If there are fifty-two weeks in a year, how many strongs are there?
One hundred and seventy-nine blind men go into a crowded bar and then can’t find a place to sit.
If fifteen days is half a month, and six months is half a year, how many years are worth halving?
Falling in love is like falling into a river, but you’re happier about it for some reason.
Yesterday at the Church picnic I was asked what comes before and after "Words, words, words" in Hamlet. I remembered Hamlet's frustration with words, but not the exact context. So today I reread that part of the scene and it gives me more questions than answers about words and mental turmoil. I am also thinking of similarities between Chris McCandless and Hamlet. By the way, the movie Into the Wild either chronicles Chris' poetry or poetically speculates the nature of Chris' thoughts, which I find similar to Hamlet's, or at least springing from a similar source. Chris deals with the turmoil differently though (see again the warning in the last post about it being rated R. I wish I'd known the number of scenes to fast forward so that I would have kept the remote more handy).
Back to Hamlet, I am intrigued by this statement,
HAMLET Slanders, sir: for the satirical rogue says here
that old men have grey beards, that their faces are
wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber and
plum-tree gum and that they have a plentiful lack of
wit, together with most weak hams: all which, sir,
though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet
I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down, for
yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if like a crab
you could go backward.
I suppose Hamlet is leveling the playing field. He is worried about slandering his elders, but is denying that decrepit age makes them above the law.
I also found some interesting and concise interpretations of Hamlet here. I like this one by Professor Ross the best, even though the feminist and post-modern ones also intrigue me. Lord have mercy.
Last night George and I spent a few hours learning about Frida Kahlo, a Mexican surrealist/realist painter. I do not want to judge her morality here (which was similar to the Bohemian artists and writers of the 1920's), and instead want to think about this aspect of her life,
On September 17, 1925, Kahlo was riding in a bus when the vehicle collided with a trolley car. She suffered serious injuries in the accident, including a broken spinal column, a broken collarbone, broken ribs, a broken pelvis, eleven fractures in her right leg, a crushed and dislocated right foot, and a dislocated shoulder. An iron handrail pierced her abdomen and her uterus, which seriously damaged her reproductive ability.
Although she recovered from her injuries and eventually regained her ability to walk, she was plagued by relapses of extreme pain for the remainder of her life. The pain was intense and often left her confined to a hospital or bedridden for months at a time. She underwent as many as thirty-five operations as a result of the accident, mainly on her back, her right leg and her right foot.
Frida Kahlo with Diego Rivera in 1932, by Carl Van Vechten.
After the accident, Kahlo turned her attention away from the study of medicine to begin a full-time painting career. The accident left her in a great deal of pain while she recovered in a full body cast; she painted to occupy her time during her temporary state of immobilization. Her self-portraits became a dominant part of her life when she was immobile for three months after her accident. Kahlo once said, "I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best." Her mother had a special easel made for her so she could paint in bed, and her father lent her his box of oil paints and some brushes.[8]
Drawing on personal experiences, including her marriage, her miscarriages, and her numerous operations, Kahlo's works often are characterized by their stark portrayals of pain. Of her 143 paintings, 55 are self-portraits which often incorporate symbolic portrayals of physical and psychological wounds. She insisted, "I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality." (from Wikipedia, bold mine)
I am drawn to stories about pain, probably since my accident when I was 12 which left me immobilized in the hospital for almost a month, not to mention other heartbreaks including divorce, miscarriage and a still-birth. I find Frida's portraits refreshingly honest. She has been criticized for being self-absorbed, but I am satisfied with her reasoning given above. There is also a certain morbidity about her paintings. I can't completely say that she despaired, though there are statements that would point to that, but there are other evidences that she did not stay in that frame of mind. Her last painting of watermelons bears the caption, Viva la Vida.
