For the Birds

Gastave Dore engraving for edition of Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Everyone remembers the haunting image of the albatross from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In the poem the gigantic bird saves the ship only to be slain by a cross-bow. No good deed goes unpunished. As in the Coleridge poem, an albatross appeared out of the blue on the Times editorial page recently (“One Last Chick", NYT, 3/15/13). One of the curiosities about albatrosses that the Times noted, besides the fact that they “mate for life” and have wingspans “easily reaching l0 feet from tip to tip,” was the fact that in “their final breeding they enjoy unusual success rearing one last chick, partly because they support the chick through a longer fledgling period than younger parents do.” Obviously this is a very sophisticated survival mechanism. Indeed, somewhere in this marvelous image lies the seeds of another great poem. One wonders how Coleridge might have handled the idea. Nature can often seem malevolent with Darwinian phrases like “survival of the fittest” and "natural selection" describing its processes. And who knows what the fate of the albatross will be with global warming. The expression "wears an albatross around his neck,” which derives from the poem, is more meaningful to poetry readers than to the few people who have actually seen albatrosses in their lifetime. “There is something wondrous in the idea of a pair of elderly albatrosses raising a chick with great care, as their own death approaches,” the Times editorial concludes. And one wonders if the real subject of the piece isn’t the fact that no such survival mechanism seems to have been installed in homo sapiens for whom no quirk of nature insures the care of the old.

The Dark Knight Rises

Every century produces its own generation of Shakespeare critics whose interpretations are reflective of their age. For instance Coleridge wrote “the motive hunting of motiveless malignity” about Iago in his edition of Shakespeare and the catchphrase epitomized the romantic concept of overarching and inexplicable evil. Hollywood directors often act like great critics and poets reinterpreting myths to fit the age. Christopher Nolan’s latest addition to the Batman saga, The Dark Knight Rises, is a reflection on the nature of modern tyranny and is filled with motive laden malignity. Two historical events,China’s   cultural revolution and the ravages of Pol Pot, both inform the plot. Evil, in Nolan’s plotting, is a product of injustice that becomes more ferocious than the injustice it originally seeks to eradicate. Bane (Tom Hardy) and Wayne (Christian Bale) are both ideologues and it’s no mistake that their names rhyme and that they both wear masks. They’re two sides of the same coin and curiously united in their oppositionalism. Bane is a criminal who's earned his stripes in a notorious prison; Wayne is a child of privilege. Yet both end up  outsiders. The film is a series of antinomies. A fusion reactor built to sustain life can also be turned into a neutron bomb. At the beginning of the film Bane acts while Wayne withdraws, but the result is similar. Society is either burned to the ground or languishes due to entropy. Bane destroys the bourgeoisie and Wayne’s laissez-faire attitude results in destruction of the business which fueled his largesse. The character of Selina (Anne Hathaway) is a curious invention within the ideological spectrum the film portrays, to the extent that she's a totally amoral figure who seeks to gratify her own desires and ends up saving the day. The one truly bright-eyed persona, the character of the young police officer, Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who starts the movie off with a belief in truth, justice and the American way, ends up quitting the force.

War of the Worlds

Lingua Franca and Social Text, Hagler and Hearns, Nixon and Kennedy, Plato and Aristotole, Coleridge and Wordsworth, William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, Heraclitus and Zeno, light and dark, hot and cold—marriage in general. Whereas one commentator on the institution once said seemingly oppositional partners displace onto each other desirable attributes, such as reserve or gregariousness, it’s unfortunate that so many people grow to hate the differences they once loved, admired, and envied.

Hegel’s philosophy of history was based on the idea of opposition. Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis were the terms he used. In modern terms, Walmart and Amazon go to war and give birth to a new discount giant. What will be the synthesis of these two oppositional elements—Walzon? In the Enlightenment, the pessimism about human nature posited by Hobbes and the clearly idealistic vision of man portrayed by Locke coalesce in the framing of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights—checks and balances, the inalienable rights of the individual in the face of the democratic rule of the majority, all are products of two opposing views of human nature.

   

In the 20th century, communism lost out to capitalism, but historical progression created the curiosities of elites within the Politburo and the decline of class in the mercantile structure. But what are the new warring forces of our present age? Fundamentalism (in both its religious and political incarnations) versus globalism, literal versus abstract, uni- versus cyber-verse, e-mail versus snail mail (no contest). Then there are the oppositions that are still-born, like pre-op transsexuals who maintain both female and male gonads without fusing into a new creature.

Naturally those who analyze the market seek to discover the answer to such oppositions on a daily basis, considering that profits lie in the secrets of mergers and acquisitions. Will Citicorp continue as an unruly giant, or will it be forced to sell some of its divisions? Google has already triumphed over Yahoo, but will an emboldened adversary come to the fore, developing a new service called Houyhnhnm? Big- and small-world theories, special and general, relativity, quantum, and string—the war of the worlds continues.