.  Her laugh was vibrant, infectious, and carried within in it a love of life that found its original expression in Paranday and brought its resilience and generosity to my little childhood corner of Pasadena.    No matter where I am, I can hear its echo in my memory and know how blessed a grandkid I am to have had her in my life.   Nona’s laugh was graceful, loving, and communicated the elemental essence of who she was, how she lived, and where her truest treasure could be found.

All the while I ask myself: what is a large eye? A small eye? What is a normal sized eye?

Two hundred years ago, a young Austrian medical student found himself with the same question. He was struggling in school, and he was jealous of those among his class who so easily excelled at memorization. In interminable lectures he watched these men trying to figure out what made them different from him, why it was so easy for them to remember and so difficult for him.

It was the eyes, he decided. They all seemed to have larger eyes.

This young medical student was Franz-Joseph Gall, and this simple, odd insight would within two decades bloom into an unstoppable cultural force. Convinced of this causal connection, Gall began to look for other correlations between mental attributes and physical appearance. “Proceeding from reflection to reflection,” he would later write, “from observation to observation, it occurred to me that, if memory were made evident by external signs, it might be so likewise with other talents or intellectual faculties.” Gall set out looking for other correspondences between physical appearance and personality, and from then on, “all the individuals who were distinguished by any quality or faculty, became the object of my special attention, and of systematic study as to the form of the head.”

Gall’s obsession drove him to search for a visible means of discovering the brain’s secrets: a process he called “cranioscopy”—what became colloquially known as “bump reading” and what his pupil Johann Spurzheim would rechristen “phrenology.” It was predicated on a few simple principles. First, Gall theorized that, all other things being equal, size determines propensity: A bigger brain implies a higher capacity for intelligence. This was, Gall asserted, equally true of different parts of the brain—if the segment of the brain devoted to memory was larger in one individual than in another, then it stood to reason that the former would have a higher capacity for memory. Second, it was well known that the skull, like all bones, is initially malleable upon birth, only gradually becoming more rigid. So it stood to reason, Gall theorized, that the ridges and folds of the brain might imprint themselves on the bone when it was still pliable and that one could come to know the brain by understanding these imprints. From this apparent insight Gall began to explore the possibility that the brain’s workings might be made visible by the patterns it made on the skull. Each part of the skull became assigned a different aspect of personality—mirthfulness in the temples, sexual propensity at the base of the skull, and so on. With precise measurements of the size of each of these areas, Gall theorized, you could develop an entire picture of an individual’s character.

One’s identity, in other words, was written in the bumps of one’s head.

The rest of the story of phrenology is well known enough: blossoming into full scale quackery, it became a juggernaut of an industry unto itself, even as it was more and more discredited by legitimate science. By the twentieth century it was all but abandoned, but in the nineteenth century it was perhaps the most popular mode of understanding the human brain. In his preface to Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman proclaimed, “the anatomist chemist astronomer geologist phrenologist spiritualist mathematician historian and lexicographer are not poets, but they are the lawgivers of poets and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem.” It seems odd that the one profession on this list that actually purports to deal with who we are, why we’re motivated to do what we do, and how we define ourselves, is the one profession that seems so startlingly out of place nowadays. But it makes some sense that the rest of the disciplines on Whitman’s list are hard sciences, since phrenology presents itself as the hard science of the mind, a system of objective measurements and offers, in its own way, a certain amount of rigor. Phrenology has none of the messiness of psychoanalysis or modern therapy; the phrenologist doesn’t care about your dreams, needs no narratives about your past, your abusive parents, your failed aspirations. Everything the phrenologist needs is right there, laid out in a perfect, analytic grid. Your mind revealed in the same topographic language the lexicographer would use.

For all the ridiculousness of such a premise, there is a simple elegance in such a map of identity, where everything is so neatly arranged, so perfectly knowable. I’m not the only one who’s drawn to the trappings of Gall’s pseudoscience—lately, phrenology charts have popped up everywhere, from CD covers to bicycle helmets. They’re a graphic designer’s dream: iconic, ironic, eye-catching, nostalgic. But as much as layout artists may fetishize Gall’s chart nowadays, no one is eager to revisit the science. I’m not bothered that phrenology—with its dubious method and explicit racism, sexism, and all the rest—has disappeared. Good riddance. But what intrigues me is that such a ubiquitous measure of personality has literally disappeared off the face of the earth in less than a century. Compare the number of people who can read Egyptian hieroglyphs or ancient Greek to the number of practicing phrenologists—there are dead languages and there are dead languages, and the language of phrenology is about as dead as it gets.

And this is where my problem begins. For the past year, I’ve been trying to teach myself phrenology, this now-dead art.  At first I assumed this would be a fairly easy task, far easier than reconstructing Egyptian hieroglyphs from the Rosetta Stone. After all, the relics of phrenology are visible everywhere; libraries and online resources still preserve the literature. It’s everywhere in popular memory—the pseudoscience to end all pseudosciences, the template for every self-help scheme from The Secret to the Master Cleanse. How hard could it be to learn it?

It was easy enough to track down what I thought would have been the Holy Grail: Lorenzo Fowler’s “Self-Instructor in phrenology.” Lorenzo and his brother Orson did far more to popularize phrenology in the United States than anyone else, selling their now-iconic busts and performing thousands of readings out of their New York headquarters. The title says it all; who needs phrenological experts, when the book promises to let you teach yourself?

“To TEACH LEARNERS those organic conditions which indicate character is the first object of this manual,” the preface boldly proclaims. “And to render it accessible to all, it condenses facts and conditions, rather than elaborates arguments because to expound Phrenology is its highest proof states laws and results, and leaves them upon their naked merits; embodies recent discoveries, and crowds into the fewest words and pages just what learners need to know, and hence requires to be STUDIED rather than merely read. ‘Short, yet clear,’ is its motto. Its analysis of the faculties and numerous engravings embody the results of the very extensive observation and experience of the Authors.”

The library copy I acquired, an original from 1850, even has its first owner’s chart, filled out by Lorenzo Fowler himself, with each region given a number on a scale from 1 to 7. His pencil marks faint but still visible; I found myself wondering what a graphologist would make of them. But as tantalizing as Lorenzo’s presence in these pages is, it is also the problem: the book’s owner did not phrenologize himself. As the preface goes on to explain, the actual work is done by the examiner, in this case, Fowler: “The examiner will mark the power, absolute and relative, of each function and faculty, by placing a figure, dot, or dash on a line with the name of the organ marked, and in the column headed ‘large,’ or ‘small,’ according to the size of the organ marked, while the printed figure in the square thus marked refers to those pages in the book where, under the head ‘large,’ ‘small,’ etc., will be found description of the character of the one examined in respect to that organ….”

