Archives for the month of: September, 2013

Arthur Miller’s ‘The Last Yankee’…

September 24, 2013 //

This play is currently on at The Print Room, London. I have just seen it, and was lucky to catch a pre performance talk by the theatre’s resident academic Dr Cindy Lawford, which helped put the play in context.

The play started out originally as a 20 minute piece about two men who meet in the waiting room of a large state mental hospital in New England. Both of their wives are inpatients, one has been there for 7 weeks, a third admission, the other for around a week.They both suffer from ‘depression’. The play was later expanded, now lasting 75 minutes, with a middle portion focusing on the two women and their relationship. In the final section, all four protagonists share the stage together.

As the programme states, there is much here that relates specifically to New England. At the time of its first performance, it was claimed that the play asserts “the values on which this country was founded deserved to be cherished”. The townspeople Miller depicts, particularly the character of one of the husbands Leroy, are “bedrock, aspiring not to greatness but to “decent children and a decent house and a decent car”. Yet, as Dr Crawford continues, Miller also considers that “…but some of them…have gotten sick with what would once have been called a sickness of the soul.”

The Last Yankee does feel like an exploration of this ‘sickness of the soul’. Not only the two inpatient wives but also their husbands are treated almost like cases studies in Miller’s narrative, and consequently the play sets out to ‘diagnose’ the aetiologies. For the women, disastrous marriages, a family history of mental illness, a lifelong sense of not being understood, the dawning realisation that for their futures there is now only one possible answer to the questions ‘is this it?/what is this?, all lead to ‘depression’ and an ‘opting out’ of their familiar and unbearable lives into the ‘safety’ of a mental institution.

The women’s characters feel stronger and more thought through, but perhaps that dichotomy is the whole point. The men avoid such questionings and explorations and make do with the life they have. There is a fatalism in their thinking, which at least partly drives the women to the brink of their lives.

There is a redemption of sorts at the end, which is left tantalisingly open to interpretation. The optimists in the audience, perhaps the majority, left feeling hopeful.

Leroy says to his wife towards the end of the play, you gotta love this life you have…

Tags Arthur Miller, The Last Yankee, the Print Room

Categories Depression, Families, Illness, Theatre

‘Have we outsourced our children to the internet?’…

September 23, 2013 //

…which is one of the opening questions of the must-see documentary In Real Life.

I saw the film yesterday, when it was screened simultaneously in many cinemas across the country. My 15 year old daughter accompanied me. The screening was followed by a live satellite discussion with a panel that included the director Beeban Kidron, as well as Tom, a 15 year old who featured in the film.

As Kidron shared during the discussion, the aim of the documentary was to start a conversation on the impact, both positive and negative, on today’s teenagers of living in an almost exclusively digital society. Our children have been born into a world where most of us look at our mobile phones between 150 and 200 times a day, and where, even more scarily, 90% of the world’s data has been created in the last two years. Data is collected from all of us all the time and every time we use the internet. The film emphasises the current ‘glorification of sharing’, as it is perceived, albeit subconsciously, by teenagers using social media. ‘I share therefore I am’ has become the new sensibility. The internet archives our history, and social media increasingly uses the data it collects to define who you are. As Julian Assange states. “Google knows you better than your mother does’.

In Real Life follows teenagers whose lives almost exclusively revolve around the internet and social media, including those addicted to online porn (the teenager interviewed candidly admitted to the attraction of constantly revisiting these sites, where he can briefly step outside of his own life and into one where ‘it’s you and all about you’) and those dependent on gaming.

There was also the heartening story of Tom, who came out on Twitter and subsequently met his boyfriend on social media. The boys have now met in ‘real life’ and seem to have truly connected. This was the one positive story within a very sobering and often shocking film.

Kidron states at the outset that the film began from her observation that all teenagers today seem to be constantly connected to the internet and to social media. This is the era our children have been born into, and one that we are all adapting to (children most rapidly) as the digital network expands exponentially and way beyond the imagination of its founders. But, as one expert interviewed commented, adaptation comes at a cost, and he questions what might have been lost alongside that adaptive process.

