east of eden

I saw the Elia Kazan movie 'East of Eden' this afternoon. It's a film interpretation of Steinbeck's novel, which I haven't read; I imagine if I did, the people and atmosphere I would picture as I read would be very different from the film.

But that doesn't mean this isn't an excellent film. It really is. I'd say that's mostly because of James Dean, though the whole thread of thought about Cain, Abel, acceptable offerings, and the dangers of self-righteousness...that's pretty important as well. . . . . But there's something about James Dean. I found a commentator that I think captured it pretty well. (Does anyone care about this? It doesn't matter. I'm sharing it anyway... Maybe you've seen a James Dean movie and maybe you've been drawn to him. )

So the commentator (Rosey Golds) writes:
"...with traditional Hollywood actors or those from the British theatre tradition (Lawrence Olivier for example), you feel … safe. As if nothing can go wrong. You feel you're watching great art through a great 'performance'. And, oddly enough, this distances you from the performer. You simply don't have to worry about them. You know that even if something disastrous or humiliating happens to their character, they'll still manage to retain their dignity. Not so with James Dean.

Dean is authentically awkward, authentically demoralized. . .To watch the Method actor is to engage in voyeurism. To watch the Hollywood actor is to watch a 'presentation'. The Method actor's spontaneity, his deep introspection and vulnerability, the fact that he has drawn his character from his own life experience results in an audience genuinely flinching at what they see. James Dean was one of the best actors at making people flinch — and one of the best at being humiliated. It is this humiliation that is the key to his charisma."

I think that is a very good attempt at capturing the man and the character(s) he plays in words. He does make you flinch. Like real people do. People shouldn't be easy to 'figure out.'

Maybe if I am easy to figure out, I'm putting on a stock character instead of letting my unique and God-created character out. Like Hollywood acting vs. Method acting.
Sometimes I try too hard to make myself 'understandable.'

Toledo

from the Elvis Costello/Burt Bacharach song "Toledo"...

But do people living in Toledo
Know that their name hasn’t traveled very well?
And does anybody in Ohio
Dream of that Spanish citadel?

I like this bit o' songage; all the things it gives little glimmers of--the discrepancy between ancientness and history-forgetfulness, between Europe and America, the absurdity of things, the whole "would a rose by any other name smell as sweet" question...shifting identity and wistfulness for something else. Lots of stuff in a little paragraph about Ohio. Good job, Elvis 'n' Burt.

Go saddle the sea

Go saddle the sea, put a bridle on the wind,
before you choose your place.





















(I found this little quote in a book for young folk called 'Go Saddle the Sea,' by Joan Aiken. I've read a couple of her kids-ish books on the side for amusement and general non-televised entertainment lately. Anyway, back to the point. I don't know if this is a real proverb or one invented for the book, but it caught my imagination and my experience and clothed them in imagery. The whole idea of widening perspective in order to be able to see where and whom you truly are. It also makes me want to cross an ocean in an open boat with magical people.)

louis and lions

As I sit here with Louis Armstrong sailing through the air, hot coffee in my belly, the glow of a lamp against a gray and windy evening, and the joy of Jesus in the room...
A couple more thought-inducements from Charles Williams's 'The Place of the Lion,' before too much time elapses and I forget the spirit of the book:

Anthony considers going to the little club of dabblers in metaphysical philosophy, to talk to them about combating the descent of the Archetypes upon the world:
“Some of them might help: they couldn’t all want Archetypes coming down on them, not if they were like most of the religious people he had met. They also probably liked their religion taken mild—a pious hope, a devout ejaculation, a general sympathetic sense of a kindly universe—but nothing upsetting or bewildering, no agony, no darkness, no uncreated light.” (P.74)

How often is that me? Wanting the reality, the truth of God, of Jesus, to come in a watered-down, gentle sitcom-with-a-laugh-track form...something smaller than me... when really it is so much greater; really it is something than can swallow me whole. Something where I can finally lose myself in the beauty of my real purpose--worshipping the Greatest.

