Archives for the month of: February, 2013
« Older Entries

The Road: A Story of Life and Death…

February 25, 2013 //
0

This film, by the documentary film maker Marc Isaacs, is an absolute gem, a must-see.

Perhaps I am biased, as someone originally from Ireland who has lived in London for many years. But I believe The Road is essential viewing for anyone living in London, and not only there. It is the story of belonging, of loneliness, of searching for meaning and identity, in essence a depiction of what humanness might be about.

The road Isaacs focuses on is the A5, as it enters London and continues north from Marble Arch, through Kilburn, Cricklewood, and further towards Edgware.

Isaacs focuses on a handful of immigrants, both recent and long-arrived, dotted along the route. Their stories vary, yet converge on a fundamental common issue – leaving one’s homeland (and loved ones) behind. At the outset, Isaacs reflects on the reflective in-between-space such leaving creates, and as we see throughout the film, this questioning never goes away.

Billy, the Irish labourer, who now has too much time to reflect since retirement, which can only be handled through time in the pub, has been in London for more than 40 years. Yet he still feels that he has not fitted in, isolation and loneliness at least partly contributing to his alcohol problem: ‘a day later and a pound shorter’.

This is a poignant, moving, and melancholic film. It is also at times very funny. Isaacs treats the individuals he films with much gentleness, and is always unobtrusive. This is their story, not his, and you get the sense that the film genuinely cares about those portrayed.

Being, belonging, making our mark, is a large part of how we define ourselves. The Road will encourage you to reflect on this, and more, and to perhaps go about your life with a little more generosity and humility.

CQ

Tags , , , , ,
Categories Cinema, Film, Kindness, Melancholy, Sadness

Edna O’Brien: The Country Girls

February 24, 2013 //
0

I have just re-read this book, having initially enjoyed it many years ago.

I connected with it again, even more so this time round. And even more so now, the furore that surrounded the appearance of The Country Girls in 1960 both infuriates and embarrasses me…another fuel to my fire on the issue of repressed and fear driven Ireland.

I like O’Brien’s prose. It is readable and immediately accessible, but also nuanced and intelligent.

She captures well, and in a way that feels recognisable and reassuringly familiar, an Ireland and its people of a certain era:

‘Poor Mama, she was always a worrier. I suppose she lay there thinking of him, waiting for the sound of a motor-car to stop down the road, waiting for the sound of his feet coming through the wet grass, and for the noise of the gate hasp – waiting, and coughing.’

Women of Ireland indeed lived lives of worry and fear, suffering much in their years of waiting. The Country Girls is very much about escaping that Irish female destiny, which at least partly explains its condemnation by the fear-driven Catholic Ireland.

When her mother dies, Cait, the main ‘country girl’ of the title, fears that she will re-appear:

‘What is it about death that we cannot bear to have someone who is dead come back to us?’

Moving from rural Ireland, the ‘country’, to the city of Dublin was transformative for Cait (I, like Edna O’Brien, made a similar journey, but for us it was the longer, both literally and metaphorically, distance from provincial Ireland to London):

‘I knew now that this was the place I wanted to be. For evermore I would be restless for crowds and lights and noise. I had gone from the sad noises, the lonely rain pelting on the galvanized roof of the chicken-house, the moans of a cow in the night, when her calf was being born under a tree.’

I also connected with the need, that desperate one, to escape the boredom of growing up in the Ireland of a certain era, as verbalised by Cait’s friend Baba:

‘We’re eighteen and we’re bored to death… We want to live. Drink gin. Squeeze into the front of big cars and drive up outside big hotels. We want to go places.’

I no longer need to go places, at least not so much physically, but I am glad that I left Ireland behind, physically, when I could and did.

CQ

Tags , , , , ,
Categories Church, Families, Fiction, Love, Religion

Tim Lott and his father’s final moments…

February 23, 2013 //
0

This piece, from Tim Lott’s regular Guardian weekend column, is profoundly moving and sad, but also uplifting (http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/feb/23/tim-lott-fathers-final-moments).

Lott tells of time spent (‘sad, but also tender and positive and beautiful’) with his imminently dying 87-year-old father.

