Today while moving the last of my large items to my new studio, unofficially called Square K as my neighbor is a Circle K, I drove my truck under a loading dock door that I had failed to raise to the proper height, crippling a set of shelves that were riding a bit proud from my truck. What was strange about the incident is that as it happened, I looked back in the rearview mirror watching buckling metal crease and collapse like many newborn giraffes trying to run across an icy lake (I used to know this artist, Ella, and she did a great newborn giraffe impersonation. She was all elbows and knees if she wanted to be, but at other times was like an arrow shot through a vacuum), and the SOUND was of saw blades being used as percussion and something dramatic from a movie like Lawrence of Arabia; timpani drums being played atop sandblasted camels.
But the sight of it all was a little strange. There weren't enough frames in the movie being shot (the movie being "Shelves buckling on the back of a T100", and I caught myself thinking at that moment: action movies are quite realistic. In between my laughter at the scene I thought of action movies. And maybe this is because I just went through a marathon of watching all the Fast and Furious movies (there's 10 if you count right, with the best being the little-known origin story of Han, Better Luck Tomorrow) and when cars crash into buildings and fly out of helicopters being driven by tanks, or whatever absurd scenario is being concocted, everything folds and collapses in a way that makes me think they should have paid more for CGI.
Looking out of Nemo (that's the T100) at those shelves, looking like they were being rendered on used Thinkpad from the 90s, I realized I just didn't have that much experience watching things collapse so that it didn't matter if destruction is high resolution or not in a movie because I don't really know what metal collapsing in violence really looks like. Now I have a bit better idea, which I'm choosing to use as a way to look at this experience as a positive versus me just loosing a set of shelves. Much like Han's storyline in the Fast and Furious, it's better to look at the larger framework in some instances than the details. On the other hand, if we generalize too much, you end up with garbage like the The Fate of the Furious (the 8th movie in the Franchise, or 9th if you count Better Luck Tomorrow).
That crumpling/buckling metal just didn't make any sense to look at. It was foreign. And that's the thing about something that doesn't really have teeth in generalities or specifics: it's hard to place. We require both to make sense of the world; and it may just be that our ability to wander from generalities to specifics back to generalities is a very human experience, which also gives us the ability to assign value to parts of the world, because we have an actual sense to some intrinsic depth to the experience. It's a bit like discovering the world through running through sewage drains and streets, where each topology allows motion that the other doesn't. Generalities and details are like real numbers and imaginary numbers, which when used together you can make a nice unit circle with.
I read this quote the other day by Hannah Arendt, "It is the sign of sophistication to speak in generalities, according to which all cats are grey and we are all equally guilty". I think she's talking about what happens when we get stuck on one side of the divide and suddenly think of ourselves as purely an observer; never in the middle ground between details and generalities. We become tainted and malicious in this mode. Maybe a bit toxic with self satisfaction. There's a sweet spot to be found: the Han Spot (in the context of the Fast and Furious movies).
And, in general, I will remember to open loading dock bays to their full height, when I, specifically, am transporting tall objects.