Of course, we can never quantify what might have been lost, or exactly what the internet might have replaced in our children’s lives. What we do know, is that teenagers spend 40% more time with friends online that with them ‘in real life’.

Our children have also been born into a society that has witnessed the collapse of where children can physically go and be safe. Today, being at home is usually assumed to be safer than being out on the streets. In Real Life highlights the myth that can underlie this assumption. Teenagers can be exposed to much more danger on their laptops behind the closed doors of their bedrooms than we might want to believe. We hear the tragic story of one teenager, a victim of internet bullying who committed suicide. Bullying has increased exponentially on the internet. It is easier to cyber bully than to do it ‘in real life’…

The issues around the ethics of digital networks and of internet safety and privacy are multiple and complex. This technological phenomenon is here to stay, and it will continue to increase and to expand in ways that we cannot even imagine right now, all of which is to be embraced. Inevitably, dangers lie within such a huge cultural revolution and these need to be addressed first and foremost for the young and for the vulnerable, who do need protection, but not control.

For me personally, I plan to stop my practice of ‘fractured presence’, when I am in the same space as my daughter but only semi-present, distracted by something vital on the internet, which of course is never that critical, or important, or even necessary, in the end…

Tags Beeban Kidron, Documentary, film, In Real Life, Social Media, Teenagers

Categories Cinema, Families, Film, Stories

‘A Boy and His Soul’…

September 20, 2013 //

This play is currently on at The Tricycle Theatre London, and what an absolute gem it is.

Written and performed by Colman Domingo, A Boy and His Soul is the story and ‘soundtrack of a boy’s coming of age in ’70s and ’80s Philadelphia.’

Jay, the central character, rediscovers the vinyls of his youth in the basement of the house he grew up in. As he replays the records, each track frames a memory and a chapter in his life. The music that he was born into was that of soul:

‘My Soul Music is my sanctuary, y’all…Soul Music is my life.’

We hear music from The Three Degrees, Switch, Isley Brothers, Earth, Wind and Fire, Aretha Franklin, amongst many others. I have never really been a soul fan. I think I might be now.

Finding it unbelievable that his parents abandoned this music of memories, Jay queries:

‘How could they leave this music behind? A lot of albums were warped and damaged but they still had glory on their grooves.’

Against the backdrop of soul music are played out the lives of Jay and his family, and the importance of music for all of them. For Jay’s mother, Edie:

‘In an instant, with just the sound of a song, I saw my mother’s thoughts leave the modest backyard of the low-income row house…With just the sound of that song, I saw my mother leave poverty, and worry, and sadness, and hopelessness of being a black woman on welfare in 1978 with three children who makes a little money cleaning houses…’

Speaking of his pop, Clarence:

‘My stepfather Clarence is what I would call a con-negro-seur of Soul Music.’

Jay’s sister, Averie, takes control of her own words:

‘I’m a Nigga! I don’t put on no airs for nobody, I like my music loud and my men tough as HELL.’

And finally, his brother Rick:

‘My brother Rick would be in his bedroom primping for his pimping to the sound of the Isley’s.’

The script is funny, often hilarious. It is also tender and sad, and ultimately very moving, particularly towards the end, as both Pop and Edie near the end of their lives:

‘Maybe, my pop a strong black man didn’t have a way to cope with my mother’s diagnosis. Instead maybe he desperately wanted to leave this earth, before the woman that he loved grew more ill and he was left to deal with the deck that he had been dealt.’

Domingo is extraordinary. He owns the part and revels in the performance. Consequently, so does the audience. Domingo mesmerises and seduces you into his world, one that is imbued with soul, in every sense, and with hope.

From Edie:

‘Just because you wish for it don’t mean it won’t come true. Just Believe. Hold tight and hold open your hands!’