This is the problem—the Fowlers don’t teach you how to read heads, they teach you how to interpret their readings. And the bust they sold is great for learning where the various propensities of Amativeness, Philoprogenitiveness, Adhesiveness, Inhabitiveness, Alimentiveness, and all the rest are located, but it’s useless for separating a “3” from a “4.” You still need a phrenologist, one who knows how to classify the size of each bump.

In all the phrenological literature I’ve scoured, there’s not one description of bump size in objective terms, no measurements that can be applied to a contemporary head. How does one even objectively measure such bumps? In centimeters? In degrees? What is the “normal” shape of the head, from which one could single out a noteworthy bump? Once proprietary trade secrets, now these secrets of identity are likely lost for good. As with any dying language, without a living community practicing phrenology, its mysteries have disappeared from the storehouse of knowledge.

So I spend my time trying to reconstruct this data, taking my measurements, looking for enough statistical data to form a working knowledge of an elusive “average” by which to judge the remainder of humanity. Not unlike the work of the Egyptologist, there’s an archeological aspect to this work, a reconstitution of a forgotten discourse.  I have no dreams of spreading the bump-reading gospel. The question for me has never been: how do we resurrect phrenology? Rather, the question is: what does it say about our ideas of identity when a “science” (however dubious) can go from such importance to the dustbin of history, in such a short space of time? The disappearance of phrenology suggests that the study of identity isn’t like biology—it doesn’t necessarily move inexorably forward, building on past discoveries. Each age has its own ideas about identity, and its truths are always in flux.

Much to my parents’ and black community’s surprise, I found friends among my peers in my private, predominately white elementary school. That’s fine for children, said some of the elders at my black Pentecostal church. For even before the civil war, white children played with the black slave children, they would say. However, these elders would say in hushed tones, once the children became of age, those friendships were impossible. And so it will be with you, the elders said, as I came of age in the early 1980s. Some boundaries, the elders said, are impossible to cross.

In college, some of my roommates who shared my theologically conservative upbringing were skeptical about my secular peers, especially my friends who were neo-atheists, and, in come cases, Wiccan wannabees. My conservative friends were fine with having relationships with “non-believers,” as long as I was trying to convert them to Christianity. Other than that, my religious friends said, these relationships were impossible and would eventually fade once the superficial boundaries of dormitories and classes ended with graduation. Some boundaries, my friends said in quiet, prayerful tones, are impossible to cross.

Much to my delight, while having dinner with two college friends in the early 1990s, we realized that our friendship had lasted more than ten years. We marveled at how our college-era acquaintanceship had evolved into lasting friendships. We were from different ethnic and religious backgrounds, and all of us had grown up in communities that cautioned us against alliances with the communities that we each represented. During that dinner, we talked about how we were able to cross the impenetrable boundaries that we had been raised with, the fences that were supposed to keep us within communities often defined more by who we were not than who we happened to be.

At first, we thought we had been friends because we were able to forgive each other. We had other close friends in college, some of whom we assumed we’d be friends with for the rest of our lives. However, disagreements, busyness, distance and shifts in ideology ended many of those relationships. Despite our ability to forgive each other for various clashes, this did not seem to define why we had managed to remain friends into adulthood.

Perhaps we were friends because the world had changed so much that the boundaries of our childhood were no longer applicable. Those ethnic and class boundaries that once confined us to a station in life were now looser. A shared college degree from the same institution also leveled our playing field. We found that we had arrived on the doorstep to adulthood with more baggage from college than from childhood. Perhaps we were surprised at how four years at the same institution created new bonds that now redefined our communities of origin. The old fences of ethnicity and religion still mattered; however, four years in the same place created new alliances and boundaries.

And in the new communities formed by this common experience of college, we discovered that we as a group of friends shared something that barely registered in today’s multicultural discussion. This “something” is probably what gave us that additional comfort level with each other. The best way I can describe this “something” is that my friends and I all come from ethnic and religious communities that had once been on someone’s list for being wiped from the face of the earth. Now, this aspect of our identity is not the kind of thing you introduce yourself with; hello, my great grandparents were once forcibly detained in some manner (concentration camp, reservation, ghetto, sexual, ethnic or religious discrimination laws, immigration status designations) for some difference deemed dangerous by the majority culture. Although these nineteenth and twentieth-century atrocities are rarely discussed in polite company, even among Jews, African Americans, and Native Americans, this legacy of oppression still defines these communities. These narratives of communal and shared oppression are often talked about among close family members and friends. The stories of pain are spoken in whispers over dinner and drinks, often while reflecting on the latest news of some genocide, somewhere in the world. Our whispers tell stories where our family members were not the main characters, but the secondary, unnamed cast members, the corp, the nameless masses, the expendable people who were not important to some oppressor’s major plot point. And this aspect of our identity as the secondary character in someone else’s story of glory and power is a powerful moniker.  For the lack of a better metaphor, this aspect of our identity as someone else’s minor character is like being the doomed “Red Shirt” character in a popular television series.

The Red Shirt character is a colloquial reference among fans of a 1960s era television science fiction program. In Star Trek’s opening scenes, two or three of the lead characters (often wearing yellow or blue uniforms) would land on a planet, accompanied by one or two characters wearing red uniforms. Within the first ten minutes of the show, generally someone wearing a red uniform died, and her or his demise introduced the central conflict of the episode’s plot. So, at the beginning of the episode, if someone appeared in a red shirt, you knew that this person, no matter how likeable, competent, or regardless of how much this character connected for the moment with the yellow and blue uniformed lead characters (often the stars of the show), this Red Shirt was toast.

When I first walked into my private, white religious school as a sixth grader, an African American from the inner city, my classmates probably looked at me with a mixture of shock and pity. They had designated me a Red Shirt in their meta-narrative of their educational experience which was suppose to result in a high school diploma, the gateway to college, business or some kind of suburban success. This suburban success would elude me, the new black kid, because, I was slated to eventually suffer some kind of fate early in the narrative of our shared school experience. This new black kid, they might have thought, is probably a nice person, but the poor girl is doomed. She’s probably a future welfare mom, I imagined people would think, or, perhaps they thought I would become a member of the service industry that would help cater to someone’s suburban success. I remember being treated politely, but eventually, people stopped reacting to me at all. I became invisible; maybe my expected short and irrelevant existence was too much to bear. As a Red Shirt, I could not be an equal in a community where the white children were groomed for the leadership and privilege that no minor character could acquire. My presence was merely to be a prop, or a token of their kindness. Eventually, for the convenience of the plot, I would be dismissed, either in actuality or existentially through being ignored and rendered invisible. I suppose this is much better than being wiped off the face of the earth. Then again, there is not much difference. Either way, I was being removed from the plot.