Anthony to Damaris about the REALITY of the situation, the REALITY of “ideas”:
“What I think is of no matter,” he answered. “Have I pretended it was? It’s the thing that matters: the truth is in the thing. Heart’s dearest, listen—the things you study are true, and the philosophers you read knew it. The universals are abroad in the world, and what are you going to do about it? Besides write about them.”
“Do you seriously mean to tell me,” she said, “that Power is walking about on the earth? Just Power?”
“Yes,” he answered, and though she added before she could stop herself, “Don’t you even know what a philosophic universal is?” he said no more.
(P.106)

Damaris is so sure that "ideas" are containable, are different from Reality. She will find out in a terrifying way that God is not just an 'idea.'
For now we see through a glass darkly...
face to face someday!!!

points of communion

places on the earth where God lifts the veil of everydayness from your eyes and you are stunned into silence by the way things really Are.

night after night
alone under a pink mosquito net
but not alone at all.
There You were.
And here You are.
(southern Philippines, October-November of last year.)

Charles Williams

have you read any Charles Williams? One of the Inklings--you know, "the C.S. Lewis group." I guess it could just as well be called the Charles Williams group. Anyway. His book "War in Heaven" has been an answer to prayer for me. Continues to be. Challenging and terrifying and wakening. Now I'm reading his "The Place of the Lion," which is more excerptable, so I want to share bits.

There is a character called Damaris; she's a scholar working for a Doctorate in Philosophy who plays around with ideas endlessly, writing papers and making diagrams and having discussions...but with no sense of the Reality behind those ideas. Until the Truth begins to break in on the visible world in a whole new way. Amazingly, there is someone who sees into the innocent, ignorant heart of this woman and loves her, even as she treats him very callously, as an 'idea'... These are his (Anthony's) thoughts on her at this time of incredible change in the universe:

“But she wouldn’t, she would go on thoughtfully playing with the dead pictures of ideas, with names and philosophies, Plato and Pythagoras and Anselm and Abelard, Athens and Alexandria and Paris, not knowing that the living existences to which seers and saints had looked were already in movement to avenge themselves on her. “O you sweet blasphemer!” Anthony moaned, “can’t you wake?” Gnostic traditions, medieval rituals, Aeons and Archangels—they were cards she was playing in her own game. But she didn’t know, she didn’t understand. It wasn’t her fault; it was the fault of her time, her culture, her education—the pseudo-knowledge that affected all the learned, the pseudo-skepticism that infected all the unlearned, in an age of pretence, and she was only pretending as everybody else did in this lost and imbecile century. Well, it was up to him to do something.”

from p.73 of The Place of the Lion, by Charles Williams

eat a brownie, wear a cape.

When the weather changes, something goes funny in me. Does this happen to you? After months and months of feeling heat envelop me when I step out the door, suddenly--very suddenly--there is cold, and it seeps into the house and makes me wear socks and borrow a polar fleece cape of my mother's.

Something about the change...first it's exciting, a little unsettling but exciting...makes the world feel like something completely new. Knocks me off balance. Reminds me of Canada, of England, of Europe, of Pennsylvania. Places that I just pass through. It shocks me that the feeling of these places can penetrate where I live. Surely I should expect it by now, the switch from hot to cold. Yet it shocks me deep every time. Suddenly I can't seem to just get on with things as I normally do; I'm stumped. I wander around aimlessly. My hands are cold. That's weird. Basic questions about my own existence take the place of specific concerns and plans. I look at things that I'm supposed to do, or am planning to do, and I think 'what??' What are these things?

Cold makes me feel like there should be a special event tonight. A concert or a party or a family get together. Must be that Christmas instinct. On the planet Winter, I feel like an alien.

...And all this because it's dropped below 80F.
Don't laugh at me, people from cold places. It's been in the high 90s and the 100s here since forever.
time to eat a brownie.

happythought

I never thought that I could fly
Over the moon in ecstasy
But nevertheless, it's there that I'm
Shortly about to be...

I've got a golden ticket,
I've got a golden ticket,
I've got a golden chance to make my way...
and with a golden ticket, it's a golden day.