Tags A Boy and his Soul, Colman Domingo, The Tricycle Theatre

Categories Cancer, Death and Dying, Families, Illness, Kindness, Music, Stories, Theatre

Grace McCleen’s ‘The Professor of Poetry’…

September 17, 2013 //

This book comes recommended, mostly notably perhaps by Hilary Mantel, who describes it as ‘an astonishing and luminous novel’.

I liked it. It resonated with me in ways that were not initially obvious. It grew on me, as did the main character, ‘The Professor of Poetry’ Elizabeth, who I empathised with much more with as I progressed through the book than I had at the outset. There is much to consider here, even after, or perhaps particularly after, reading the final sentence.

Elizabeth is an academic, a serious academic in her early 50s whose single life revolves around her work, which is poetry, particularly Milton and Eliot. She becomes ill, and is subsequently diagnosed and treated for a brain tumour. Her post treatment scans reveal a remission, something Elizabeth was not expecting. In the light of this news, and reprieve, she decides uncharacteristically to do something different, to be spontaneous, and to seize something from the gift of time that she has just been granted. She decides to revisit her past, the university of her younger years, and also her tutor of that time, who still teaches there.

‘The day was perfect and it was her own, had been wrapped and presented to her, and she smiled at the pleasing coincidence: the present, for once, being precisely where she found herself.’

We learn much about Elizabeth’s character as she commences her journey, and as she reminisces on her present and on her past. We discover that, for example, ‘Elizabeth doesn’t ‘do’ love poetry’. She also doesn’t ‘do’ summer. But we also learn that as a child growing up, her mother used to retreat ‘from the everyday world by a process of not-being, not-saying, not-doing’.

Elizabeth has mastered, at least in her professional life but one also suspects in her personal life, ‘The Art of Detachment’:

‘It was easier to eschew human beings than interact with them.’

She had a troubled and a tragic childhood, memories of which flood persistently Elizabeth’s consciousness.

‘The sea taught the child that pain takes place only in time, that it was impossible to hurt and be truly occupied, but if your hours were empty, pain could be felt very clearly indeed. Pain had much in common with the sea. Both ebbed, both went unnoticed for hours on end, then reared up and took your breath, and neither pain nor the sea was ever completely at rest.’

From an early age, poetry was her consolation, her safety net.

‘A poem could usually be counted upon to shatter the quiet, carry them through the wilderness and bring the knight back safe.’

As she considers her childhood, lost moments and regrets of her time as a university student, and also explores the poetry of Eliot, Elizabeth gradually experiences an epiphany of sorts:

‘What must it be like to produce a living creature instead of one made of paper and ink? A creature that became a real entity, no longer merely an appendage to its creator.’

‘She was suddenly reminded of something Eliot had written somewhere, that most people were ‘only very little alive’. Eliot was obsessed with buried lives, unlived lives, the life of the living dead.’

This realisation culminates in one night of inescapable and painful self-reflection:

‘It suddenly occurred to her that she had travelled further this night than she had her whole life.’

Speaking to her body, which she mostly ignored all her life until illness happened (although ‘For as long as she could remember Professor Stone had lived with a pain in her chest’):

‘I am sorry, hands, because you served me well and I have not been good to you.’

‘And I am sorry, arms, because you never wore bracelets and never hugged and never saw much of the sun.’

‘And I am sorry, heart, because you beat fast for fear many more times than for joy, and never for love.’

There is much tenderness in the book’s denouement, and McCleen’s style throughout is as poetic as the poetry she refers to. So much of the prose passages made me stop and think, not just about Elizabeth, but also about who or what I might be and have become:

‘It was strange to see people one had known a long time ago: they were always unchanged and changed completely, and somewhere within that contradiction lay the state of ourselves, she supposed.’

Tags Eliot, Grace McCleen, Milton, Redemption, Self-reflection, The Professor of Poetry

Categories Art & Suffering, Cancer, Illness, Literature, Loss, Love, Memory, Suffering

Guests of Another Nation…

September 15, 2013 //

Just came across this on YouTube, an independent film about the young Irish arriving in London in the 1980s.

I arrived here in 1989.

