Last night, a friend and I attended a play given by students of Leuven University who are members of a club called Janus at a theatre in the university’s Stuk building. It’s the first play I have ever seen in which artificial intelligence is one of the characters. Appropriately enough, it is set in a mad house and is essentially a murder mystery. Sort-of 2001: A Space Odyssey meets One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.
Janus are a group of improvisation artists, and had honed this play out of their interactions and discussions. I really don’t think there was a script. Some of the scene transitions were chunky, and some of the dialogue was forced, and some of it was hilarious. Typical improv.
This spontaneity evoked two reactions within me at the same time: the performance was not smooth, so it appeared unrealistic. And because it was not smooth, it was realistic. Was the lack of realism being play-acted realistically?
Life is a journey, and it would be a dull journey if, at each and every turn along its highway, our reaction were to be a yawn. This journey is portrayed to us as youngsters as being a voyage of discovery and acquisition of knowledge, learning, experience, joy, and the odd grief. The rosy picture that is painted of our futures by well-meaning parents, teachers, uncles and aunts (what do you want to be when you grown up?) is intended to urge us on; but, often, these voices of encouragement fall silent when the child to whom it is uttered meets with crushing disappointment. We arm the young for success, but rarely for failure. Primarily because we pre-define success and failure.
In The Guardian, George Monbiot has written about cattle farming and takes a view that not only contrasts with our rose-tinted childhood teachings, but that cites those teachings as a concerted effort to dupe us for life. Just one instance of how the world we grow up in can transpire to be very different from the model presented to us at an impressionable age. And it’s not always simply a case of keeping pace with the changing names of countries on the world map.
A learned truth can be like a rut in a pathway that we roll along, day in, day out. One day, we realise that it is the roadway to the side of the rut that offers the better path for our passage, and we find our way out of the rut, only to discover the next time we pass that way that we are once again back in the rut we thought we were now eschewing. There have been a number of ruts in my life and of one thing I am sure: there will be more, even in the short span that remains to me until I quit this mortal coil. And, what is more, there can never be a guarantee that the epiphany that sees you emerge from one rut does not in fact turn out to be but a second rut, from which further epiphany might even yet be required in a bid to escape it.
The ruts along the way of life comprise our own failings, our own misconceptions of others, and failures to understand the physical world we live in. And no small measure of these ruts stem from our being lied to. By spouses, by employers, by friends, by parents, by children, by those invested with responsibility over our common existences.
Oh, our failings are many. I have personally known three people who died falling off mountains, and it has imbued me with a deep respect for heights and a basal fear of danger, whatever that might be. I have misconceived others, too: viewed them as confidants and trusted, bosom friends, whose machinations against me have only been thwarted by supernatural intervention. And, then, there are the physical ruts: I’ve been towed out of bogs at least twice in my car; and probably far more often in person.
Whether we view revisiting a rut as a relapse or as an addiction or as a compulsion or as Wilde’s view on losing two parents: “carelessness”, ruts, it’s a fact, get revisited. And they get revisited no more insidiously that when we have dismissed the lesson that it had been assumed we had learned the first time around, which will generally occur in relation to our being lied to: we start to doubt whether our judgment that the other was lying is correct. Let me quote from a dramatisation of the morality tale, The Adventures of Pinocchio, by Carlo Collodi.
Lady with the Blue Hair: How do you feel now, my little one?
Pinocchio: My neck’s sore.
Lady with the Blue Hair: It’s your own fault: the Cricket warned you.
Pinocchio: How did you know that?
Lady with the Blue Hair: I know everything.
Pinocchio: Your hair’s blue, why’s that?
Lady with the Blue Hair: Because it’s blue, that’s why.
Pinocchio: You’re very kind, I like you.
Lady with the Blue Hair: I like you too, Pinocchio. You can stay with me, if you like; you’ll be my little brother.
Pinocchio: I’d like to stay, but my poor father—
Lady with the Blue Hair: I’ve told him where you are. He’s on his way here now.
Pinocchio: I’d like to go and meet him! It’s light now, and I do so want to kiss him!
Lady with the Blue Hair: All right, go, Pinocchio ... and don’t get up to anything silly.
Pinocchio: Oh, no, of course ... not.
