on propensity

first of all, i want to apologize for the humming in the background – that’s my air conditioner. i’d also like to apologize for the song’s low volume. lastly, i’d like to apologize if my dancing temporarily blinded you.

one of the biggest challenges was to find a live adaptation that fit the themes i chose to explore within “drown” the story as well as the act of drowning itself. i couldn’t find anything that suited my needs so i created something. i tried to tell a simple story with the song and the movements, which is the story of disappointment. it was the easiest way to get across drowning, because the way the narrator drowns in the story is how he is continually let down by his environment. he is limited by the people he’s around and the lifestyle choices that he has made.

i thought about what it would be like to drown – my immediate response was that i’d try to break open to the surface for air, but if i am drowning then i am not making much headway. i limited myself to moving around the floor as little as possible, almost always returning to the same spot. i did the same with my arms – wild, strong gestures that would explode outwards but be dragged to their original location, slowly and surely. i also thought about the body after it has drowned. in movies (i’m heavily reminded of Titanic), people often sink – so i closed out the piece by moving closer and closer to the floor.

i hope you enjoyed.

drowning

when i established the relationship between the narrator and his mother in “on intervention” i couldn’t help but be reminded of a similar relationship that we saw in a different piece of literature: “endgame” by samuel beckett. the dependency expressed in the relationship between the narrator and his mother is reminiscent of the relationship between hamm and clov. however, the stories themselves also share a sort of self-deprecating humor – not in the characters necessarily, but in the language used to build the stories.

for instance, the very first line of “drown” gets funnier every time i read it: “my mother tells me Beto’s home, waits for me to say something, but i keep watching the TV.” it’s so sassy but also reveals a crucial insight into what the relationship is like between the narrator and his mother. through the entire play of “endgame”, the lines of dialogue between hamm and clov is silly, if not moronic – which is funny in a sad way. it’s likely that some members of the audience would have no idea what is going on while watching the play – which is also a feeling a reader might get from reading “drown”.

but the dependency in these relationships is what’s significant. hamm and clov depend on each other for their survival – be it hamm’s physical need for clov to move him around or clov’s mental need for conversation. it’s an endless cycle of trying (but, one may argue, ultimately failing) to provide for what the other one needs. the narrator’s mother wants to provide motivation for him through pushing him into the company of Beto whom – unbeknownst to the mother – is toxic for the narrator. the narrator passes off the money he made off of selling drugs to his mother pushes her into the company of the narrator’s father, who is also not healthy for her. the endless cycles being portrayed in these stories have a very real basis in life. while we may not need someone else to survive or be pressured into being friends with someone that makes sexual advances at us, we can all relate to being in a situation where there is no clear answer, because we either lose out on something that we want (having that relationship) or suffer the consequences which derive from getting what we want (the cons of being in that relationship).

the picture is simple: a submerged person whose hand has broken the surface is reaching for rope, which would hopefully pull him out from under the water. however, it remains outside of the person’s reach

a depressing question we must ask ourselves when reading this piece is IF the narrator in “Drown” has an escape altogether. the man is stuck both physically and mentally. the physical prison is his lack of resources forces him to sell drugs for a living. his mental prison is the people around him, a best friend that is leaving for college, whose recent actions towards the narrator is suspicious at best, abusive at worst.

does a rope even exist for our narrator?

i am inclined to say yes. the scene between the narrator and the army recruiter gave readers so much insight as to how the narrator feels and his personal desire and ambition. upon realizing that the army is an option, the narrator did his best to avoid the recruiter – afraid of saying yes to the offer. not only is there a rope for our narrator, I would go so far as to say that he is actively grabbing at the air right next to his rope.

something i try not to think about too much are other people’s marital affairs, mainly because it’s such a foreign topic to me that i can’t even begin to understand what it’s like. love is so strange to me, but i’ve heard mostly raving reviews, and a few terrible reviews. maybe i’ll try it someday.

pressure is a theme that is prevalent in this passage. we have two relationships that must be explored in this passage, the relationship between Beto and the narrator, and the relationship between the mother and the father. the mother consciously pushes the narrator to be friends with Beto as she thinks that Beto could serve as a good influence and role model. the narrator unconsciously pushes the mother to the father when he gives her money, which she then sends to the father. we touched upon the relationship between Beto and the narrator in “on suffocation”, so we will mostly focus on the mother and father.

what little we know about the father is said in this passage – he is “…in Florida now, a sad guy who calls [the mother] and begs for money. He swears that if she moves down there he’ll leave the woman he’s living with…His words coil inside of her, wrecking her sleep for days.” so we know that the mother still pines for the father, but he is with another woman in Florida. the passage suggests that these calls occur every now and then, which is more evidence to support that the mother still loves the father.

what is worth nothing here is that the narrator ends the call. however, we can also read that the narrator is the root cause of the calls – if the narrator did not give his mother the money which she then sends to the father, would these calls take place at all since the father wouldn’t spare a thought for the mother? perhaps it’s only after she has allowed the father to sap her of her financial resources that he picks up, enticing her with tales of leaving the woman he’s with for her if she moves down to Florida.

poor soul.