Much resonates…

Categories Film, Stories

When The Dragon Swallowed The Sun…

September 14, 2013 //

This documentary film, directed by Dirk Simon, focuses on the Tibetan movement to free Tibet.

Seven years in the making, it is an ambitious piece of work, and one that doesn’t quite deliver. The most interesting sections are those involving interviews with the Dalai Lama. His calm, pragmatic and charismatic approach to a non-violent way of living is truly impressive. This approach, which is mirrored in his followers, has, however, failed to provide a solution to the Tibetan problem, and Tibetans, both those who remain in their native land and those in exile, appear torn between their loyalty to the Dalai Lama and their frustration at the lack of any resolution of the political situation.

There are numerous comments from Tibetan activists, as well as Chinese people who seem to be equally entrenched (and totally lacking in any insight or empathy).

I was particularly struck by the non-involvement of the US (and everywhere else) when China invaded Tibet in the late 1940s. The film claims that at the time the US was trying to woo China away from Russia, and therefore did not want to jeopardise the relationship by involving itself in the Tibetan situation.

There is much passion, and distress, to be witnessed in this film. Overall, however, despite its earnestness and its well meaning premise, it felt like an overlong meandering through Tibet’s history post invasion. In terms of the movement to free Tibet, I was left with the depressing sense of a ‘political’ activism that does not seem to be going anywhere.

Tags China, Dirk Simon, film, Free Tibet, Tibet, US, When the Dragon Swallowed the Sun

Categories Art & Suffering, Suffering, War

‘…the club of the left-over living.’

September 11, 2013 //

This phrase is taken from Christopher Reid’s poem Exasperated Piety from his collection A Scattering, which was created as a tribute to his wife, who died as a result of cancer in 2005.

It is no coincidence that this came to mind today. This day a year ago, my sister was diagnosed with cancer, from which she died less than five months later. When I first saw her a few days after the diagnosis, we were both overwhelmed by our sadness and distress. I was also acutely aware that my sister had now entered a world that was instantly unshareable, and which progressively alienated her over the next months from those of us who remained in a world she had hitherto inhabited.

Susan Sontag describes illness as ‘the night-side of life, a more onerous citzenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.’

Yet, although the gap between the kingdoms is narrow, those who are suddenly transported from the land of the well to that of the ill very quickly realise the meaning and the isolation that this entails. Christopher Hitchens described is as follows:

‘I see it as a very gentle and firm deportation, taking me from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of the malady.’

I will never know what my sister’s experience was. She chose not to talk about it. I became increasingly aware, and guilty, of the gap between our worlds, one that seemed to widen every moment of every day of those few short months.

A Hospital Odyssey is an epic poetic and mythical journey through illness by Gwyneth Lewis, which focuses on Maris’s experience following her husband’s cancer diagnosis. Maris journeys alone to the Otherworld, separated from Hardy, and explores an imaginary and surreal illness landscape.

The voice throughout is that of Maris:

‘I want to capture what it is to care

for someone you love who’s very ill,

how quickly you age as you see them suffer,

you’d do anything to make them well,

but you can’t.’

‘What do you say when someone you love

is dying and there’s nothing you can do

to stop it happening, and you’re alive

and well, nowhere near through

adoring , and you can’t follow?’

Tags A Scattering, Cancer, Christopher Reid, Death, Gwyneth Lewis, Hospital Odyssey, Loss

Categories Bereavement, Cancer, Death and Dying, Grief, Illness, Literature, Loss, Poetry, Sadness, Suffering

The week ahead…

September 9, 2013 //

I have some thoughts on what I would like to experience, and to hopefully share, over the forthcoming week:

The Professor of Poetry by Grace McCleen

This work of fiction focuses on Elizabeth Stone, an academic (primarily of Milton) who has been diagnosed and treated for advanced ovarian cancer (thematically reminiscent of the play W;t, previously discussed here https://sufferingandthearts.wordpress.com/2012/12/15/wt/). Unexpectedly given an ‘all clear’ following treatment, the protagonist re-explores her life, and her loneliness.

