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...can't help it that I devour tomes like...like....oh bother, like a person who reads extremely fast.
And then I decided to listen to the soundtrack of The Ghost and Mrs Muir, which has always been one of my favourite old movies. Because, you know, I do like things where there's a lot of DEATH and LOVE and PASSION and being reunited finally beyond that border, where nothing more can harm and all pains are healed. And even, with an autumnal surge of melancholia, the ones where there is just the grave, just the monument and the shock of recognition of a name, a statue's face -- just the mortal memory, the meeting-again still around the corner, and a long stretch of life till that corner it will be, if indeed the same corner atall.
And yet..."Journeys end in lovers' meetings,/ Ev'ry wise man's son doth know." And they do...maybe that's why I've always recognised it, I've been thinking lately, especially when sharing such a loverly gutter indeed with my beloved Litharriel. Oh right, did I mention? -- soulmates do exist, as do slightly looser groups of old mates that keep turning up again like in a spread of cards. I don't believe that anything is really lost just because death happens to intervene. There are few things more illogical to my mind (let alone my own personal experience) than the materialist idea that consciousness and character simply cease to exist just because the physical body dies -- or even, taking the more religious side, that one chance at life is all that a soul ever gets as a rule, to pass or to fail. I know there's more than that. If anyone chooses to believe in less, then that's their prerogative -- doesn't mean there's actually less there, though.
But anyhow....love, death, memory, coming back.........massive massive amounts of angst.......familiar territory, that, just grown deeper with remembrance.
But pulling back from that particular angle just a little.....perhaps you've noticed it lately, perhaps not, but it's pointedly true all the same: The best fantasy isn't just something to entertain children but rather to make adults remember. Not to escape the harshness of "reality" but to confront it, to take up arms against the insanities and inhumanities of the world -- and by opposing (not-too-obviously) (help to) end them. It is, quite literally, what we "grow up on" -- rather than being kept in the dark and running in the comfortable and well-worn superstitious circles that parents and other well-meaning adults would often like to keep their youth 'safely' within. Reality is bigger than conventionality...and sometimes fantasy is far better at showing reality than reality is capable of showing itself. It slips under the radar of automatic defensiveness, angles the mirror to show more than just the subject at hand, and actually gives some reason for giving a damn without one's own life and/or liberty being directly at stake. Where we don't care, we can't change -- especially not for the better, whether in ourselves or in the state of the world and society.
We need very badly the truths and realizations that go around under the guise of "fantasy" -- the deeper and darker they're growing, the closer they get to what's really there, what has to be found in more than just bright platitudes. The measure of an authentic mythology or a fairytale does not lie in how pretty or how happy it is, but how true it is in essence. And time will tell by its sorting and sifting where the greatest truths reside, no matter how improbable the vehicle.
_
And then I decided to listen to the soundtrack of The Ghost and Mrs Muir, which has always been one of my favourite old movies. Because, you know, I do like things where there's a lot of DEATH and LOVE and PASSION and being reunited finally beyond that border, where nothing more can harm and all pains are healed. And even, with an autumnal surge of melancholia, the ones where there is just the grave, just the monument and the shock of recognition of a name, a statue's face -- just the mortal memory, the meeting-again still around the corner, and a long stretch of life till that corner it will be, if indeed the same corner atall.
And yet..."Journeys end in lovers' meetings,/ Ev'ry wise man's son doth know." And they do...maybe that's why I've always recognised it, I've been thinking lately, especially when sharing such a loverly gutter indeed with my beloved Litharriel. Oh right, did I mention? -- soulmates do exist, as do slightly looser groups of old mates that keep turning up again like in a spread of cards. I don't believe that anything is really lost just because death happens to intervene. There are few things more illogical to my mind (let alone my own personal experience) than the materialist idea that consciousness and character simply cease to exist just because the physical body dies -- or even, taking the more religious side, that one chance at life is all that a soul ever gets as a rule, to pass or to fail. I know there's more than that. If anyone chooses to believe in less, then that's their prerogative -- doesn't mean there's actually less there, though.
But anyhow....love, death, memory, coming back.........massive massive amounts of angst.......familiar territory, that, just grown deeper with remembrance.
But pulling back from that particular angle just a little.....perhaps you've noticed it lately, perhaps not, but it's pointedly true all the same: The best fantasy isn't just something to entertain children but rather to make adults remember. Not to escape the harshness of "reality" but to confront it, to take up arms against the insanities and inhumanities of the world -- and by opposing (not-too-obviously) (help to) end them. It is, quite literally, what we "grow up on" -- rather than being kept in the dark and running in the comfortable and well-worn superstitious circles that parents and other well-meaning adults would often like to keep their youth 'safely' within. Reality is bigger than conventionality...and sometimes fantasy is far better at showing reality than reality is capable of showing itself. It slips under the radar of automatic defensiveness, angles the mirror to show more than just the subject at hand, and actually gives some reason for giving a damn without one's own life and/or liberty being directly at stake. Where we don't care, we can't change -- especially not for the better, whether in ourselves or in the state of the world and society.
We need very badly the truths and realizations that go around under the guise of "fantasy" -- the deeper and darker they're growing, the closer they get to what's really there, what has to be found in more than just bright platitudes. The measure of an authentic mythology or a fairytale does not lie in how pretty or how happy it is, but how true it is in essence. And time will tell by its sorting and sifting where the greatest truths reside, no matter how improbable the vehicle.
_
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The Ghost and Mrs. Muir is one of my favs, as its The Turn of the Screw, though it's not a romantic or nice. But both stories are important. The governess in The Turn of the Screw has been corrupted by religion and sees evil wherever she looks. It doesn't really matter if the ghosts are real or not. She would still manage to find something maddening evil elsewhere. I know too many people like the governess and far fewer like Mrs. Muir. Or the ghost.
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The other big 'death and romantic ending' film I used to like was Maytime -- Jeannette MacDonald, Nelson Eddy and John Barrymore -- but it has completely the opposite social message as The Ghost and Mrs Muir, because the whole flashback device of the plot is to convince a young girl in the present-day to give up on her own operatic ambition and marry the nice young local boy who wants to cling onto her and not let her go away to New York to study singing as a career.
To which I say, "Bollocks"....honestly, the only part of the movie that still 'works' for me is the very end (i.e., death and reunion), because I don't give a shit about generalizing one person's experiences into advice for another -- just let 'em have closure for their own stories and leave the hamhanded didacticism out of it.
Besides which, Nelson Eddy was an abysmal actor for high melodrama. Personally, I think it would have been much more interesting (though less musical) to have John Barrymore playing the lover and Nelson Eddy playing the controlling/jealous husband, just to be as far against cliche as possible (even though that means one would certainly have to take out the cliched romantic advice and let the story stand for itself).
Luckily, Rex Harrison was always quite good at shedding dramatic cliches from his dry and saturnine persona.... >:)
From:
hi lj friend
There is so much here.
I would love to see your reading list sometime.
spike
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Re: hi lj friend