Lott’s father was intermittently aware that his family was present, as they shared the experience amongst themselves, ‘laughter, reminiscence, and unexpected joy’, alongside their sadness.

Lott’s take on sadness and loss and mourning following death leaves much to reflect on, in terms of what we mourn…

‘I wept, but not for his death. He was fulfilled.’

‘I will miss him, but I will never mourn him. His death was, like the man himself, profoundly average yet utterly exceptional.’

Lott mentions something, which I have often personally considered:

‘Death is so intimate – more intimate than first love.’

This intimacy troubles me, and the extent to which we are truly ‘invited’ to be present at the time of dying. Intuitively and instinctively, it feels ‘wrong’ to allow someone you love (or indeed anyone) to die alone. Yet I also wonder whether, without explicit consent, it is one of the most intrusive and invasive things we, inadvertently, do.

I have no answer, apart from making my own wishes explicit to those I love.

CQ

Tags , , , , , ,
Categories Bereavement, Death and Dying, Families, Grief, Loss, Sadness

The Magdalene Sisters…

February 22, 2013 //
0

I watched this film recently with my daughter, who although Irish in many ways, has never actually lived there, unlike her mother.

For me, watching this film forced me to consider how little I knew about my homeland as I grew up there. Perhaps I did sense something, subconsciously, as I escaped at the first opportunity.

For my daughter, watching the story of the Magdalene girls filled her with horror and disbelief.

Timely viewing as it happens, given Enda Kenny’s apology this week to all those who suffered from such incarceration and cruelty.

The last Magdalene convent closed in the 1990s.
Which isn’t such a long time ago…

CQ

Tags , , , , ,
Categories Cinema, Suffering

Bodies and Car Parks…

February 20, 2013 //
0

The discovery of the remains of Richard III has not in itself particularly interested me. However, two loosely or otherwise connected issues, which are independent of whose DNA we are considering, do intrigue me.

Firstly, the finding does serve to reinforce the fact that we humans ‘survive’ for an indeterminate length of time following death. I am not sure whether I find this reassuring or whether it fills me with terror. I suspect that, by shattering my belief in absolute physical finiteness, apart from whatever genetic legacy I endow my child with, the prospect of my lingering somewhere indefinitely is not a happy one.

Particularly if that somewhere is a concrete edifice.

My second thought on the issue stems from a memory the report stirred. I instantly recalled Catherine O’Flynn’s novel What Was Lost. Like Richard III, whose body was lost for all those years, O’Flynn’s story centres on an unfound body. In O’Flynn’s fictional narrative the body is that of a little girl. We discover, some time after her disappearance, that she has been entombed in the foundations of a shopping centre.

The protagonist implicated in the case, although not directly responsible for the child’s death but a witness to it, had the following to say when questioned:

‘Do you know in Germany in the Middle Ages, when they tried to build the church in Vilmitz, the builders couldn’t finish the job? Whatever they put up in the daytime fell down at night. So they took a child, gave it a bread-roll in one hand, a light in the other, and set it in a cavity in the foundation, which they mortared shut. The building stood firm after that…There are entombed children all over Europe bringing prosperity, security, happiness.’

An intriguing fictional construct, one which made me wonder about Royal Souls, and Richard III’s contribution to the well-being of a certain Leicester car park…

CQ

Tags , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

The Bell Jar…50 years later…

February 19, 2013 //
0

It is 50 years since Sylvia Plath published her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, originally under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, in 1963. The book has never been out of print. The front cover has seen many guises, however, with the current one above, and that from my copy purchased a few years ago, below:

Irrespective of the cover, the content remains reassuringly the same. I have read it probably 5 times, not because it is a great novel, but because there has always been something essential about it for me.

If you have not read it, I truly recommend it. I am not about to summarise the plot or the background, but I will draw your attention to the title, a bell jar signifying entrapment, being kept within, imprisoned:

‘To the person in a bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.’

Thus reflects Esther, the main protagonist in the novel, as she leaves the asylum in the last chapter, and realises that forgetting is not an option: memories are a part of her, ‘my landscape.’