Lady with the Blue Hair: Take the path through the forest, you’re sure to meet your father.
... oOo …
Pinocchio: Oh, Foxy and Tommy.
Foxy: Oh, hello!
Pinocchio: Hello.
Tommy: Hello!
Foxy: Why didn’t you come to the Field of Miracles last night?
Pinocchio: Two brigands tried to kill me. I bit the hand off one of them, he’s got a finger missing, just like you have, Tommy.
Foxy: One of your fingers missing, Tommy?
Tommy: One of my fingers missing? Ha, ha, oh, yeah!
Foxy: Well, that’s a coincidence.
Tommy: A coincidence.
Foxy: But tell me, have you still got your gold pieces?
Pinocchio: Yes, I’m going to give them to my father.
Foxy: Five miserable, little pieces of gold when you could have two thousand of them: remember, the Field of Miracles?
Tommy: Remember?
Pinocchio: The Cricket told me that you were a pair of rogues, I don’t believe a word you say any longer.
Foxy: The Cricket was talking nonsense!
Tommy: Nonsense!
Foxy: But, do you know where you are?
Pinocchio: No?
Foxy: You’re in Booby Land, and you’re in the Field of Miracles.
Pinocchio: Am I really?!
Foxy: Course you are! Look, I’ll make a hole here. You put your gold pieces in it and they’ll grow before your very eyes!
Tommy: Before your very eyes!
Pinocchio: You promise me?
Foxy: We swear they will.
Tommy: We swear.
Pinocchio: All right, I’ll do as you tell me.
Foxy: Ah! Now, go and get some water from the stream in the hollow of your hand.
Pinocchio: All right!
Foxy: And, meanwhile, we’ll ... fill the hole in ...!
Tommy: Yes, we’ll fill the hole in ...!
Pinocchio: Where’s the stream? I can’t see it. Foxy, Tommy! They’ve gone! Oh, where are my gold pieces? The hole’s empty! They’ve robbed me!
Clip: a 1970s Italian animation telling the real story of A Marionette by the Name of Pinocchio.
Pinocchio’s misconception lies in not recognising the two brigands who strung him up from a tree the night before as being the self-same Foxy and Tommy who tried to trick him out of his gold. He is set right by the ghost of the Cricket, which is confirmed by the Lady with the Blue Hair and he still allows himself to be tricked out of his gold. His punishment is that he is sent to prison for four months, for his gullibility.
Like all children’s stories, there’s a great deal of satire and imagery that is intended to go over children’s heads. Unfortunately, it sometimes goes over the adults’ as well.
Perhaps, by now, with your memories of Walt Disney’s Pinocchio from 1940, there will be elements of the original story that strike you as unfamiliar, that will seek to persuade you that the film you saw in your youth does not tell the story that Collodi told in 1883. Whereupon I must shatter your illusions, dear children, and advise you that dear Uncle Walt pulled the wool over your eyes and deceived you. And he was not the only one.
In case you missed it, a while back I wrote about the gangster film The Godfather and, because I have a boxed set of the DVDs, I sat and watched the entire three-part series, with The Godfather Part II and The Godfather Part III, and then I even sat and watched the DVD of extra features, like interviews, castings and cut scenes. Ten-plus hours of video entertainment.
Is The Godfather a feel-good movie?
I like old movies, and one I have in my DVD collection got dragged out this evening for an old, nostalgic wallow: The Godfather. It was made in 1972 and, rated X, it was a film I was unable to see for some time until it got suitably cut and shown on television. It was first shown in the UK as celebratory holiday fare, for Christmas, ironically enough; t…
At the end of the marathon, I felt as if I had watched the rise and fall of an old friend. As Michael Corleone trembled to mount his sunglasses on his nose and the camera drew back to watch his puppies sniffing around his chair in the garden, we saw how the actor collapsed, and then slumped into his chair and down onto the sandy ground, his life at last, after ten long hours, expired. Mr Pacino is an excellent actor, and his demise certainly looked realistic, but I happen to know that he is still with us, hale and hearty, and that his death in that garden chair was nothing more than acting.
In the world of film, of stage and of novels, a story can be told in a number of fashions, and they can sometimes be hard to sort out in one’s mind. Part of the problem of sorting them out is the need that is felt to sort them out. Let me explain.
