Cloud Atlas

"Even as I was watching "Cloud Atlas" the first time, I knew I would need to see it again. Now that I've seen it the second time, I know I'd like to see it a third time — but I no longer believe repeated viewings will solve anything. To borrow Churchill's description of Russia, "it is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." It fascinates in the moment. It's getting from one moment to the next that is tricky."

I watched the movie four times and i think I understand it pretty well now. In fact, I don't think the confusion is totally deliberate -- the keyword is ambitious and it doesn't work on every level. It tells a new kind of story in a new way. It demands attention for almost 3 hours from an audience barely able to follow the plot of a 22 minute sit-com. What's worse, it demands to be studied (how many other 3 hr movies does everybody say they watched more than once?)

But this is not a movie review blog.  I want to say something about the central idea of the movie:

Sommi-451: "Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others. Past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future."

Perhaps we have heard this before -- the idea of "karma" and reincarnation. What the movie does is wrap this up in a compelling mashup featuring the same set of characters in vastly different stories, switching back and forth between them until "Sommi's" wisdom slips past our logical defences. I remember Bishop Pike saying the same thing about Church Music, which slips profound theological archetypes past our skeptical minds and plants truth deep in our subconscious -- truth that is impossible to express in mere words.

In this case, the old ideas of Cloud Atlas slipped beneath the surface (after four viewings I had pretty well memorized it!) then popped up in that place between dreaming and waking where I was writing a goodbye note, meant to be read on my death.

Life is not a thing, I began. Nor is it "energy" or "vibrations" -- not even "information" or any of these pseudo-Scientific terms that are used to hide our ignorance and pretend there is a logical way for us to convince ourselves it cannot end.

Life is a process, like a waterfall or a thunder storm. Processes definitely do have beginnngs and endings. So how does the process of life end? In my semi-awake state, I pictured my email account receiving offers of Viagra a century after my death. But then, on a more serious note, my mind stood back and thought of the whole process that is my life. How did the process begin and how it would, perhaps, eventually fade away. Does the pumping of blood and the twitching of neurons completely describe this process? Does the process end when we are forgotten? My friend asked me that later and I replied that the light switches still work for people who have never heard of Edison. I suppose that, at some point, the individual splashes and eddies of our individual lives merge into the powerful current of history. Precisely this point is made in the movie -- that our efforts are but a drop in the ocean but (our hero replies) the ocean consists entirely of little drops.

Perhaps influenced also by the book I'm reading (Your Inner Fish) I was left with a vision of my own life as an eddy in a vast river of cause and effect that goes back to the Big Bang.

No, I don't believe in literal reincarnation or Karma. But perhaps I have found what these ideas have to offer me -- to allow myself to feel my own life in a totally new way.