Life: for the living?

I spent part of my morning catching up on the recent Interview Project interviews. All of the episodes perform a quick examination of what I would call the "American condition", with a slice-of-life motif. David Lynch has always been interested in the post-modern/post-industrial America, seeming to be especially intrigued by the social fallout of this era and how the ideals of the Golden Age society now stack up against the social freedoms and norms of the present globalized American culture. (sounds like a thesis statement)

I enjoyed them all, but one interview (the most recent) really struck me. The interview with Clara, which is the first released interview of a woman, crossed into the somewhat antiquated notion of settling; the idea that one was supposed to settle into their life (settle down into marriage, kids, grandchildren, etc.) in order to be a proper citizen and contributor to social norms.

She didn't have any regrets about this, but did sum it up as being something that she just thought she was supposed to do. She supposes that her dreams as a child was to be married and have her own children. The thing she's most proud of is her children (and their children). That is to say, that what she's most proud of is family, and in the most base term, pro-creation.

She says she didn't have any regrets at all, "didn't step on anyone's toes." Her final adage is that "life is for the living." It doesn't matter if anyone remembers her, because she's lived her life and had her time, and made the decisions that made her life fulfilling to her.

It's easy to think of this as naive, as simple. And Clara's not exactly living the burgeois life of a retiree (is anyone these days?) with her small home in rural Colorado, encircled by a chain link fence. There's something missing to her life, something grand that should signify or justify existence. There's something 'un'-settling.

But the reality, for her, is that no, there's not. That this is existence. That existing is no different than living. And that living, is no different than breathing. Breathing, and walking, and talking and having children and watching them have children. That childhood dreams are simply based upon what we think might be achievable for us. And that perhaps a dream which seems so simple still yields the same amount of satisfaction when achieved.

Life for the sake of living. Existence because we exist. It's an element philosophical prescription. I am what I am, and I exist because I am; a rudimentary cogito ergo sum where being trumps thinking. Clara has tapped into something elemental in the aging post-industrial American society; that simply living is something to be proud of.



*he once sat on the corner of Hollywood Blvd and La Brea Ave. with a cow to promote a movie. what's more American than a cow?