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    • Apr

    27

    “Blindness” to be a Movie

    Filed Under books, movies, people, quotes | Leave a Comment

    I’m not quite sure what to think yet. One of my favorite novels, Blindness, is being adapted to the big screen. The cast list has me scratching my chin - it includes Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Sandra Oh, Danny Glover, and Gael Garcia Bernal. The inclusion of North Americans puzzles me a little as the writer, José Saramago, is Portuguese, and his stories tend to be set in nameless Iberian countries. 

    But … it could be good. The premise - in case you’re wondering by this time - is this: a man on his way home from work or wherever is sitting in his car at a light, when all of the sudden he goes blind. Of course, he cannot drive so he is assisted to his home by another man. The man who went blind visits the doctor, who isn’t sure what’s going on. But very soon after, the doctor goes blind. The blind man’s wife goes blind. Pretty soon many people have inexplicably gone blind, and the government starts housing them all in an unused asylum.  And then we see what happens to people in these situations, and what becomes of society as more and more people lose their sight.  

    Back to the film: The director, Fernando Meirelles - also Portuguese - is responsible for City of God and The Constant Gardener. Oh my god - two films that can grind even a stone heart into sand for an hourglass. I’ve only a little exposure to the screenwriter Don McKellar. He is a Canadian, who seems to travel (at least some of the time) within this circle of excellent and interesting Canadian actors and directors like Egoyan, Cronenberg, Sarah Polley, and Oh. He made the indie film, Last Night, which I thought was … okay. In general, I find Canadian films made by this group of people to feel slightly frozen. I like them, but the characters always seem to be in the midst of thawing. 

    Maybe something truly remarkable will be the result when these two Portuguese and Canadian sensibilities are mixed. The novel itself gives the experience of being rent from a long distance. Saramago is magical that way.

    This afternoon I skimmed through some of the book, rereading underlined passages. It’s a challenge to quote Saramago because his “sentences” are the length of paragraphs, while his paragraphs are the length of chapters; his humor is difficult to take out of context, and the dialogue is not separated from the narrative.  But here are a couple of excerpts that I like:

    …The good and the evil resulting from our words and deeds go on apportioning themselves, one assumes in a reasonably uniform and balanced way, throughout all the days to follow, including those endless days, when we shall not be here to find out, to congratulate ourselves or ask for pardon, indeed there are those who claim that this is the much-talked-of immortality ….

    … She did not waste time asking herself where such a thought had come from, she was only surprised at its slowness, at how the first word had been so slow in appearing, the slowness of those to follow, and how she found that the thought was already there before, somewhere or other, and only the words were missing, like a body searching in the bed for the hollow that had been prepared for it by the mere idea of lying down. 

     

    … animals are like people, they get used to everything in the end.

    That last one reminded me of something Dostoevsky wrote in another of my favorite pieces of fiction, House of the Dead, - “Man is a creature who can get used to anything, and I believe that is the very best way of defining him.” 

    There are many days when I think this is true. In Blindness, Saramago offers a great parable. 

    Popularity: 45% [?]

    Apr

    9

    A Crock Pot Life

    Filed Under friends, from the heart, inspiration, life changes, quotes, spiritual practice | 4 Comments

    Last week I met Kendall, a UU whose blog I’ve been reading for a year or more. Kendall moved to Portland several months ago, and it was such a privilege to speak with her in person. That she took time out of her life to have tea with me is a little mind-boggling. In a nutshell, she is as interesting and sincere as her blog posts would suggest, and I hope we see more of each other over the coming years. 

    In one of her most recent posts, The Life Not Taken, she writes about a visit to Ashland, Oregon (home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival), and the life she could have led: 

    Wild as my fantasies have been, rich though my imagination is, I’d have never cooked up the extremely unlikely and utterly eccentric life I have had–and am still having–if I’d been running it.

    Kendall is not exaggerating - the book she’s writing based on her life’s experiences won’t be boring.  A year or two ago I think I’d have thought of this and felt regret about my life - why wasn’t I more exciting? Why hadn’t I taken more chances? Could I ever be a “great” person if nothing tragic, traumatic, or soul-searing has happened to me? I would have felt panic about the whole thing. I would have felt less valuable than people with more interesting lives. 

