Just a short post for new characters, though a lot of people ended up being in this section. It will seem like nothing, though, when I finally get around to posting the characters for July!

The Professor

If any of you are from the UK or know the television show QI, you will know who Andy Hamilton is. If not, then here are some pictures:

I probably picked him because of the influence of QI and how the show’s basic premise is to expose and update common assumptions in knowledge. So clearly the correlation here is a professor = knowledge. Yes. Go me and symbolism. This isn’t always the case, clearly and I wanted to create some ambiguity around this character in particular. The tensions between his influence over Thomas and then whoever else Thomas happens to interact with in the later sections of the chapter are suppose to make him question all he’s ever apparently read or know.

At the time of writing this section, I was particularly jaded with academia. Not with knowledge, but how people in positions of power and cultural capital end up treating others. Basically, the higher you get in academia, the easier it is to take yourself far too seriously. Yes, these people do good work, are very smart, and have a lot to contribute, but I get really fed up if someone discounts another person’s input because of the ways in which they’ve learned it.  Knowledge and reason are really funny things, too, because all knowledge aquistion must prove faulty at one point or another. You must think you know something for sure, then have it challenged, and then try to find the answer all over again. It’s the myth of Sisiphys, and it can be very scary and enraging for a lot of people. At the time when I first wrote this, I had been enraged with the system, but when I went back to edit this part, I had figured out how to get through it (laugh, a lot, and don’t be so serious all the time).

The Professor is supposed to be an ambiguous character. You think you know him, but then he does something different to make you question his motives. He’s a mirror to Bernard in the narrative plot, providing Thomas with something that he desperately needs (knowledge), but leaving him hanging on a lot of other things (affection, personality). He will send him poems through email, but then question him and tell him he’s still in Plato’s mythic cave. He’s that critical voice inside all of us that spurs us on to keep going and never be satisfied with what is. There are limits to that, though. How far to you push against something you believe, like love and the person you’re supposed to spend your life with? I know that Travis, for all that he is intellectual and never seems to turn it off sometimes, outright refuses to reason with love and sex. The gray areas of what you’re supposed to question and what you’re supposed to accept come up in this and drive Thomas, and probably the reader, too, a little mad.

The strive for knowledge (Nietzsche’s Will To Power) is what is really important in this section. Thomas needs to get that motivation back and the urge to live again on his own without the aid of something toxic. He reads and reads and reads to try and do this, but a lot of his discomfort, with the Professor and what he is learning, I think, can be summed up in that story from the Symposium about the four legged and four armed people. It’s something that Travis and I ended up talking about recently, since it influences both of our works. There is this idea that is so prevalent in culture that you are missing something integral to your being and you just don’t know what to do about it. It makes you uncomfortable, it makes you wonder if there is something wrong with you, but you can’t articulate it. In the context of our conversation, he and I were talking about transgender studies. I said that the language of trans studies provides a vocabulary to express this missing piece theory – and you can see this, to a certain degree, with Alex in the later section of the chapter. But Thomas is not trans, and he is still missing something. He feels as if he is missing his other half, like the story suggests. The section of the Symposium is the origin of where soul mates come from – we are all wandering all around looking for that other half. Thomas thinks he finds it in Bernard, but it is taken away (or so he thinks) through the illness. He tries to put himself back together, but that doesn’t work either. Thomas also realizes that in the back of his mind, especially in December during the last chapter, that Bernard can’t be that other half all the time. He will always be uncomfortable in his own skin and it doesn’t matter what he does.

The missing piece is something that will always be there. It is what that striving is for. The moment that we think we are whole, everything becomes boring again. That is why the Professor is ambiguous. As soon as you think you understand him, you are jostled and made to think of something else. He is vague and unsure because that feeling of not being whole is not sure. It cannot be articulated, but we are always trying to articulate it. I think this is why we do tell stories to one another  Jasmine, at one point in the story, even asks, “don’t you ever tell yourself a story to get through the day?” and I think we all do this. It’s uncomfortable realizing that it is only a fiction, but then that gives us the energy to start again, start someplace new.

The Prosecutor

Ever since I saw Aisha Tyler on Friends, I wanted to use her as a character prototype. I think she’s really beautiful and how she carries herself as Charlie on the show is how I imagine her in this section. I just have the one picture, but you get the idea, right? She and the Professor are a very intelligent, upper-middle class family and have a strange, but idiosyncratic relationship with one another. They sort of remind me of a professor couple that is at my school; the man in the relationship is sort of an awkward, bumbling guy who talks a lot (compulsively, actually) and she is this demure private woman. It seems so bizarre that they would be a couple, but then you see them together and it just makes so much sense.

To finish this post, I want to share the youtube video for one of the songs on the soundtrack: The Origin of Love. This is from the film Hedwig and The Angry Inch, and it’s hands down one of my favourite films. My mom’s late boyfriend is actually in one scene – the pizza man when Hedwig rips up the passport. He was a writer and would usually supplement his income with extra work, and since parts of the film was shot in Canada, he was able to do it. Aside from that, it’s a really fun film with an interesting take on finding your other half. This song reenacts the speech by Aristophanes in the Symposium. Enjoy!