How would you make a film depicting the events of 11 September 2001? Here’s one scenario: Bertha and Barry, two merchant bankers, are madly in love and take a chance during their morning tea break to have a quick bit of whoopee in the stationery cupboard; they tear wildly into each other in a frenzy of passion and lust and just as the pinnacle of their love-making is reached, the Earth moves for them as the nose cone of a commercial airliner momentarily joins them in behind the pencils and they are atomised in carnal bliss. That’s called a fictionalised story based on true events. Titanic, Pearl Harbor, The Longest Day are such examples.
You might also see films about 9/11 which are more documentary in nature. The sort of thing that a news agency like CNN or National Geographic might produce. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is an example of a less factual and more critical view. Moore doesn’t dispute that 9/11 happened, but questions some of the events that preceded and followed it.
Then, one might make a documentary that casts doubt as to whether 9/11 was even a terrorist attack—a sceptical view of government shenanigans. Some people point to buildings collapsing that did not have aircraft flown into them, and other aspects of that day which they identify as odd.
Finally, one could write a poem about 9/11, even one in which it’s not immediately obvious what the poem is about. Here’s one by Colette Inez:
Of the dramatisation, the straight documentary, the critical documentary, the sceptical documentary, and the poem, which is then the most realistic?
If we assume that the various art forms are to be appreciated in terms of the realism their creators intended to portray, then there can only be two levels of realism. The less realistic portrayal is the dramatisation, because a dramatisation is always a flight of fancy on the part of its creator, the film director. However, the judgment of whether or not the portrayal of Bertha and Barry is realistic assumes that realism is a matter of representing known actual events in the manner in which they actually happened. But, will anyone tell me that there have never been two merchant bankers who developed a sexual attraction for each other and found a quiet part of their office to have hurried, casual sex? The chances of this having happened at the very moment the aircraft was flown into the WTC are remote, but everything is a remote possibility in films. And 9/11 itself wasn’t exactly a common occurrence. We don’t know that it happened, but we don’t know that it didn’t happen. It’s possible. But is it realistic? Sex is something that can be built into a disaster movie, a horror movie, a comedy movie, even a murder movie. Are all such film plots unrealistic?
The documentaries are all realistic in terms of the portrayals presented by their makers. But the factual one states that the events were engineered by terrorists, the critical one questions the motives behind the ensuing war on terror and the sceptical one points a finger at the US authorities for engineering the entire episode. The sceptics view the factual film as anodyne, the factual filmmaker views the sceptics as conspiracy theorists, for the sceptic, the critic is insipid, for the fact-monger, he is a danger. They all think they’re being realistic. They all think the others are unrealistic. Nowadays, we say lying, disinformation, fake news. But part of the danger behind fake news is exactly that it can seem so realistic.
What about the poem? Is that realistic? Reputedly, the worst poet in English literature was Scotsman William McGonagall, who wrote this ditty about the Tay Bridge Disaster:
Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.
It’s not very good, but it draws a smile today, when we know McGonagall’s reputation, and cherish his memory. However, although the death toll from the disaster was somewhat fewer than 90 (around 75), there can be little question but that the Tay Bridge as built by Sir Thomas Bouch was indeed elegant, if frail, and it was indeed Sunday, 28 December 1879, when the disaster struck. McGonagall tells of his sorrow at the event, of its memorable nature; he uses an expression of woe (alas), and laments the loss of the bridge’s beauty and alludes to that of the river, shrouding the whole episode in the solemnity of the Sabbath. Is that unrealistic?
A poem is an expression of emotion and, while perforce descriptive of things other than emotion, precisely how the emotion is expressed is a matter for the artist. If the banality of his method fails to evoke emotion in the reader, that may speak to the artist’s artistry, mastery of language and ability of technique, but it cannot impugn either his emotion or the realism of that which he expresses. For the poet, their poem is realistic, even if it’s bad poetry.
When we look at the realism of The Godfather trilogy, therefore, we can assess that at a number of levels:
emotional, as with a poem;
as a documentary (some events in Part II are factual, such as the 1959 Cuban revolution and the Valachi hearings, as are some in Part III, like the death of Pope John Paul I, and the Vatican bank scandal); and
as a dramatisation—fictional portrayals cast within a framework that is believable and accurate in terms of its paradigms.