Perhaps the warnings about crossing boundaries to make friends came from the reality that if you are the designated Red Shirt in someone’s narrative, the initial camaraderie could quickly devolve into the experience of genocide on a personal or communal level. The warnings were quite accurate, and there was wisdom in not becoming too comfortable with your friends until you understand where you fit into someone else’s narrative. Being a Red Shirt created insanity, psychosis, neurosis, paranoia, addictive behaviors, all related to the strangeness of knowing that you are the extra, easily disposable character, in someone else’s epic narrative. It’s probably why so many marginalized people end up being designated the “crazy” Red Shirt person. As part of the elimination process, the crazy Red Shirt person is blamed for their own negation, thus relieving the main characters of guilt and insuring their roles as heroes in their own meta-narratives.

So, in an effort to find true friends and avoid insanity, I heeded the warnings, I made friends cautiously, and tried to live out my own meta-narrative where I was the lead character and conquering hero. I had not planned on the narrative’s transformation. The change started after college in the 1990s, when my Red Shirt status expired and was replaced with a new narrative shaped by the shared experience at an institution that treated me not like a minor character, but as an equal with my peers. My new uniform after graduation was not red. I was no longer the character whose demise was required by the plot of the larger narrative. I had become a productive member of society with a college degree and thus no longer a threat to the meta-narrative of US culture…sort of.

While I enjoyed this new narrative status, I found that most of my friends felt similar about their former Red Shirt status. The Red Shirt status crosses ethnic, religious, and gender boundaries, as was also the case with the science fiction show. I remember taking comfort that it was not always the black character who died in the first ten minutes, but it was the Red Shirt character, who might be a man or woman, or a black or white or Asian character. The Red Shirt status of non-existence was an equal opportunity position.

For my friends (whom I have known for almost 25 years), this former Red Shirt identity was often a coat that hid our original ethnic and religious attributes. For some, the assimilation process was adopted in an effort to stay off the Red Shirt list. For others, assimilation was adopted as part of living out our own personal meta-narrative while ignoring the majority culture’s efforts to assign us to the role of the doomed Red Shirt (like, for example, attending college and gaining access to networks of privilege). I found that beneath the surface of my friend’s skin lurked Catholic guilt, habits honed in former British colonies, a hidden ability to dance rhythmically shaped by a Celtic heritage, or perhaps a secret and unexpressed taste for kugel, bratwurst, and kimchi.

I vacillated between the paranoia of being someone else’s minor character in their major culture epic narrative and my new found identity outside of my previous Red Shirt status. As I grow older as an African American, I must not forget my Red Shirt reality, that in someone else’s meta narrative, I am not suppose to exist. I must hang onto the sane part of my paranoia as a reminder that someone’s meta-narrative once required my demise. This paranoia is not needed to keep me safe from false friends or tokenism anymore. What I hope is that by remembering my former Red Shirt status, I won’t absentmindedly write my own meta-narrative that assigns the role of the Red Shirt to some kind, jovial, and unsuspecting person out of convenience or in a delusionary attempt at some kind of suburban nirvana.

The revolution’s generational consumption was completed in different stages. First, starting in June 1980, Marxists and political organizations with Marxist tendencies were massacred. Then the secular nationalists and moderate religious were banned and pressured. In 1989 Ayatollah Khomeini’s designated heir, Ayatollah Montazeri, was removed from power, and a few months after Khomeini’s death in the same year, the newly-elected government of Rafsanjani eradicated from parliament (the Majlis) those who were considered “leftist” inside the political establishment. During the 1990s there was a fight for power within the right wing of the Islamic Republic. For the first time elements of the traditional religious groups who had no revolutionary background found their way into the government and held key positions. The revolutionary left came to power again in June 1997, and the years between that date and today were the years of political struggle between the last of the revolutionaries of the 1960s and 1970s and the new generation of rulers trained not in the battle with the Shah’s regime but in the military camps of the Iranian Revolutionary Army. With the defeat of the Reformists in this recent “election,” and their arrest for supposedly inciting riots, the revolution is complete; all her children have been consumed.

In my Iranian childhood in the 1970s, the most memorable mouse and cat characters were not Tom and Jerry -whom I used to watch on the “American” channel- but the characters from a short story for children written by the fourteenth-century Iranian satirist poet, Ubaid Zakani. My sixteen-page book of “The Mice and the Cat” was a reproduction of an old lithograph print, which gave it a unique look among my other books.

Zakani, as is customary among the classics, began his story reminding the young readers that by the end of the book they should pay attention to the moral of the story: “Be smart and mind the story of the cat and the mice. You’ll be astonished about what the story might teach you. Even you, who are wise and prudent, listen to the tale and let it be like a jewel earring on your ear.” The playful language of the story and its funny unusual rhyme scheme made it easy to memorize and a joy to read. But the ending was not quite what one might expect from a children’s tale.

The story, as the name suggests, narrated the tale of mice, powerlessly oppressed before the paws of a brutal cat. At some point in the story, the cat’s conscience appears troubled by what he does to the mice. Taking refuge in a mosque, he prays, cries, regrets his viciousness towards the mice, and becomes a “man of god.” A mouse hidden under the “manbar” (pulpit) sees the repentant cat and takes the news to the other mice. The news about the cat’s spiritual change spreads among the mice. The joyful mice decide to show their appreciation by offering food to the cat. So they send their leaders to the cat to deliver him a message of friendship with trays of food. The message delivery, of course, gets interrupted; the new cat of god eats both the food and the messengers. This makes the mice extremely angry, unites them, and motivates them to change the course of their miserable life once and for all. They decide to fight back against the cat. The mice organize a revolution, defeat the army of the cats, and capture the cat that ate their leaders.

Up to this point, we have a regular Hollywood-style movie plot where the little guy rises up against an oppressive overlord and seemingly wins; the good and the meek defeat the evil and the cruel. The last few lines, though, undo such a happy ending. The mice take the cat to the stake to hang him. In the last minutes the cat frees himself from the ropes, kills the mice around him, and forces the army of mice to scatter. Brutality wins. Life goes back to “normal.” The “oppressed” remain powerless, and the winner is the one who uses hypocrisy, brutality, and ruthlessness.

I remember being nine years old and reading that story in 1977. Iran was pregnant with a revolution. The Shah was widely despised by the educated, secular intellectuals as well as many traditional Shiite clergy and their followers. For many members of the newly formed middle-class families of the 1960s and the 1970s, Islam was the alternative to reform Iran, a country supposedly corrupted by Western ideas. In those decades, many Iranian religious intellectuals tried to create a socialist and Marxist inspired Islam, a “modern” Islamic ideology. To many of them Shiite Islam was considered an authentic “Iranian” alternative to Western radical ideas. They believed a reinvigorated political Islam could be the revolutionary solution that makes Iranians independent of Marxism or any other Western ideology. Many of these intellectuals were more invested in the power of the idea than in their own faith in Islam. They believed political Islam would mobilize the masses against the Shah’s dictatorship. Others, perhaps more faithfully, viewed Islam as the true solution to any problem, even though they never could define how the religion would digest modern values. For the secular nationalists, liberals, and Marxists, it did not matter how Shiite Islam would become a modern political ideology.