The Ochlophobist's 'book club' suggestion, Orthodox Thinking on Theosis, has the title "Self-Transcendence" in the "contents". On the surface (I'm looking forward to reading what Mr. Russell says about it), I can interpret this title to promote a dialectical relationship with the idea of self, where one loses ones self. We can rest in the attitudes suggested in the Orthodox prayers, which can have a self-negating posture, but I think if we were to count the number of "I" pronouns in the Psalms, and even in many of the other prayers, penitential though they be, there would be a lot of them. We are to be honest about ourselves, not totally forgetting ourselves and our lives. Monastics tend to try to forget their past life, and make a complete break with it. They take on a completely new name, part with their possessions and heirlooms, and do not wish to be asked about their past before the monastery, after a certain period anyway. Probably the later vows. Frida painted a dialectical relationship with her self, not of negation by any means, but one that showed how her husband Diego saw her, the Frida he liked, and the Frida he didn't.
This was her perception of how he saw her anyway. I suppose that is what Frida did best, she painted her perceptions from her point of view. I don't want to invalidate this. She struggled to not be consumed by her pain. She struggled very long and intensely. She neither denied it, nor let it completely blind her to the beauty in the world, though she was blinded to beauty immediately after her accident. She said at that time that there was nothing beyond the ugliness of the world, and if there was she would be able to see it. She didn't stay there though. Maybe that's why she was spared, she learned to see the beauty again, even in herself. Her self-portraits can be pretty harsh, but there is a certain acknowledgment of the divine spark, a certain retained comeliness of form.
One painting in particular describes external, imposed pain pretty well, as do the ones of her miscarriages. [I've removed it here, but if you click on one of the other paintings it will take you to her gallery, which can be graphic]
I can't help but be reminded of the cross and the cup of suffering that our Lord accepted. Frida was not ignorant of Christ's sufferings, even though she rejected the Catholicism of her upbringing. Her exposure to Mexican religious art also influenced her paintings.
Perhaps though, when one has suffered, it is easy to get caught up in a persecution/Messiah complex. On one hand this can draw one to Christ, who also suffered, but it is probably easy to slip into the delusion that one is innocent, sinless, and undeserving, or worse, Divine, as He. I sort of like people with Messiah complexes though because they can try harder to act like Christ, with whom they identify. Frida built a garden of Eden out of the home of her childhood, and gave art classes there, Bohemian though they were. But we are not sinless. We can't be naked in the garden. Should she have been so naked in her sufferings as well? One thing being in the hospital does, is that it strips you naked. Indeed even during the bus collision, all of her clothes were torn away and she lay naked and impaled on the ground. During surgery one is stripped bare, and in recovery, there are those stupid gowns, barely on, which the staff draws back with too-familiar ease and entitlement. Necessary evil?
How can one pretend modesty after that? Once one has been involuntarily exposed to the world, what's the use of covering up? If I had had complete control of who to trust to expose myself to, the list would have included two people only. As an infant, a trusted child care provider, who loved me, and then no one until the husband of my choice who would also deliver my baby. To keep that list so short, should I risk my and my babies' lives? I'm going to leave the door open on that one. If they had been the only two, I probably wouldn't be blogging. But since there have been many breaches of protection of my privacy, I want to take control of the information I suppose. That's what Farah Fawcett did when she was diagnosed with cancer. Since the National Enquirer told it wrong, she decided to tell it and produced her own documentary chronicling the last few years of her life and her struggle. I'm glad for her and Frida's sharing of their pain. Frida said that she felt we are all united. When one expresses ones self openly, one is voluntarily inviting a certain type of communion. Oh yes, it was related in the PBS documentary that Frida became communist because of a mistaken idea that it would bring about community, where she wouldn't be alone in her suffering. I'm going to cut her and Farah some slack and pray for mercy on their souls.
He headed to the Alaskan wilderness as an extreme ascetic forsaking money, companionship, and the comforts of "civilization". In his light backpack however, he brought along Tolstoy, Thoreau, and Dr. Zhivago. Sean Penn made a movie about Chris McCandless called Into the Wild (which is rated R for occasional language and about 3 nudist scenes), based on the book by John Krakaur. Mr. Krakaur's original essay about the innocent is available, but don't click on it if you don't want the ending given away. Incidentally, the author makes a comparison to 5th and 6th century Irish monks who tried to escape civilization in Iceland, then Greenland.
Friday the kids and I went to Church to peel, cube, and boil 100 lbs of potatoes, which were then mixed with cheese, and scooped into little balls, with around 14 people.