One wonders whether mantras such as never let anyone know what you’re thinking and make him an offer he cannot refuse really are part of the codex of the mafia, and whether mafiosi all talk with a clipped, Bronx brogue. I guess they do, in the Bronx. But there’s no reason to suppose that all mafia types speak the way they do in The Godfather, no more than there is to suppose that all Caribbean pirates spoke with a rounded ‘Ooh, aarh, Jim, mi’lad!’ redolent of English cider country.
So, on one level, we can try to assess the realism of the characters depicted in the films on the basis of the kinds of characters who engaged in the types of business shown in the movies in real life, even if in so doing we don’t show any particular individual’s real story. (We’re back in a merchant bank’s stationery cupboard.)
The mafia is depicted as a territorial organisation in terms of both geography as also in terms of business activity. In Part II, we see some arms dealing and trading in ladies’ dresses. The dresses (and, for all I know, the pistols) are stolen, but the goods dealt in are those described. We hear references to numbers, which is a form of betting whereby three figures are chosen in an order that will be published in the newspaper the next day as (the last three figures of) the total amount bet at a given horse racing event—and which therefore could not be known in advance; guessing the three numbers looks deceptively easy but carries odds of 999:1 against, and would offer very tempting prize money of 600:1—if guessed correctly, of course). There’s also reference to prostitution, the uses for which become admirably clear in Part II when Gervase Spradlin, playing the Senator, is caught in a brothel with a dead girl, a set of facts sufficiently compromising to induce the politician to accommodate the Corleone family’s business ambitions concerning Nevada gambling licences. In Part I, we hear talk of drugs, in which Vito Corleone (in his Marlon Brando iteration) is reluctant to be involved. I can’t say how accurate that is, but whether the Corleones dealt drugs or not, certainly others of the five families in New York did, and do. If you have the stomach for it, there is a fairly accurate and open admission of how various modern drug operations work in a compendium film narrated by three reformed drug smugglers, here.
In Part III, Michael Corleone is endeavouring to move into legitimate business interests, and wants to acquire a controlling shareholding in a firm called Imobiliare, owned by the Vatican City. No sooner has he taken steps, using not unusual strong-arm business negotiating tactics, than he finds the Pope has suddenly died and the Vatican is mired in a huge financial corruption scandal. We know that the scandal is realistic because it was in a huge financial corruption scandal that the real Vatican was embroiled, further to which Roberto Calvi ended up dangling under London’s Blackfriars Bridge in 1982. And we know that Pope John Paul died surprisingly suddenly, thirty-three days after taking up office as God’s anointed representative on Earth in 1978. The danger, of course, is relating both John Paul I’s death and the scandal involving the Institute for the Works of Religion to the fictional account of Michael Corleone, but it is realistic to do so, even if not real.
Books such as Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll and Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, or even the nursery rhyme Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary are laced with satire, even if, in Mary’s case, it’s questionable which Mary was the subject of the disdain or lament, as the case may be. Satire must be oblique in order not to be seen as outright criticism. But, without context, the satire itself can get lost, whereupon the tale becomes naught but a children’s story.
Some of you will have clicked on the link above, and some will have preferred not to do so. For some of you, it’s enough to know that bad people exist, but more than that is too much information. Others may be conscious of this omnipresent badness and seek to learn more about it in order to arrive at a balanced judgment. And some may learn about things they didn’t know and conclude that what they classify as criminal and that which they classify as lawful can be harder to distinguish than they had realised, given how the way in which organised crime operates can in large measure reflect the way in which organised government operates.
The most obvious differentiator between the two is the election (along with such other matters as a given individual may deem to constitute such a differentiator: the unstinting uprightness of political representatives, the utter absence of self-interest in those who govern, the altruistic vocations of large corporations, the inherent sense of fairness in the gambling industry, and such like).
Therefore, in order to distinguish organised crime from organised government, all one needs to do is to focus on the elements that, to the given observer, distinguish the two, and determine whether that chosen factor is in fact a distinguishing factor or not. Some nuance may occasionally be required: few mafiosi eliminate enemies by incarcerating them, for instance. Instead, they tend to murder them. Whilst judicial killing is prevalent in some legal systems, incarceration is nonetheless also resorted to. You may wish to regard that as a distinguishing feature or, on the other hand, as being tantamount to the same thing. (For instance.)