The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin

This will be my 6th read from the Booker Longlist. Described as a book depicting ‘overwhelming grief’ and ‘suffering’, it promises to be suitably apt for this blog…

Love’s Work by Gillian Rose

I have just started re-reading this hugely impressive book by the philosopher and writer. It impressively covers many issues, including death, illness and Judaism, in such a short text. One sentence in the book:

‘It was the occasion of my initiation into the anti-supernatural character of Judaism: into how non-belief in God defines Judaism and how change in that compass registers the varieties of Jewish modernity.’

prompted the next item on my list:

The Story of the Jews by Simon Schama

This is a current BBC series that I have started to watch, in order to redress my ignorance of the history of Judaism.

Alexis Hunter and Jo Spence Art Exhibition

This exhibition, at the Richard Saltoun Gallery until September 27, focuses on the development of feminist art. I have previously discussed Jo Spence in the context of the art she created around her diagnosis of breast cancer, and her living with, and dying from, the condition (https://sufferingandthearts.wordpress.com/2012/07/05/jo-spence-art-photography-illness-and-the-body/).

http://www.richardsaltoun.com/exhibitions/26/overview/

When The Dragon Swallowed The Sun

This film screens at the Lexi Cinema on Wednesday. Seven years in the making, it tells the story of the Tibetan movement, and struggle, to free Tibet.

http://thelexicinema.co.uk/2013/08/17/when-the-dragon-swallowed-the-sun/

Finally, a thought…

Something I came across today, and am still considering, from Nietzsche:

“We possess art lest we perish from the truth”

Categories Art, Art & Suffering, Cancer, Fiction, Film, Grief, Illness, Literature, Suffering

Brueghel’s Icarus, and Auden…

September 7, 2013 //

Last night’s viewing of Museum Hours inspired me to re-read Auden’s poem Musee des Beaux Arts today:

‘About suffering, they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along…’

‘In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling from the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly by.’

Tags Auden, Brueghel, Cinema, Literature, Musee des Beaux Arts, Museum Hours, Poetry

Categories Art, Art & Suffering, Poetry

Museum Hours…

September 7, 2013 //

I have just seen this film by the acclaimed director Jem Cohen.

I loved it. I already have a strong sense that this film will linger and haunt me for some time.

It is not a happening film. A story of sorts is gently weaved, but this is not a narrative that feels plot driven.

Amazingly, the production of this Museum Hours involved only seven people, and mostly non-professional actors. Even more amazingly, no artificial light was used throughout, all of which help to explain the authenticity that the work emanates.

The story centres around Anne, who travels from her home in Montreal to visit a dying (and comatose) cousin in Vienna, and Johann, a guard in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, who Anne befriends during her frequent visits to view the art in the museum in between hospital visits. The film interweaves various narrative threads, including those of loneliness, aloneness, friendship, life, living, and death. There is much to interest any art lover, and I particularly loved how the camera shifted seamlessly from people to art. In terms of the latter, insights into works within the museum, for example Rembrandt and Brueghel, were fascinating and illuminating.

To some extent, not being plot-driven, the film goes nowhere, and yet everywhere. It is a life journey of sorts, and as such offers much to consider, especially the possibility of a new ‘way of seeing’, both in relation to art, and to its mirror image, life.

I was not surprised to see John Berger acknowledged in the credits.

I was uplifted by this film, moved by its optimism in terms of how we might see things anew, particularly if we choose to truly pay attention to what we are actually observing. Yet Museum Hours is also suffused by melancholy, of which it is aware but does not force, and in turn does not overwhelm. In the final moments, Johann reminds us of the transience of things, which may at first seem to contradict the lasting impact of the works of art we have seen throughout the film.

What is really transient is us, the ever-changing population of viewers.

All the more reason to ‘see’ what we can, and while we can…

Tags Jem Cohen, John Berger, Museum Hours

Categories Art, Cinema, Film, Melancholy