The year 1978 began with the first serious anti-Shah demonstrations. Massive protests continued for the rest of the year. By January of 1979, the Shah left the country. In February of that same year the secular and Islamic revolutionaries, united under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini, overthrew the Shah’s regime. The Shah’s army could not fight back.

On February 11, 1979, at the age eleven, I witnessed the collapse of one of the most brutal dictatorships of the century. I was elated that the mice had defeated the cat, that the oppressed could finally live free. The moral of Zakani’s story seemed to be wrong.

Things didn’t go the way the mice had intended. The next thirty years witnessed a Zakani-style victory of the cat. The king was gone but the kingdom reincarnated in the Islamic dictatorship called “Velayate Faqih.” In 1979 the first constitution of the newly-formed “Islamic” republic institutionalized a new position above the government and the president to overlook the acts of the republic and “guide” them according to Islamic Sharia: “Velayate Faqih,” meaning the Jurist Ruler, or as it is translated into English, the Supreme Leader. The story of post-revolutionary Iran became the struggle of a nation with its self-invented monster.

Today’s fight in Iran between the reformists and the hardliners is the result of a thirty-year struggle within the nation’s mind, a battle between those who finally recognize the face of the brutal cat in their self-made system and those who do not. No one knows if the story must ultimately end as Zakani would predict, the cat’s brutality triumphing, leaving a status quo of oppression on the mice. I still want to believe, as I did on February 11, 1979, that Zakani does not always have to be right.

A few different aspects of this situation frustrate me to no end.  First, and most selfishly, there is nowhere within easy walking distance for me to rent a movie anymore.  For most people in the country, this is not a big deal because they can just drive the extra mile over to the next Blockbuster or Hollywood Video or whatever.  I live in Manhattan and do not own a car.  For something as trivial as a video rental, if I can’t walk there within ten minutes, it’s not worth going.  When I complained of the situation to friends, their answer was simple, just join Netflix.  The movies come to you.  For a flat fee, Netflix sends one or two movies at time based on a list you compile on their website.  It’s a very simple, user-friendly process.  But that’s not how I rent movies.

When I was a small child relishing the miracle of my family’s brand new VCR, we would all pile into the car and go to the video rental place.  I learned the pleasures of browsing the shelves, looking at titles and poster art, debating whether we should get a comedy or action movie based on what we felt like watching at the time.  It was a social activity.  As an adult, I still enjoyed roaming from one genre section to another thinking about what kind of mood I was in and whether it was more conducive to an indie thriller that I’d heard was really good or the romantic comedy that I already knew I liked.  Or maybe something else entirely would catch my eye and be the perfect choice even though I hadn’t known it existed before.  Or feeling indecisive, I could just ask the film geek at the desk for a recommendation.  The options were endless.

For all its convenience, Netflix can’t provide the satisfaction of an impulse.  The movies come to you in a steady stream of titles you picked out at some point when you had a few minutes to mull it over and then forget about it.  How can you know what kind of mood you’ll be in when the movie finally shows up two days later?  Of course it’s lovely that there are no late fees, but that means DVDs arrive and sit around collecting dust when you don’t have the time or inclination to watch them and send them back.  Meanwhile, you continue to pay the monthly fee.  And if you change your mind at the last minute and decide you’d rather watch something else on your queue, or some other film entirely, you have to wait for the one you don’t want anymore to show up before you can send it back in exchange for the one you do want which won’t show up for another two days, by which time you may not want it anymore either.  It was so much easier to just walk into a store and pick up whatever caught your eye at that moment, and take it home to watch right then.  The digital world’s answer to this is the instant view function, which allows you to watch select titles on your computer or via a box that connects your television to one provider or another.  Aside from the questionable video quality, limited list of options, and necessity for even more tech gadgets; scrolling through titles on a screen just isn’t as satisfying or as informative as picking up a little plastic box with poster art on it and turning it over to look at pictures, review quotes, plot summary, and all the other miscellaneous details.

Secondly, I’m irritated and disappointed with Blockbuster and its kin in the world of traditional media corporations.  This is partially because I work for one of those corporations and, I’m pretty sure that in about ten years, my job will be obsolete.  But it really comes down to the widely recognized and basic fact that they didn’t see it coming.  All of the huge multibillion dollar, international, media conglomerates never anticipated that at some point, they would have to evolve.  Now, they’re all either playing catch up or shutting down, which just leads to more inconvenience for me.  As a result of the online digital revolution and deficient and/or greedy business strategies, there are fewer and fewer places to go shopping for media of any kind, but especially music and movies.  I freely admit that iTunes is a wonderful thing.  It is amazing that you can open up a computer program and buy music, movies, TV shows, and what have you from all over world and from a wide variety of sources and then put in all onto a little device that fits in your pocket.  It truly is a miracle of modern technology that we pretty much take for granted now.  Just like I took video and music stores for granted my whole life.

When I first came to New York as a college student, I was impressed by the size of music stores here.  An HMV at 72nd Street and Broadway had two floors.  That was nothing compared to the Tower Records near Lincoln Center whose classical music section alone was the size of any entire music store in the malls back home.  When the Virgin Megastore opened up in Times Square, some of my fellow students and I made a pilgrimage to check out the reason for all hype.  One of my companions looked at the multiple escalators, flat screen monitors and aisles upon aisles of CDs, and breathed, “Yeah, it’s pretty mega.”  He was right. Walking into that store wasn’t just shopping, it was an experience.  Listening stations lined the walls, a DJ played a more diverse song list than most radio stations, you could find just about anything that had ever been put on a CD or DVD, and it had a multiplex movie theater right inside!  But each chain, had its own brand and its own personality.  HMV was dark with moody pink and purple highlights, a Brit pop rebel that never quite got over the 80s. Tower, on the other hand, felt like the super cool, sunny California native that it was, with huge windows and airy spaces. None of these retail chains exists in the United States anymore, but they can all be found on the internet, where the shopping experience is exactly the same as at any other online store, the only difference is the logo on the home page.

Which brings me back to my point that for a culture so obsessed with shopping, we are gradually losing our venues for it.  Yes, I know, anything you can find in a store, you can also find on a website.  Point, click, type in a few crucial numbers, click again and eventually the item will show up at your door, or possibly your office mailroom.  But that means you have to wait for it to get to you, wait until it is already yours, before you can touch it, look at it, or decide whether or not it fits or the color is right.  And if you don’t like it, you’re either stuck with it or you have to go through the process of sending it back.  What’s wrong with the old fashioned method of going to a store, walking around, looking at the options, standing at a listening station, asking a salesperson’s or fellow shopper’s opinion?  I love the immediacy of seeing something in a store and knowing that I like it and want it and can walk out with it in my hand.  I enjoy looking around and seeing what other people are looking at or listening to or talking about.  And what’s more convenient than being able to run to a store and pick something up?