    If I were to paint a picture of my life right now, it would be of a pot left to simmer on the stovetop for days in an empty house. That’s how my life feels most of the time, and I’ve accepted it. I don’t see it as deficient. We are all capable of different things. I’m learning more about my limitations, and as I stop berating myself for not being other than my own nature, I loosen up. In response to Kendall’s blog, I commented, in part: 

    Me and my pathetic (if that can be meant non-negatively) little life. I’ve never been one to take chances …. And I’m afraid to fail. So things haven’t been exciting or very tumultuous for me. Unless something traumatic happens, or I decide for some inexplicable reason to throw everything away and overhaul my personality, I don’t see that changing. So I’m trying to settle into myself and break things down into many, tiny, wonderful parts. Because that’s all I seem to be able to process anyway. I can’t cope with too much.

    I’ve had to accept a lot of things that I’d earmarked as “bad.” Messiness. Moodiness. Shyness. Low energy. Depression. Short attention span. Physical ailments. Large teeth. A big booty. The list could go on …. Not too long ago I was reading a book about writing, written by a woman who had been diagnosed with something like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Initially, she tried to persist in her busy life, and “beat” her CFS. She tried to cure herself so that she could keep on doing what she’d always done. Eventually, she realized that she needed to accept her changed capacity for work and travel.  She began to shape her life activities around who she was, instead of distressing herself by trying to be someone who could live the life she’d fashioned for herself when her health was different.

    What an A-ha! moment for me, so bent on self improvement, and so sad about my chronic status as underachiever. Of course, I have to admit that I’m still learning the lesson every day.  

    Popularity: 41% [?]

    Mar

    15

    Because of Me, He’s an Atheist?

    Filed Under people, questions, quotes, religion, spiritual practice | 7 Comments

    My husband informed me that before we met, he was agnostic. But due to what he’s learned from me about religion over the last 2+ years, he’s now an atheist. Wow. And I thought he’d influenced me to be an atheist.  

    I’m not sure what to think about this. Apparently, his attitude about God-belief used to be one of “whatever.” He didn’t see God as something that could be proved or disproved, and therefore chalked it up as irrelevant. For me, God was always very important. So losing my faith in God as I understood it in my mid-20s was life-changing for me. Trying to “make sense” of the world as a post-believer, means I haven’t let go of religion, or even notions of God.

    The best explanation of this I’ve heard yet was provided by Hubert Dreyfus, in his first Berkeley lecture on existentialism. Here is my transcription of what he says about why Camus isn’t an existentialist, according to his definition:

    Camus says he isn’t. He says he’s a pagan. I think that’s right. That is - I think, all the existentialists are within the Judeo-Christian tradition … they are in opposition to a culture that has as one of its fundamental beliefs that there is a supreme being that makes everything intelligible, that gives moral law … and thanks to the supreme being, we can find out what to do and everything will make sense, and not be contradictory and so forth, and the culture lived off that for a long time …. we can call that absolute - this absolute source of meaning, absolute authority. You can count on it to make sense of the world, and make sense of your life.

    Now Camus certainly denies there is any such Absolute … he’s definitely against the whole Judeo-Christian tradition, but he thinks that the way you should fix it is just get over the problem of seeking an absolute. So, reduce your demands … why should we think that there’s going to be THAT kind of answer, why should we need that kind of answer? Can’t we just appreciate the little things? Lie on the beach in Algeria as at the end of The Stranger, appreciate all the way the world is, even though you’re going to die … but … that’s a kind of pre-Christian attitude, that’s why he says he’s a pagan ….

    Our culture has gotten addicted - Nietzsche would say, we’re sort of absolute junkies; that is, we’ve gotten so used to understanding everything in terms of a supreme being and creation and so forth, that you can’t just get over it. Camus’ idea is you just get over it, you stop expecting the kind of answer that we thought we had for 2000 years. And that’s pre-Christian as I say ….

    [The existentialists (Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Sartre, Heidegger)] - they all think that though it turns out there isn’t any such absolute, we have become defined in terms of the need for it; because once we thought we had it, and it gave us this amazing world in which everything made sense, and we knew what to do and we knew that virtue was rewarded and vice was punished …. But when Nietzsce says God is dead … unlike Camus … he thinks it is the most disastrous and frightening and terrible thing you could possibly experience and discover - because he’s not a pre-Christian or pagan, he’s a post-Christian, he’s somebody writing after we got hooked on this absolute supreme being.

    The most serious thing we have to deal with is that the supreme being kind of absolute doesn’t exist anymore.

    So if you’ve read that far (which I hope you did), that pretty much sums up where I’m at, and it also explains why Nietzsche, and writers inspired by Nietzsche have been so instrumental for me.

    In our time together, I’ve managed to impress upon my now-husband the centrality of religion to many people’s lives, and now he seems genuinely alarmed. His eyes are opening to the ways people call on their faith to justify their lives, to sort themselves out, make even small daily decisions, rule nations, and so on. Now he sees religious belief as a threatening state of mind, whereas in the past he saw it as a mostly harmless personal matter.