If you had to paint a picture, therefore, of the mafia, what characteristics, adjectives, nouns, judgments would you set down on paper as identifying Cosa Nostra and delineating it from … you?
Criminal—they break the law;
Ruthless—they kill to achieve their goal; the people they kill are ordinary folk going about their business;
Use of weapons—guns, knives, bombs; killers;
Disrespectful of authority—police, judiciary, government, lawmakers;
Tax avoidance—money laundering and salting away illicit gains in tax havens;
Low morals—engaging in prostitution, child abuse, cocking a snoot to the established church;
Social vermin—destroying the institutions of social cohesion;
Gambling—Las Vegas, numbers rackteering;
Fraud—financial dealings intended to trick people out of money;
Drugs—growing, manufacturing, packaging, developing, smuggling, distributing, pushing drugs;
Stolen goods—probably: I don’t think many mafiosi are peddling stolen ladies’ dresses these days, but counterfeiting and theft are certainly in the mix.
All these things are characteristic of organised crime. The mafia are despised by decent society, because they cause the rot of society and kill indiscriminately, and cannot be trusted. If we could eradicate the mafia, life would be so much better for decent, hard-working people like you and me. Because, if that were the case, if the mafia were gotten rid of, then we could concentrate on the other sources of society’s ills: we would only have problems like the following to deal with:
Criminal—criminal is that which is contrary to statute law. In theory, it’s anything that is contrary to law, statute or not, but that is not quite the case in many places any more. The law comprises the statutes enacted by parliament, the dicta of the judiciary who interpret that law, and custom and usage, which are also valid parts of the law of the land. However, as we see in the US Supreme Court and the UK’s Rwanda Bill, and indeed as we have seen since legal systems began (such as the Act of Supremacy of 1534, which whisked from under Thomas More’s feet the legal certainty underlying his silence on the matter of Henry VIII’s divorce), parliamentary acts that get interpreted incorrectly by courts get changed; and judicial careers can suffer as a result of their misinterpretations. Richard Nixon said what everyone knew anyway: it’s not illegal when the president does it, which is a succinct manner by which to restate the fundamental definition of criminality. All presidents are corrupt , really, they are. The ones who don’t go to prison are the ones who have political opponents; the ones who do are the ones who have political enemies;
Ruthless—they kill to achieve their goal; the people they kill are ordinary folk going about their business, politicians say of the mafia. Parliamentary democracies achieve their goals with elections. We have just observed one in Russia, and there was one in the US in 2020; elections get held all the time all over the world, so that governments always act with legitimacy and authority and a popular mandate. And, if they don’t, we always have Richard Nixon’s definition of criminality to make everything all right. Governments don’t need to kill people, they need to control people, and you cannot control somebody by killing them. If you kill someone and then say, “Do this” or “Do that”, they will just lie there and not do anything.
The only people you should kill are people who you have no other way of preventing from doing something you don’t want them to do. Like speaking, or protecting your enemy or trying to kill you. Democracies do an astonishing amount of killing, but they do tend to exercise quite a lot of tolerance before they get to the point of ending someone’s life.
Take Mr Navalny in Russia, for instance. He was killed slowly, and then killed quickly, no one really knows why for sure, but he was no fan of Mr Putin, so that will have a lot to do with it. But Arthur Scargill didn’t get killed by Margaret Thatcher, even though he was a real thorn in her side. Mr Scargill was lucky enough to be on the 6 o’clock news every night and, if he’d not turned up one night, people would’ve asked how come. But Mrs Thatcher did send a lot of troops to the Falkland Islands in 1982, and 900 of those died (as did some Falkland Islanders). The war in the Falkland Islands was about control of the island group. Soldiers may expect to die more readily than striking coal miners, but I doubt they find it any more likeable.