Several weeks ago, I was assigned a project at work that required me to watch a handful of specific movies within a pretty short time frame.  I sent my production assistant out to get the DVDs.  They were all mainstream titles that should have been easy to find, except that our old standby, the Virgin Megastore in Times Square, was closing and therefore no longer restocking.  The Union Square location had similarly slowed down on restocking.  Both stores had sold out their copies of one of the films on the list and wouldn’t be getting new ones.  We suddenly realized that, with the closing of the Union Square Virgin Megastore, New York City would no longer have a large dedicated music and video store.  I don’t want to diminish the value of the handful of local independent places that are still holding on.  If anything, they are more valuable than ever.  But their resources are limited, almost by definition.  And their numbers have been dwindling for years.  In a city that has long been associated with the creation of music and film, it’s getting harder and harder to find places that actually sell the stuff.  Currently, Best Buy is making a notable effort to fill that void, but DVD shopping there is not unlike shopping at Sears.  Your favorite movies are just twenty feet from the vacuum cleaners and dishwashers.

And that leads to the third aspect of my original story that drives me nuts.  When my neighborhood independent video place shut down, it was not for lack of business but because their landlord wouldn’t compromise on a rent hike.  And, as it turns out, the US Virgin Megastores are not, in fact, victims of the recession or even the struggling music industry.  As a chain, they had been able to prop themselves up by expanding their retail offerings and they were consistently profitable.  In 2007, Virgin Entertainment Group North America was acquired by a partnership of two real estate companies.  Those companies decided, quite early on, that the spaces the stores occupied were worth more than the stores themselves.  So, just as with my little local video rental place, it all came down to real estate.  That place was driven out over two years ago, right around the peak of the real estate boom.  The storefront has been empty ever since.  The situation at the Times Square Virgin is a bit different, since the owners secured a new tenant before even announcing that the store would shut down.  A year from now, that site will be home to the largest, and no doubt most obnoxious, Forever 21 clothing shop that anyone would ever want to see.  Apparently, cheap trendy clothes bring in a lot more money than music or movies these days.  I can’t argue with that.  But it does make me sad.

Change is hard sometimes.  As much as I appreciate downloading songs off iTunes (and of course there was no other way to get Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog), I also enjoy shopping as a social activity.  It was a great thing to walk out of a movie with a friend and wander into the Virgin to see if anything interesting had come out or discuss the merits of a DVD’s special features.  And, of course, artist in-store appearances are a thing of the past.  Even if I rarely went to them, it was nice that they happened.  What it comes down to is that I don’t like losing my options.  What bothers me even more is the idea that this is just the beginning.  How long before Kindle and Amazon partner with real estate developers to kill off Barnes & Noble?  At least two Barnes & Noble locations in Manhattan have already been shut down thanks to the real estate industry’s irrational exuberance.  One of those was among the chain’s most profitable stores, and its space has been vacant ever since.

There is an inherent value in doing things in person, value in the tactile turning of a page, reading of liner notes that are not electronic files, and being handed a pen to sign your name on a receipt.  Right now, we still have the option in most cases, of taking part in these tiny human moments.  But as a culture, we are in transition in ways many of us don’t even realize.  In our thirst for cheaper, faster, more convenient consumption, we are gradually giving up things that are more basic and just as valuable.  The physical act of making eye contact, or sometimes just as significantly avoiding it, is one of the most basic and most crucial elements of human society.  As we turn to wider uses of all our wonderful technology, we must also maintain opportunities to engage with each other and the world around us because all our gains do have their costs, and we are wise to be mindful of them.

U.S. involvement in the Philippines began with the Spanish-American War of 1898 and continued with the Japanese occupation during World War II.  Philippine liberation in 1945 directly led to large-scale Filipino immigration to the United States in various waves following the war.  The aggressive Americanization that  twentieth-century U.S. military occupation in the Philippines gave Filipinos an “anything American is better” mentality that later gave Filipino immigrants to the United States a unique head-start to assimilation.  Filipino cultural traditions seem to be practiced by immigrant grandparents and parents but appear to be entirely abandoned by their U.S.-born grandchildren.  I suspect this is an unfortunate consequence shared amongst countless other immigrant groups.

Filipino-Americans have always suffered a mild inferiority complex in the United States in regards to their status in both the Asian-American community and U.S. society at large.  Filipinos in the United States have settled for a strange complacency about being overlooked when it comes to recognition and representation in the greater Asian-American community.  It may seem like a presumptuous statement to make about all Filipino-Americans, but their obscurity persists in a nation that is finally warming to its inherent and inevitable ethnic diversity.

In my lifelong struggle to reconcile my Filipina identity with my U.S. heritage, I’ve simply become accustomed to being under-noticed, underappreciated, and simply overlooked as a Filipino-American in U.S. culture and history.  Filipinos come from a region considerably ravaged and irrevocably transformed by U.S. colonization, military intervention, and desperate poverty.  Millions have immigrated to the U.S. for better lives with the promise of opportunities nearly impossible to achieve in the Philippines.

It is no surprise that most people in the U.S. are simply unaware that the Philippines was a U.S. Commonwealth from 1898-1946.  The United States took the Philippines as a prize after the Spanish-American War in 1898 much to the dismay of the Filipino freedom fighters like rebel leader Emilio Aguinaldo who sought freedom from centuries of oppressive Spanish rule.  Although Aguinaldo and his rebels proved crucial to the U.S. victory, their efforts were thrown in their faces when the U.S. decided to colonize the country instead of liberate it.  It was an especially cruel bait-and-switch that compelled Aguinaldo to oppose the U.S. push for sovereignty.  Again, he led rebel forces, but this time against the very soldiers who were once his allies.  The Philippine-American War lasted for three years resulting in American victory and subsequent colonization that lasted until the end of World War II.  The Philippines did not truly gain independence until July 4, 1946, in the wake of calamitous destruction from battling Japanese and U.S. forces.  Manila, once the shining metropolitan jewel of the Pacific, was flattened on a Dresden-level scale by Japanese bombers and, to this day,  has never quite recovered 

It is no question that Filipinos exulted in their long-awaited independence after two major world powers shaped disparate island communities into the unified, developing, and politically struggling nation of today.  U.S. intervention was a critical factor in achieving this freedom and opportunity for a unified self-rule.  Yet the imbalance of a third world nation having close links with the world’s main superpower naturally sent millions of Filipino immigrants to this country.  When restrictions on Philippine immigration were lifted following the Immigration Act of 1965, an expected surge in the number of Filipino immigrants to the U.S. quickly followed.