When Esther first arrives at ‘Doctor Gordon’s private hospital’:

‘What bothered me was that everything about the house seemed normal, although I knew it must be chock-full of crazy people. There were no bars on the windows that I could see, and no wild or disquieting noises.’

There was no going back after Esther’s experiences, from what she had witnessed and lived through. She could not, as her mother wished, dismiss it all as a bad dream.

This is not a book whose passages you memorise, but there are some that resonate and stick:

‘The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.’

CQ

Tags , , , , ,
Categories Literature, Madness, Suffering

Mea Maxima Culpa…

February 17, 2013 //
0

This film was highly rated at the 2012 London Film Festival. I saw it yesterday, in a relatively packed auditorium for a Saturday midday screening.
I was hugely impressed. This is great, and essential, cinema. Shocking? Yes. Distressing? Yes. But some truths need to be told, and told again, and again, until they get the attention they deserve. Tragically, atrocities within the Catholic Church just don’t go away.
Mainly focusing on sex scandals within the Catholic Church in America, much of the film deals with the sexual abuse of deaf boys by Fr. Murphy in a school for deaf children in Wisconsin. Years later, the adult victims began a campaign to have Fr. Murphy removed from the priesthood. While this did not happen, the campaign achieved much to bring the issue of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church into the open. The campaign continues to gain strength.
The reason why priests who abuse children remain not only active as priests, but continue to have open access to children, is beyond comprehension, yet it appears to be how the Catholic Church deals with such heinous crimes (at worst the ‘offenders’ are deemed ‘sinners’, never criminals). The hierarchy within the establishment mostly responds to allegations of sex abuse against its priests with silence. A sad irony indeed, as we learn in Mea Maxima Culpa of the abuse of children who were already vocally silenced and isolated by their deafness.
The intricacies and complexities of the conspiracy within the Catholic Church at the highest level to publicly ignore the suffering of the abused is astounding. As is the money – billions –  the institution pays out annually via ‘fixers’ to ‘settle’ sex scandal cases.
There is an on ongoing movement, led by the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robinson, to remove the Vatican’s right to exist as an independent state (granted by Mussolini…the Vatican’s position in the war is surely the stuff of another film…), a status that currently gives it diplomatic immunity and puts the Pope outside the jurisdiction of the law. It is truly absurd, and wrong, that such a situation exists. It is also absurd, and personally shocking, to see clips of various Heads of State paying homage to the Pope during their special audience…
Nonetheless, I do have a sense of the Vatican imploding. I hope that I am not being overly optimistic…

CQ

Tags , , , , , , , ,
Categories Abuse, Church, Cinema, Deafness, Religion, Spirituality

Sean Hughes at The Tricycle…

February 14, 2013 //
0

Just been, and it was magic. Mega Magic.

The current performance, which includes just a short few days at The Tricycle, centres around the death of Hughes’s father (Sean Hughes senior) from cancer.

The show is a tribute to Hughes’s dad, and as such has many moving moments, but it is also an honest and brave depiction of their at times troubled relationship.

Hughes does not dwell on pathos, and while this is a script with death and dying as its focus, it is by no means leaden or depressing. On the contrary, it is hilarious, at times uproariously so, a fact that in no way diminishes (in fact it enhances) the very real and poignant central theme.

Hughes cleverly skips around – his childhood, moving back to Dublin in 1970 aged 5 with a cockney accent at the height of ‘The Trouble’, the Irish, Catholicism, drinking, his own health and relationships – but always within sight of his father, so that returning repeatedly to his hospital bed feels natural. The show is very much about the death of ‘someone you love’ (a phrase Hughes repeats several times, and also questions what it means in relation to our parents), and about what grief means and how we make sense of it, but within the context of both the lived life of the person who has died, and the lives of those left in death’s wake.

I loved the finale. I had wondered on what note it would conclude, and I think Hughes got it just right. It served to beautifully and movingly emphasise what the entire show had attempted to portray  –  that we can indeed talk about death and dying and loss and grief, that we can also laugh about it, and we can combine it all, publicly, to create something tangible and meaningful, while at the same time entertaining and real.