The kids brought home some of their friends and we finally beat the 4-player N-64 Tetris game which was begun 10 years ago. The last of the seven wonders was St. Basil's Cathedral! That was cool. Then we watched Tommy Boy, which I'd never seen all the way through before. We had to fast-forward more parts than the kids remembered. The deer scene brought back the trauma I experienced earlier this summer.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiG4SGByY-8]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1lBAjxDrmo&feature=related]
Saturday morning we went back to Church, rolled out pie dough, ran it through the pasta machine and cut it into discs which were then pinched around the potato cheese filling. A team effort of about 25 people produced 195 dozen Peroghi! One more work day and we'll have enough for our annual Christmas bake sale.
So with all that, Vespers, Liturgy, and Half Priced books (just jr. fiction), and returning #2 son to UD (and the friends to their home), I've had a pretty full weekend.
This past weekend the older ones watched There Will Be Blood with George and I. The credits revealed that it is based on Upton Sinclair's novel, Oil. Wikipedia reveals that the movie is only very loosely based on the book, and that the screen writer only admits to basing it on the first hundred or so pages. I had drawn all sorts of conclusions about Mr. Sinclair watching the movie, but now I have to mix them in with the producers of the movie, as well as my own personal experience and opinions and those of others.
I have read a few critiques from Orthodox bloggers recently on materialistic or scientific cause and effect. Probably much of "secular" psychology is based on it. I have said before that I'm a bit Freudian in my analyses of people, but I think I need to clarify that by relating it to the idea of cause and effect of childhood relationships with family and other influential people, rather than on erotic tendencies. There Will Be Blood is pretty heavy on scientific cause and effect, to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, theory, mainly in the relationship between fathers and sons. I appreciated the depth of thought and the acknowledgment of how we treat others will affect them, unto the next generations, but the effects were too mechanical, too copy cat. While we may build up steam after being traumatized, and explode on others to a similar degree, I think our reactions are a little more varied, taking into account other influences in our lives, than how they were portrayed in this movie.
Also, there were no efforts towards forgiveness. People seemed unable to control their reactions, and had no other options presented to them, especially not by the cooky churchpeople, who sang a hymn I know and still believe in, "Take it to the Lord in Prayer". However, it did acknowledge complexity in people, such as what to do with inconsistent behavior in parents. The little boy in the movie is portrayed as having the most excusable actions. I imagine that he represents Mr. Sinclair and the screen play writer. We always imagine ourselves the protagonist. But sometimes, maybe we are. The boy has to deal with his greedy, cruel, alcoholic father, who also pays him a lot of positive attention. But the boy knows something isn't right, you can see it in his face, even though he barely speaks throughout the whole movie. When he feels he is being replaced by a long, lost half-brother, he becomes jealous and tries to burn the guy and the stuff that connects him to his father - but there's something not right between his father and the brother, too. When he kicks and hits his father after he was abandoned to a boarding school, his father deserved it, truly. He had been used and replaced. Towards the end, I believe that the son is sincere and correct in being grateful that he had learned a trade from his father, but that it was time for him to move on to start his own business, deliberately out of his father's territory. But his father was paranoid about competition and abandonment and abused him. The son kept his cool and his dignity and rightly walked out of the room. But he did get a pretty good barb in on his way out. The barb had to do with not wanting to be biologically related to his father. That went too far, I thought. I don't think that biological relation has to carry with it the sins of the father. It may predispose one to certain temptations, but I think they can be overcome and the bloodline redeemed. The movie was too fatalistic in presenting effects from influential causes.
There were a few bones throne to the father. Apparently his father, the grandfather, had a mistress, and reading between the lines, he was raised in poverty and probably was not treated very well. I get this mainly from how he sleeps on the floor.
Other than that, the experimental soundtrack noise was quite irksome. The cinematography was really good, and conveyed a tactile sense of being connected to the thentofore unaltered earth. Daniel Day Lewis is a phenomenal actor in everything I've seen him in, beginning with "My Left Foot".
Wikipedia talks about Mr. Sinclair's political activism and socialism. He vilified capitalism, which is very evident in the movie. I recognize abuses caused by greedy profiteering, but I do not idealize the opposite ideology. Any ideologue can be abusive. Wikipedia also says that the book focuses more on the son than the father. I think I'll put it on my very long Amazon wish-list.