Children of Filipino immigrants share the somewhat embarrassing peculiarity of being unable to speak their parents’ native languages, whether it is Tagalog or any number of the regional dialects spoken throughout the Philippines. I find it embarrassing because most of my second generation Asian-American peers, who had Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, and Laotian backgrounds, are fluent in their parents’ languages without having any trouble speaking English as fluently as I do.  The fact that most of my classmates were first generation Mexican-Americans who switched between English and Spanish with enviable ease only compounded my sense of failure at not being bilingual.  For most second-generation Filipino-Americans, our aptitude in any native Filipino tongue is limited to understanding major vocabulary words (especially swear words), the general gist of conversations, but never truly understanding or parsing the language.  Lack of fluency in my parents’ language has served to distance me from my parents’ culture in a way they probably never intended.

The reasons why most second-generation Filipino-Americans grew up only speaking English are certainly related to the U.S. colonial influence on English-language education in the Philippines.  When the United States annexed the Philippines as a commonwealth, they established a comprehensive educational system that made English a requirement of scholastic success.  By contrast, when the Spanish ruled, only the white peninsulars (people born in Spain) spoke Spanish among themselves and the language remained in the upper classes with a fair number of words seeping into local dialects.  Today, high rates of English literacy in the Philippines has made it a popular alternative to India for outsourced call center support.

Mastery of the English language has given Filipino immigrants the ability to assimilate to U.S. ways and lifestyles much easier than many other Asian immigrant groups.  Those same inquisitive Thai and Vietnamese nail salon clerks have told me on several separate occasions that they are jealous of how well Filipinos speak English.  I have noticed that Filipinos do largely belong to the middle class, and a high percentage of us have college degrees.  My parents, born in the mid-1940s during the catastrophic devastation of World War II and its aftermath, grew up speaking English from grammar school to university because it was and continues to be the primary language of instruction.  Even when the U.S. left, the Filipinos caught onto the “lingua franca” upswing of the English language.  Nearly everyone in the country is fluent, making many Filipinos tri-lingual by being able to speak English, Tagalog, and sometimes a local regional dialect.

In the midst of writing this piece, I came across a serendipitous validation of my cultural dilemma on a recent Philippines-themed episode of chef Anthony Bourdain’s show, No Reservations.  For this show, he travels to locales far and wide around the planet to meet foodie locals and indulge in authentic local cuisine.  In Season Four, the Philippines was the very last country in Asia featured on the program.  Mr. Bourdain admitted that he had to capitulate to pressure from outraged, neglected, and very vocal Filipino viewers of his program.  In this episode, he interviewed a young second-generation Filipino-American man named Augusto.  He shared my concern about being caught in a strange limbo of not feeling truly Filipino, because of the distance and inability to speak the language, while not feeling truly American either.  Mr. Bourdain himself asks the various locals in the program, “Who are the Filipino People?”  He speaks for a great deal of people in the U.S. who are genuinely curious but know very little about Filipino culture and cuisine.  Augusto gets to the heart of the matter in a statement, “Filipino families will put another culture before theirs just so their kids can get along.”  I asked my parents why they never forced us to speak Tagalog or thought it was important that we speak their language.  They believed that it was the best way we could speak with non-accented English and have easier lives at school and at building a new life in the U.S. 

Perhaps all those years of Spanish occupation set in the mentality of making the best out of limited circumstances.  But now we are in an era that celebrates difference and change.  I am recklessly optimistic that the tide is changing for Filipino-Americans. President Barack Obama’s recently passed stimulus package is righting a wrong that occurred 63 years ago: President Truman signed the Rescission Act taking away full veteran benefits to Filipino World War II soldiers who volunteered to fight when the Philippines was a U.S. commonwealth.  CNN.com reports, “A provision tucked inside the stimulus bill that President Obama signed calls for releasing $198 million that was appropriated last year for those veterans.  Those who have become U.S. citizens get $15,000 each; non-citizens get $9,000.”  Out of 250,000 Filipino men who volunteered to fight for the United States, only 15,000 survive and most of them are in their 90s.  The NPR program “Morning Edition” interviewed an elderly Filipino World War II veteran who, in response to the long-delayed reception of benefits, merely proclaimed, “America has come to its senses.”

The Obama presidency also has another Filipino-American connection close to home: the White House head chef happens to be a Filipina.  In the March 2009 Vogue cover story, First Lady Michelle Obama shares her enthusiasm about her new life in the White House by sharing, “I am excited about the potential of the White House kitchen being a learning environment for the community.  The current chef, Cristeta Comerford, is the only female chef in the history of the White House.  She’s a young Filipina woman, a mother with a young child, and I am excited to get to know her and for her to know us as a family.”  Ms. Comerford was appointed by Laura Bush but the Obamas elected her to stay on to be the main cook of all family meals and state dinners.  I am curious whether she’ll whip up some of my favorite, delicious Filipino food concoctions for the Obamas.  President Obama, after all, did grow up in the multicultural melting pot of Hawaii where the Filipino population is substantial.  Given his Southeast Asian roots in Indonesia, I think he is open to more recognition of the general region.  Indonesia is a sister country to the Philippines (given our shared Malay and Muslim roots) that could also use more exposure and representation.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder made some controversial remarks effectively accusing the U.S. of being a “nation of cowards” for not being able to recognize the racial rifts that still plague a great deal of this nation despite all the encouraging progress of recent years.  Mr. Holder says that the U.S. is  “…[a] nation has still not come to grips with its racial past nor has it been willing to contemplate, in a truly meaningful way, the diverse future it is fated to have.  To our detriment, this is typical of the way in which this nation deals with issues of race.”

My singular quest may be Filipino-specific, but I feel a particular spark in my soul to heed Mr. Holder’s call to “engage one another more routinely” about the issue of race because “there will be no majority race in America in about fifty years.”  I hope that Filipinos, and many other invisible minorities who have practically zero representation or recognition, are able to be vital and valued members of this astonishing and inevitable multicultural future.  The historical tendency to “Americanize” through the forced use of English deprives many Filipino-Americans of today the ability to speak a Filipino tongue.  However, it does not mean that Filipinos, as an ethnic group, have to be excluded from the cultural dialogue.  Someday soon, as people learn more about the vital historical connections between the United States and the Philippines, more people will start to ask me and my sister, “Are you Filipino?”

SOURCES

“Chronology for the Philippine Islands and Guam in the Spanish-American War.” http://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898/chronphil.html

“Filipino American.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filipino_American

“Full Text: U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Remarks on Black History Month, ‘Nation of Cowards.’” http://www.clipsandcomment.com/2009/02/18/full-text-us-attorney-general-eric-holder-remarks-on-black-history-month-nation-of-cowards/

Macabenta, Greg. “An undiscovered market [3-4 million Filipino-Americans].” Free Republic, July 12, 2008.

“Philippines.” No Reservations broadcast on the Travel Channel. February 17, 2009.

Skillin, Don. Magdalo: The Story of Emilio Aguinaldo; Revolutionary Hero of the Philippines. PublishAmerica, 2006.