    I’m not sure how to feel about this. Did I unwittingly draw him away from a more innocent, pre-Christian attitude while I’ve been busy coping with the tear in my own religious fabric? And another question I have is what is the next step? I’m asking this of myself - what is my next “step” in belief about the nature of things. Am I going to continue to try to “make sense of the world?”

    The conscious part of me says there is nothing to make sense of: The purpose of life is to find and make meaning. This is what I’ve learned from the writings of people who have lived through the horrors of war (particularly the Holocaust). When I isolate my thoughts to that, I feel a tremendous amount of peace. But the unconscious part of me is still grounded in an absolute mindset, this belief that somewhere, there is an answer, and that if I purify myself enough and educate myself enough I might be able to glimpse it with a mythical clarity - even for a moment.

    I don’t know. Whatever happens for me, I now feel a greater sense of responsibility - knowing that whatever path I walk, my husband will be with me.

    Popularity: 34% [?]

    Jan

    24

    Its All About Love, and Not About Me

    Filed Under love, people, quotes | 1 Comment

    Another great (excerpt of an) interview with one of my teroes,* bell hooks. She offers the six ingredients of love, and some thoughts on pain, healing, wholeness, and growing up.

    The six ingredients of love are, care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust. I found that a lot of people just felt really confused about what love is, so I said, here, take these six ingredients and as you go about your life, you can ask: the action I’m taking, does it have these six ingredients?

    And another favorite quote, which fits so well with my UU sensibilities:

    For many of us, whether it’s turning toward Buddhism, or like many African American people who have turned toward Yoruba, the healing is a healing into wholeness, moving away from the sense of the self as splintered and fractured and broken. But it’s not a healing into perfection. It’s not a vision of wholeness that says everything will become right with me. It’s an acceptance that says we are, at our core, essentially whole even in the midst of our flaws and our woundedness. And it’s an acceptance that includes those flaws and wounds and that includes the embrace of pain.

    I am so grateful bell hooks was born, and that she writes. Thanks to my blogging friend from Brooklyn for sharing the link.

    *Teroes: teacher-heroes; I’ve heard this phrase used in anti-oppression trainings, but don’t know where it came from.

    Popularity: 18% [?]

    Jan

    11

    More on Money as Debt (from the 18th C.)

    Filed Under books, capitalism, class, college studies, happiness, history, questions, quotes | 3 Comments

    Never say never, indeed. It’s nearly 4 in the morning, and I’m delighting over pamphlets from 1720 about an ill-managed public land bank experiment in Massachusetts. Having just watched Money as Debt sheds some light on the subject, as did the 1953 article The Land-Bank System in the American Colonies (courtesy of JSTOR).

    The best thing is that my professor (the class is Muckraking: Activists’ Role in History) provided us with a format that links passages from the Colman pamphlet to another that refutes it (by a fellow named Wigglesworth).

    Colman is in despair about the middle class landowners who have taken out paper currency loans against their estates through the public land banks; they are now in dire straits because there isn’t enough paper money in circulation to pay off the debts with interest. While I sympathize with Colman (but disagree with his faith in the private bank), one of Wigglesworth’s responses is what I want to note here (emphasis is mine):

    For it is easie to see, that if we had never trusted one another, the worst Husbands of us all could not have spent more than we earnt ; for when we must pay ready Mony for every thing we buy, we can’t buy more than we earn Mony to pay for; unless we borrow Mony at Interest to support our Extravagance; a thing which but few would have been so foolish as to have done. Indeed when Debts are already contracted, Do but set up a Bank to borrow of, and we have found from sad experience already, that men will be ready enough to mortgage their Estates for mony to pay their Debts. But (I say again) where Debts were not before contracted, few men would have been so foolish, as to borrow Mony at Interest to provide needless Fineries and Gew-Gaws for their Families. The Folly of so few could not have affected the Country.

    Oh wow; does any of this sound familiar?

    I am fascinated by these papers, and also by the fact that in our society today - 290 years later - we are encouraged as a people to buy more in order to spur the economy, to take out more loans, to spend, and spend, and spend. That is our “role” as consumer-citizens.  And yet, as individuals, we are shamed and chastised if unable to pay on our debts; then we are irresponsible, foolish, and greedy.

    And while that may be the case (though, not necessarily), what then, is the vice? Is the vice to borrow money (at interest) in the first place, for things we can get by without? Or is the vice to fall into a situation where one cannot pay on the money borrowed?

    Popularity: 35% [?]

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