I felt uplifted as I walked home.

Genius. I was mesmerised, moved and seduced by Hughes’s mind and brilliance.

CQ

Tags , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Bereavement, Death and Dying, Doctors, Families, Grief, Illness, Loss, Love, Medicine, Religion

The Book of Embraces/1…

February 13, 2013 //
0

I have just bought probably my fifth copy of this wonderful book by Eduardo Galeano (translated by Cedric Belfrage). The other copies I could not resist giving away to friends and family. It is that sort of book, you want everyone you love to read and be similarly mesmerised and enriched by it.

From the very outset, as Galeano pays tribute to his longstanding friend and translator Belfrage, who had recently died, the author welcomes us into the intimacy of his world and self:

‘A part of me died with him.

A part of him lives with me.’

The Book of Embraces is largely comprised of short pieces and vignettes that embrace personal stories, parables, politics, dreams, and above all a wonderment on life and on being human.

In one such piece, The Function of Art/2:

‘The chief took his time, then said:

“That scratches. It scratches hard and it scratches very well.”

And then:

“But it scratches where there isn’t any itch.” ‘

Few words say much with Galeano’s pen.

He speaks of Pinochet, of political prisoners and military dictatorships, the tragedies emphasised by personal narratives. He tells the story of Jose Carrasco, for example, a journalist who was dragged from his house following an attempt on the life of Pinochet:

‘At the foot of a wall on the edge of Santiago, they put fourteen bullets in his head.’

‘The neighbors never washed the blood away. The place became a sanctuary for the poor, always strewn with candles and flowers, and Jose Carrasco became a miracle worker.’

In a piece titled Forgetting/2, Galeano continues the political thread that suffuses the book:

‘Military dictatorship, fear of listening, fear of speaking, made us deaf and dumb. Now democracy, with its fear of remembering, infects us with amnesia…’

Divorces:

‘Our system is one of detachment: to keep silenced people from asking questions, to keep the judged from judging, to keep solitary people from joining together, and the soul from putting together its pieces.’

And politics and society in The System/1:

‘Politicians speak but say nothing.

Voters vote but don’t elect.

The information media disinform.

Schools teach ignorance.

Judges punish the victims.’

‘Money is freer than people are.

People are at the service of things.’

There is much autobiographical in the book, including Galeano’s reflections following a heart attack, when death was ‘clawing at the center of my chest.’ He spent the time while recuperating updating his address book, and as he transferred names from old to new, he experienced ‘a prolonged mourning for the dead who had remained in the dead one of my heart, and a long, much longer celebration of those still alive who fired my blood and swelled my surviving heart.’

He ends this vignette with my favourite sentence from a most magical book:

‘And there was nothing bad and nothing odd about the fact that my heart had broken from so much use.’

CQ

Tags , , , , , , ,
Categories Art & Suffering, Literature, Loss, Love, Suffering

‘Barbara’, the film…

February 7, 2013 //
0

… which I highly recommend.

Released in 2012, I missed Barbara during the recent and short cinema run, and only just caught it some months after its London screening.

I know little about German cinema – Run Lola Run was probably my most recent experience – and it was the storyline that intrigued me most about Barbara. A couple of years ago I read, and was very much taken by, Anna Funder’s book Stasiland. The setting of Barbara in 1980’s East Germany fuelled my interest in the hidden world of that era. I first visited Germany, and Berlin, shortly after the wall came down. It felt then like I had only experienced a fragment of the aftermath, with no perspective on what had gone before.

Barbara, directed by Christian Petzhold, tells the story of a female doctor (played by Nina Hoss) in East Germany in 1980, who has been banished to a hospital in the provinces from Berlin as a result of her attempts to escape to the West. Barbara finds herself in a world where she does not know who she can trust, or love, including herself.

This is not a hugely action-packed film but a deeply compassionate and redemptive one. Watching it, for me, was a restorative experience.

CQ

Tags , , , , ,
Categories Cinema, Doctors, Grief, Loss, Love, Medicine, Suffering
« Older Entries