 ”Stimulus To Repay Debt To WWII Filipino Veterans,” http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101024302

Talley, André Leon. “Leading Lady.” Vogue. March 2009.

“TV Sweep:  Asian Faces Now Showing.” http://www.eastwestmagazine.com/content/view/119/40/

“U.S. to pay ‘forgotten’ Filipino World War II veterans.”  http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/02/23/forgotten.veterans/

photo credit: berlinpiraten.de

Imagine my surprise when the movie turned out to be brilliant. Brilliant, note—not enjoyable. The cinematography was fantastic and every one of us was retrospectively amazed that the whole thing was accomplished using a mere five actors. So yes, an incredible piece of work. The technical coups, however, were only icing on the cake. Its true distinction lay in its patent ability to discomfort the viewer in ways that I no longer thought possible, in a show-all, tell-all world.

Disclaimer: I can’t proceed without plunking down a massive spoiler. You’ve been duly warned; if you haven’t already seen the film, and you want to be surprised, stop reading, go out and watch it, and join us again later.

Now, then: as I mentioned above, the basic summary that I had received only covered a minute fraction of the overall narrative. Mainly, the film consists of a fourteen-year-old girl drugging and torturing a man who—and we don’t know this for sure until well near the end of the movie—enjoys picking up woefully underage females and, to use an outmoded euphemism, corrupting them, sometimes worse. The height of tension comes as we (and the depraved villain) realize that a safe, hygienic, and considerately anesthetic castration will soon take place, courtesy of the enterprising heroine’s prescient purchase of a medical reference and a book bag packed with all of the requisite tools to perform the operation in the comfort of one’s own home. The only thing we see while this procedure is ostensibly underway are shots of the respective players’ faces; the lack of visual confirmation of bloodletting and corporal restructuring still set off tangible winces, cringes, and waves of general disgust and terror through the audience. The males in my group were especially uneasy with each new development, screwing themselves up into contortions that would seem to indicate the receipt of a good, hard kick to the groin. Even after we learned that our bright young gal has only faked the procedure—she’s merely made him believe that she’s removed the visible representations of his manhood and sent them through the disposal—the sense of moral indignation, of shock and outrage, was still palpable among our little assembly. Why did we need to see that? What possible reason could anyone have for creating such a thing? That’s revolting.

The collective sense of having been abused was, I think, undeniably justified. But then—simultaneously, disturbingly—it also wasn’t. A curious sort of appreciation began to make its ugly appearance inside of me, accompanied by the hopefulness that my feelings about the film were “right,” that the writer and director and whoever else was in charge also had hoped to convey the message that was gradually taking shape inside my head. Stay with me.

Throughout most of my adult involvement in cinema and literature, I’ve regularly had to endure portrayals of rape, whether in print or on celluloid, while trying to remind myself that it’s not real, that it’s all a condemnation of human brutality. In discussions about these scenes, in class or informally, I’ve had to sit there and pretend to be objective, try to get through the ordeal and successfully hide the fact that those artistic encounters with rape have left indelible bruises on my psyche, punched empty spaces into my stomach that will never really fill themselves in again. I try to dismiss the foolishness of feeling personally small and hurt and beaten down by the action. And resignedly, I realize that there’s not much protest to make after others (usually men) have ended the conversation by walking away congratulating themselves that they’ve been able to float past all of this pain to an appreciation of the greater significance of the piece—having  defended the sacrality of Art and brought me to a higher plane of awareness in the bargain. 

I’m tired of having a man condescend to explain to me that art can’t ignore the violence in society, that these scenes portray reality and thereby refuse to talk down to us by hiding the evil of the world from us. I’ve had enough of hearing such episodes justified by an assertion that, in showing the cruel truth of life, the purgative powers of horror will bring us to some sort of realization and change us into better people because of it. That, according to the guys down the hall, for example, the mental scars that remain fifteen years after viewing A Clockwork Orange constitute a small and worthwhile sacrifice compared to the new, profound considerations of ethics to which the film supposedly exposed me.

Every time I hear such schlock, I’m reminded, in spite of all of our contemporary rhetoric of equality and worth, of the still-present, senseless ways that (mostly) men can demonstrate what they perceive to be superiority over (mostly) women. It’s not merely the act of rape itself, then—or the vicarious humiliation of a viewer faced with its reenactment—but the noble-sounding defense of its inclusion in art that seems so insulting. The justification believed, so smugly, to be representative of advanced rationality. The authority so convinced of his instruction on the proper way to feel about (portrayals of) something so unforgivable.

Admittedly, these proponents of Truth in Art might not change their tune, where Hard Candy is concerned; if so, I’ll at least congratulate them on their consistency. Based, though, on the reactions I saw in the guys around me, I would expect a different sort of argument to ensue, at least a pause or a momentary lapse of certainty. Because I’ve witnessed these same men sit through more “traditional” rape scenes, visions of slaughter, war crimes, and so forth, and even while acknowledging, on some level, the dread of it all, not displaying any sort of physical discomfort, or expressing a post-viewing condemnation of the project’s creators as sick.

I’m guessing, in other words, that with this film, art has brought us as close as possible to allowing males to appreciate the emotional reaction that I (and many other women) have when watching a rape scene. Not nearer, note, to understanding the actual crime, or to acknowledging that humans are capable of heinous cruelty, or that life is intricately unjust. Rather, the movie might just give guys a taste of the chilling sensation that what you’re witnessing is somehow directed at you, almost a warning that you, too, could have your soul and dignity hatefully, mercilessly, and often casually shattered in front of your face. A reminder to watch out: don’t become too secure in your foolish conviction that you are a unique and valuable individual.

Why does this movie get those messages across so successfully? Among a multitude of other reasons, it openly addresses, without shying away from any of the “truths” that proponents of truthful art so admire, the fact that so much of being able to prove that one is a respectable man seems tied up in the presence or absence of a functioning organ. That someone might care so little for you that that person wants to go beyond hurting you physically, taking, too, that thing that, at bottom, you believe is yours alone. I saw those men in my little group begin to understand what it feels like to see someone so successfully go after another’s soul with a self-congratulatory smile. And then to get the impression that those around you would dismiss you as weak and hysterical were you to admit your painful feelings of empathy and fear, were you to do anything other than walk away from the screen and grab a beer and move on to the next activity. Well, I thought, they might finally know what it feels like.

But hold on, now; I’m not trying to “get back” at anyone; I’m not gloating over a victory in the ridiculous battle of the sexes. The scene I’ve described, and most of the movie, in fact, was almost too excruciating to watch. There was nothing enjoyable about seeing someone tortured, despicable person though he was; I experienced no triumphant feeling of “justice” (if we must call it that) having been served. There was no glee in wondering what this act of vengeance was doing to the person perpetrating it, or what sorts of hurt and sense of futility had led her to undertake such an extreme course of action. It was more than unnerving to think that a whole team of creative professionals came together with the intention of turning a disturbing idea into a visible reality. This film is not, in other words, what I would call “entertainment” in any sense of the term.