The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre was about control of Chicago during the Prohibition era. It cost the lives of seven men. The objection that a government is different from a criminal gang is more spurious than one might imagine, because neither a government nor a criminal gang will kill people who are useful to it and loyal to it, who contribute to it and do not drain its resources unnecessarily. Mafiosi are not known for their compassion. And, increasingly, nor are governments;
By Chicago History Museum - Original publication: PrintImmediate source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/opinion/how-the-st-valentines-day-massacre-changed-gun-laws.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62799362
Use of weapons—guns, knives, bombs; killers. The police are armed, because they never know what kind of characters they’re going to have to deal with. And, because the police are generally viewed as a body of men and women whose job it is to prevent criminal activity, they sometimes need to draw arms in order to do that preventive work, or to apprehend those who contravene the law. But they do more, much more than that.
Policemen and -women take the law into their own hands, shoot to kill the young, the mentally challenged and the old, and commit outright crimes like the Nivelles Gang, Wayne Couzens, Derek Chauvin, and other law enforcement officers whose duty and function is edged by their own or others’ hands into the realm of self-service or the service of interests other than those of the general public in whose name they are appointed and by whose purse they are remunerated. To serve and protect is a great motto, but it’s becoming increasingly unclear who, precisely, they are there to serve and to protect. Not protesting university students, it seems.
When one observes the viciousness with which law and order measures are pursued against the defenceless, one is minded to conclude that the outrages practised by Chicago gangs against those who would impinge upon the liquor-smuggling efforts were positively compassionate compared to professional police forces taking action against those who protest for the lives of innocent people in the Middle East.
Stanley Kubrick, the film maker, said once that large countries act like gangsters and small countries act like prostitutes and, as one surveys the global scene, it is hard to conclude that that is wrong, although I can’t quite decide which Switzerland is. The Savile Row suits and glittering diamonds of the world’s elites are almost hallmarks advertising the nefarious means by which riches can be acquired. Mr Elon Musk does as he pleases and I level against him no criticism, but a man who can go from Paypal to Boring in 50 billion dollars is either stupendously lucky, stupendously able to spot and exploit an opportunity, or stupendously good at disguising the source of his pile. I doubt whether he has ever had somebody knocked off but he has certainly terminated many on his route to riches.
The article I allude to above, about The Godfather asks whether it’s a feel-good movie. It asks whether we should feel good when the mafia kill someone, or when a mafioso is killed. It asks the reader to question the criteria by which they position themselves on some scale of morality. The truth is that there is no scale of morality. Morality is not something that is imposed by society. What society imposes are rules: some written, some unwritten. But there is no such thing as social morality. Morality is a matter for you yourself. It is the set of rules that you have laid down in collaboration with your conscience and, if you believe in him or her, your god. Morality is not a court room argument, it is a private conversation between you and it.
It is within the confines of that internal debate that each one of us determines what is and is not criminal. Criminality is not a characteristic that can any longer be determined by rules imposed from above. Criminal justice, it must be admitted, is imposed by those who hold power over us and in its administration and in its practice, the ordinary citizen is powerless. They can defend themselves in terms of rules of moderation but not against iniquitous rules that condemn them absent all proportionality. In other words, the debate that you are able to conduct with your conscience as to what is and is not right is a freer debate than that which you can conduct in your defence before a court of law. What that does for the conscience debate is heap responsibility on you as an individual, and in that we can perchance fail. What it does for the courtroom debate is heap responsibility on the legal system, and it, too, can perchance fail in that.
The Godfather Part II contains a scene in which Vito Corleone (played in that iteration by Robert de Niro), frustrated at the coercion practised by Don Fanucci (Gastone Moschin) murders the protection racketeer and thereby earns the honour and respect of the local tradespeople. Fanucci is the local authority, demands protection money from commercial traders in order that their premises don’t get firebombed. Fanucci is not elected, he is self-appointed, and that is why his elimination must be contrived by firepower rather than a ballot box. But when Fanucci’s bad form of government is swept away by Corleone, the locals rejoice: they love the new criminal who has disposed of the old.
And that is more realistic than many are prepared to admit.
When I see peasants with pigeons and goats, whistling to their flocks and thanking God for every small blessing that’s bestowed on them, and then look at primly dressed folk in compartments of morning trains, shoes polished and French perfume in their hair, travelling into town like a flock heeding the shepherd’s whistles as sounded by an engineer at the head of their train, I wonder which of them has the more fulfilling life.