Dan Kaplan: Great beginnings and weak endings

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love." In my experience, there's no such thing as a better beginning. The poetry-like prose first line of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera needs only 17 words to make you know that its author is the best kind of romantic -- the melancholy who knows about death and sadness and regret and yet manages to believe that the rhythms of the hearts of people in love somehow exist somewhere above all of it. So I ripped off Marquez to get your attention.

I am a sucker for good beginnings; I figure if a book, movie, song or essay opens with true jolt or the soothing gentle touch of meditative curiosity, the creator of the piece has, at the very least, the talent and potential to follow through. Back in the days before hip hop started to suck, there were few things in the mass media world that had for me both the immediate gripping power and shiver-shudder aftershock of a flawlessly executed rap song.

2Pac's Only God Can Judge Me jumps to mind. It enters with a stretched-out bass sound followed by the gently echoing, alternating high notes of a windy synthesized sound, mournful and rich. Almost instantly, 2Pac's voice, unmistakable for its hushed but imbedded sadness and rage, asks, "Only God can judge me... that right? Nobody else. All you other mothafuckas get out my business." Then, the crackling drum line and the perfect delivery of his viciously touching lyrics.

The problem with great beginnings, of course, is that they are Catastrophic Meltdown's staging ground of choice. The initial bang, glimmering with skill and received with nods and hoo-hahs all around, can all too easily implode into a mediocrity that is perhaps worse than a mediocrity that was never anything but. No one sighs when Mariah Carey acts badly in her new movie, but we're all still scratching our heads and wondering the fuck happened to Optimus Prime.

Such descents do not only happen over the span of a human career. I think of novelist Tom Robbins' Skinny Legs and All. It begins, "This is the room of the wolfmother wallpaper. The toadstool motel you once thought a mere folk tale, a corny, obsolete, rural invention." Let it be said that I sort of like this novel: Robbins' prose is sensuous and beautiful, his style unique and insightful. But with those 23 words, he set me up for disappointment. They are bizarre, brilliant, the beginning to a meditative epic on all that is human, funny and strange.

A few chapters in and the book has become a masterfully scribed lecture in Robbinsspeak on violence in Jerusalem, the ills of a soulless American culture and unusual interpretations of art. It rang true but seemed obvious; there was none of the timeless genius winked at by the novel's first line.

And then we have The Matrix. The first movie promised us that it would be Act One of a three-act, 21st-century successor to Star Wars. It took the ever-ongoing (and always visually impressive) rivalry between evil and good and refashioned it as anti-capitalist Buddhist cyberpunk: a literal and metaphysical battle between those who would digitally synthesize our perceptions and suck away our life, and those who could lift the veil but promise that the only thing we'd find underneath would be materially uncomfortable and taste like goop.

And this was only the backdrop. In the foreground, we got to see a sharply dressed and futuristic dude earn the hots of a badass cyber chick and find himself in greater and greater control of some pretty sweet moves. When we left those theaters, we had the feeling that the movies this time had finally done it: now everything was possible, it seemed, and we couldn't wait to plummet down as deep as the rabbit hole would go.

But then, four years later, plummeting, we found out that the rabbit hole was not a rabbit hole, but a small circular rabbit hole-like mound of dirt, just deep enough to cover an enormous rock, and it sucked to be moving that fast.

I guess, however, that it's possible that I set myself up for a letdown. Perhaps any and all well-executed beginnings are not such works of genius after all; everyone, they say, gets lucky sometimes. Perhaps a beginning of any sort is a lead-in to disappointment. Didn't Robert Frost have something to say about that?

Maybe all of this is my own personal nature turning my life into a roller coaster of high expectations and low results. Maybe I want too much of people, things. Maybe I'll learn that beginnings don't really matter, that it's in the space between start and finish where things really happen. Maybe I'll find that nothing is certain and that the whole practice of forcing things into frames of beginning and end is bogus, something my own mind creates to make sense of itself and the universe at large. Maybe I'll break my own heart. Maybe I'll break the hearts of others. Maybe, though I doubt it, I'll get it right from the start.

Dan Kaplan is a senior History major from New York City.

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