I feel that I should note, too, that this picture was not the product of angry, vindictive females; writer Brian Nelson and director David Slade are, as their names suggest, men. And watching the DVD commentary, it’s quite obvious that their purposes in making this movie weren’t aligned with the ones the ones that I’m taking out of my experience with it. 

All of its motivations aside, though, Hard Candy is an obviously powerful film. And, sadly enough, in spite of all of my disparagement of “truth in art for truth’s sake,” I think it had to be as gruesome as it was in order to wake “us,” male or female, out of the desensitized ways in which it seems that we accept violence in this culture—at least violence against women, or any sorts of brutality committed between members of the same sex. (Think of the especially prurient pleasure taken in “chick fights.”) I don’t know of any more fruitful course of action in terms, for example, of getting men to see just what the idea of rape does to at least this woman. Other than this incident, the closest I’ve come to that outcome has been a sort of paternalistic sheepishness on the part of nice, guilty-feeling men who can’t imagine (and why should they be able to?) how it affects me.

What am I really trying to say, then? My plea is not for a balancing of the scales, so that brutality is acceptable as long we achieve parity in the number of victims of each gender, each side keeping up in a continual raising of graphic stakes. Neither am I demanding a wide-ranging ban on the depiction of violence, in film or elsewhere. But might we consider—just for a second—whether letting us in on the intricacies of a sexual assault is really worth it? Whether the continuing portrayals of such an act—and the justifications made about them—might be (maybe unconscious) attempts to hold onto a place on some remaining hierarchy? Or whether they only present us with “inevitabilities”—for whose elimination, in our newfound artistic maturity, we might as well not struggle?   Why resist truth, after all? 

How about we get a little more creative than merely reporting on “reality?” Why not, in other words, ditch the rape scenes and scrap the shoot-em-ups? Idealistic? Sure. Willfully naïve? Maybe so. Likely? Not in this universe, I’ll admit. I’m not asking for a revoltingly aseptic cinematic universe worthy of Patty Duke and the Beave. But I will ask that writers or directors consider, next time they feel like using rape to make a point, that they think not only about what kind of world they’re reporting on—but what sort of reality—emotional, spiritual, even physical—they’re helping to create.

The illustration is based on the photo by Made Underground. Credit: Made Underground

Whichever side they come from – and whichever variation of the arguments they choose – it all boils down to this: they are decrying the fact that relationships have moved from the private to the public sphere.  The underlying logic is that love is between two persons only and should remain between them; love should remain an unmediated experience between the two persons in that relationship.

Which of course completely misses the point. 

If we consider the fact that relationships are the result of a negotiation between two persons, then there must be a space between them for this very negotiation to occur. Otherwise, all that is happening is that one person is subsuming the other within their own sphere of understanding.  This would be understanding at its most banal – and perverse – form; that of bringing the other person under one’s stance.  If that were the case, there would no longer be any relationship; all negotiation is gone and the other person is effectively effaced.  Hence whenever one hears the phrase “I understand my partner,” one should be wary; clearly that person’s version of a relationship is a masturbatory one.

In this sense, any relationship between two (or more) persons always already carries with it the unknown, and always unknowable.  The other person is an enigma, remains enigmatic, to you.  This is the only way in which the proclamation “I love you” remains singular, remains a love that is about the person as a singular person – and not merely about the qualities of the person, what the person is.  For if the other person comes under your own schema, then the love for the other person is also a completely transparent love, one that you can know thoroughly, calculate; the other person becomes nothing more than a check-list.  To compound matters, if it is the qualities that you love, by extension, if those qualities go away, so does the love.  Only when the love for the other person is an enigmatic one, one that cannot be understood, can that love potentially be an event.

If it is an event, then strictly speaking it cannot be known before it happens; in fact, at best it can be glimpsed as it is happening, or perhaps even only realized retrospectively.  Hence at the point in which it happens, it is a love that comes from elsewhere; this strange phenomenon is best captured in the colloquial phrase, ‘I was struck by love’ or even more so by ‘I was blinded by love.’  This is a blinding in the very precise sense of, ‘I have no idea why or when it happened; before I knew it, I was in love.’ Cupid is blind for this reason: not just because love is random (and can happen to anyone at any time) but more importantly because even after it happens, both the reason you are in love, and the person you are in love with, remain blind to you. 

Since there is an unknowable relationship with the other person, the only way you can approach it is via a ritual.  This is the lesson that religions have taught us: since one is never able to phenomenally experience the god(s), one has no choice but to approach them through rituals.  These rituals are strictly speaking meaningless – the actual content is interchangeable – but it is the form that is important. Rituals allow us momentary glimpses at secrets, and secrets are never about content. Rather, secrets entail the recognition that they are secrets; the secret lies in their form as secret.  This can be seen when we consider how group secrets work; since the entire group knows the secret, clearly the content of the secret is not as important as the fact that only members within the group are privy to this secret.  Occasionally the actual secret content can be so trivial that even other people outside the group might know the information; they just do not realize its significance.  For instance, if I used my date of birth as my bank-account password, merely knowing when I was born would not instantly give you the key to my life savings.  In order for that to happen, you would have had to recognize the significance of the knowledge of my birthday.  This of course means that you have to know that you know something.  Since the god(s) are, strictly speaking, unknowable, this suggests that rituals put one in a position to potentially experience the god(s).

The meaningless gestures on Valentine’s Day play precisely this ritual role.  It is not so much what you give the other person, but the fact that you give it to them.  The gift in this sense is very much akin to an offering; the gift opens the possibility of an exchange.  Gift-giving does not guarantee that you will like what is returned; there is always a reciprocation of the gift, but what is returned to you is never known in advance, until the moment it is received.  This of course means that the worst thing that one can do is not to give the gift: that would be akin to a cutting off of all possibilities, a complete closing of all communication with the other person.  This at the same time also means that you cannot wait for the other person to give you something before you get them their gift: if that were the scenario, the return gift would be nothing more than a calculated return, where the relationship is nothing more than an accounting figure, where the other would be once again reduced to a statistic, a mere return of investment.

The only manner in which both persons can give true gifts is to offer them independently of the other person, whilst keeping them in mind.  In this way, the two gifts are always already both uncalculated (in the sense of not knowing what the return is) and the reciprocation for the other (without knowing whether the other person actually has a gift in the first place). 

Of course this would seem like an irrational, even stupid, way of buying gifts. The stupidity involved actually saves the relationship from being merely banal.  And more importantly, prevents it from entering the mere profane.

It is the stupidity of Valentine’s Day – complete with it kitsch-ness – that protects the sacredness of relationships, precisely by being completely and utterly meaningless …