Never Let It Go

There is a movie I watched recently, starring Kiera Knightley and the lovely Carey Mulligan. Both of these actresses have a propensity for being in period flicks that leave me feeling distant from modernity and yearning for simpler times. This movie was different, though, being more sci-fi than romantical. The plot is that cloning is an acceptable action, and that with cloning life expectancies have jumped to 120 and there are no longer people suffering from disease. This sounds lovely, in theory, but as always there is something tilted when science becomes too strong. In the sad case of the three main characters, they grew up as clones, born and breed to be the harvesting vestiges for other 'real' humans. Something Heather kept saying, throughout the movie, stuck with me. The three characters grow up together in a boarding school, not knowing they are clones until later. They are still taught schoolwork, but they know nothing of any other world existing outside the brick and ivy walls of their isolation.

Heather kept saying, "But why don't they fight for more?"

Before I even took a breath, my reaction was, "Because they know nothing else."

Why didn't they fight the people that put them on a cold, silver table and took their organs out one by one? Why didn't they build a boat and try to cross over to America, even if they died somewhere over the Atlantic? And why, dear God why, did they for a moment think that they were inferior to their originals?

But I didn't think those things; not at first. I saw the movie as a classic example of not yearning for the ocean when you have never seen any body of water larger than a pond. How can you want that vastness? How can you dream in neon when everything around you is an abused hue? The truth is, I don't know. I come from a time and place where dreaming is so prevalent that often reality is disappointing. Where, seeing the Eiffel Tower is more like the mind confirming the glossy pictures in the magazine than accepting the building as something profound. That is why I loved the movie. That is why I can't stop thinking about it. I want to know why those three didn't fight, why they didn't try to run away or selfishly take their own lives to at least be in control of their bodies. But the things they did find, the things that could not be halted or harnessed, were love and disappointment of things that could never be.

While walking through the redwoods on a recent trip to the California coast, I thought about this movie a lot. Sure, the scenery is beautiful, as England always is, and the acting is raw and worthy of award, but there was more to it. In fact, all I could think about, looking out at the great rippled trunks of red trees before me, was how amazingly steadfast the human spirit is. That there are those out there that sacrifice everything for love, for family, for pride. That in Yemen, child marriages are quietly acceptable, even when they result in death for a twelve-year-old girl from internal bleeding. That there could be women whose husbands are twenty years older than them, and they must live their lives within their beautiful internal palace of spirit with all the doors and windows locked around them. But they do it. They watch their fathers give them to violent old men and they stop crying, eventually, at that betrayal.

It makes one wonder if the human spirit is made to want certain things, programmed to crave freedom, to cherish family, and to spill into other humans with affection and love. Do these things come in each of us, like a complex micro-chip? Or, do we merely seek what is within reach, what our environment has exposed us to? I don't know. All I know is that in Thailand, they wanted white skin so bad they bleached their arms, legs and faces just to look a certain way. I also know that I will never want to stop learning about people, geography and the environment. That, though I have never been a mother, I want to one day hold my child in my arms and know that love of a mother and her darling baby. Could the movies and media have implanted all these desires in me? Perhaps.....but I think there is something more, something so deep within my spirit that no matter how much the outside world hammered upon my skull I would still want the things I do. Even if I had been born in 1476, I would have yearned for the Pacific Ocean, and I would want a room of my own for my writing (as blasphemous as that would have been). So what comes first, the desire or the delusion?

It seems that the overwhelming spirit of humans demands that they can never let their truest desires go. They can never let it go, and I'm afraid nor can I, which is why, just like the characters in the movie, I will always be lost in the magnificence of love and the darkness of wanting things I can't express and know should not have been born in me.