The Origins of Wind

I woke up just before dawn, stretched, and went for a brief jog that cut straight through downtown and then looped back to my apartment. I haven’t done much jogging the past few weeks; after a few half-marathons, I decided to spend November doing other exercises and activities. You can overdo anything, after all.

The weather forecast never indicated rain, though the skies were gaunt and the air had the metallic scent of an impending storm. Puddles blotched the streets from rainfall the night before.

A torrential downpour of rain slammed down on me shortly after I crossed the St Louis Arch. Gusts of wind gained intensity and lashed rain against my face. The wind, in my imagination, seemed capable of leveling each building and tree, and finally rendering downtown a pile of rubble.

Finally, I arrived back at my apartment, totally drenched.

I thought about when I was young and I always wondered if wind had an origin. In my mind, there was some faraway land, owned by wind’s creator, initiating these gusts and storms. Or did wind just appear out of thin air?

Obviously there is a scientific explanation for wind, but some things in life are best left a mystery. The unknown opens the imagination, whereas explanations kill it.

The rain stopped about as abruptly as it arrived. There was something other-worldly about it.

The escapist in me looks for these “other-worldly” signs. The day before, I crossed a rest station on the Riverfront Trail, and it reminded me of a train station. Suddenly I imagined the train station from Spirited Away that Chahiro took to visit the witch’s twin sister. It was the same train station occupied by various spirits, navigating a strange purgatorial world.

Would I take this haunted train, and would it take me on some fantastic adventure, away from the consumerism and hustle culture that seem to prevail in the city?

Spirited Away is an amazing movie. Who were these spirits, and where were they going? Brilliantly, the movie doesn’t tell us much. Like the origins of wind, it’s best left a mystery.

Underrated Art: Manhunter

Though Silence of the Lambs is the most renowned and critically acclaimed film to feature the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter, the 1986 film Manhunter is arguably superior (I believe it the greatest serial killer film of all time). As decades have passed, critics have increasingly acknowledged that Manhunter was tragically overlooked.

While Anthony Hopkins’s manic performance as Lecter captured an Oscar, the version of Lecter portrayed by Brian Cox in Manhunter is chilling in a far different way. Cox plays Lecter with an understated detachment to emotion and suffering, making him much colder than Hopkins’s version. He is an empty vessel that follows a violent pathology and lacks any ability to decipher right from wrong. Cold and calm indifference disturb the viewer more than ferocity in this film.

What also makes Manhunter so disturbing is how it hints at deep similarities between the FBI agent hunting the serial killer and the serial kill himself. The film dares to suggest that it takes the mind of a serial killer to catch a serial killer, and one could posit that the two are born with similar souls. The editing and color hues emphasize an eerie symbiotic relationship between law and lawbreaker. This play with duality is territory that The Silence of the Lambs barely treads on.

Manhunter was ahead of its time, as was its beautiful and haunting synth-laden musical soundtrack. It’s well worth listening to the motion picture soundtrack. Do nothing. Just listen. I find it to be a very immersive experience.

Here’s once of my favorite tracks, “Seiun / Hikari No Sono”.