POETS UNITED - THE DOOR

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“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched - they must be felt with the heart.” - Helen Keller

We live in a harsh age where people have become hardened and twisted, apathetic and callous. We live in times where values have been degraded so that the thing most valued is what can be sold for most money to the highest bidder. People close up like clams and their hearts shrivel up like mummified corpses. And we wonder why things keep going from bad to worse…

For those of us who still manage to feel, and empathise and remain open-hearted (at great personal risk), this world can seem to be nightmarish at the best of times, hellish at the worst. And yet we hope and we try to keep our openness at any cost. Poets United this week has the theme of “The Door”. My contribution below: 

Closed Doors 

Our doors are closed –
Just like our hearts –
For these are hard times,
Harder than corundum
Ready to grind down
Any trace of mercy.

Our doors are closed –
Just like our minds –
Free thought causes dissent,
Dissent is disunity
And disunity is weakness:
Far easier for prejudice and fear to rule.

Our doors are closed –
Just like our fists –
Clenched tight, ready to strike:
The best defence is swift attack,
Hit now, question later,
Collateral damage easy enough to justify.

Our doors are closed –
Just like our borders –
For we are pure and superior,
And we do not want to be tainted
By foreign blood,
Content in our incestuous decadence.

Our doors are closed –
But some of us leave the keys under the mat:
We of the generous open heart;
We of the free, open mind;
We of the outstretched open hand;
We of the open borders.

We wait for our door to open
And lay another plate on our table
For our food’s enough for one more.
We welcome change and progress
And we embrace the stranger
For our gods have taught us hospitality’s sacredness.

MOVIE MONDAY - ÄNGLAGÅRD

“A conservative is someone who makes no changes and consults his grandmother when in doubt.” - Woodrow Wilson

We watched an old Swedish film last weekend, the 1992, Colin Nutley movie, “Änglagård” (“House of Angels”), starring Helena Bergström, Rikard Wolff, Sven Wollter, Reine Brynolfsson and Ernst Günther. This was a pleasant, entertaining and bittersweet movie that concerned itself with prejudice, small town mentality and conformity vs individuality. The film is very Swedish, even though it is directed by an Englishman and takes place in a lovely part of the Swedish countryside.

A small, conservative village in Västergötland, Sweden is turned upside-down when an elderly, lonely old man dies and his mansion with surrounding land and woods, called “House of Angels”, is inherited by his grand-daughter, Fanny, whom he had never met. Fanny a vivacious and free-spirited young woman comes to the village riding on a big black motorcycle with her best friend Zac, wearing black leather and spikes.

The village people do not welcome this unorthodox city girl, although she manages to win some over with her open, sunny nature. The local well-to-do entrepreneur and village kingpin, Axel Flogfält had expected that he would be able to buy the mansion for a good price, but now it seems that Fanny and Zac have come to stay there. The village is divided into two camps, one for and one against them…

The film is quite a lot of fun, and while the story does not break any new ground, it is a study of human nature. As Fanny gathers information provided by the townspeople about her dead mother and her grandfather, she learns more about herself. The prejudice, fear of the unknown and the different, and the small-mindedness of the Swedish village people is captured well by Nutley. Small communities the world over have similar attitudes and similar characters. The themes of forgiveness and self-knowledge subtly unfold as Fanny interacts with the people of the village, but also as she re-evaluates her relationship with Zac.

The acting is good, the direction light as befits the movie and the music well-suited to the action. The cinematography is beautiful and highlights some of the summery countryside of a lovely part of Sweden. We enjoyed seeing this light and fluffy sleeper of a movie, on a DVD which sort of fell in our lap. It is the first of a trilogy of films, the second being “Änglagård - Andra sommaren” (1994) and the third, “Änglagård - Tredje gången gillt” (2010). I can’t say we’ll actively look for the sequels, but if we come across the DVDs, no doubt we’ll watch them sometime…

POETS UNITED - JUSTICE

“The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” - Edmund Burke

Justice is meant to be blind and we are familiar with the image of Justitia, the Roman goddess of justice holding the balance of judgement while blindfolded. When one thinks of a court of law, one thinks of justice. Judges are meant to serve justice and be impartial, disinterested, unbiased and unprejudiced when considering a case before them.

We now see corruption in the judiciary becoming increasingly common and judges are exposed to be willfully violating their oath of office. Justice is not being served in an astonishing number of cases, with verdicts leaving the public perplexed, and the innocent becoming victims of a corrupt legal system. Read more about this topic here.

Poets United today has as its theme “Justice” and invites participants to: “Create a poem centering on Justice or Poetic Justice”. Here is my offering:

The Fillips of Hope

Sacrificing all to dark gods –

Who ever more bloodthirstily demand –

You lose your dignity.

Killing all traces of humanity

While burying deeply all regrets,

You lose your probity.

A faceless ghost of who you were

A vampire feeding on the blood of justice

Your silence makes the evil stronger.

The bloodless lips won’t speak out

The wide-open eyes refuse to see,

Your ears hear, but won’t listen.

Is every cell of yours malignant now?

Has heart become so petrified,

Has soul escaped you so completely?

Is cruel body just an empty shell,

Are tendons tightly drawn so taut

In attitudes of ever-attacking fury?

Your brazen corpse, so empty

Should let the hardened shell at least to crack,

Admit the light, truth, justice, love…

And then your every cell would resonate

As the sounds of hope enter it and act as fillips,

To effect your metamorphosis,

From noisome grub to brilliant butterfly.

MOVIE MONDAY - CODE UNKNOWN

“I let the audience use their imaginations. Can I help it if they misconstrue my suggestions?” - Ernst Lubitsch

Imagine this scene: A young man is eating a pastry, walking down a fashionable boulevard in Paris. He is lost in his tumultuous thoughts and his black mood. A woman sits on the pavement, begging. She extends her hand towards him and he throws the scrunched up paper bag with the half-eaten pastry in her lap. This is one of the first few scenes at the beginning of Michael Haneke’s 2000 film, “Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages”, translated into English as “Code Unknown: Incomplete Tale of Several Journeys”. This early scene will return to haunt the actors in this drama and it is interwoven with other scenes of a similarly challenging type that tantalisingly shift into a pattern and are then quickly disrupted by scenes that deliberately confound our logic.

“Code Unknown” is a well-crafted film, made by an obviously gifted director, with actors who play with extraordinary talent. Juliette Binoche, Thierry Neuvic, Josef Bierbichler, Alexandre Hamidi all interact wonderfully and handle each nuance of their character with aplomb. And yet the film is a strangely unsatisfying one; it is a film that frustrates and delights one at the same time. Austrian director Haneke plays with us self-indulgently, refusing to compromise his artistic ideals, unwilling to make any allowances to us, his audience. Yet, that is one of the strengths of the movie.

If one goes into a movie house and expects a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, one will be disappointed with this movie. On first viewing, especially if one is unprepared for it, it may seem like a hodge-podge of images, random threads of disparate stories that occasionally criss-cross, a device that is at risk of becoming cliché. There are stylistic links to: Magnolia (1999), Amores Perros (2000) and Crash (2004), and yet, this movie is set apart from them in that we see only little glimpses of people’s lives, incomplete and shadowy, we have to work hard in order to guess at what is going on, and as far as the end is concerned, be prepared to be let down. This is no ordinary tragedy and definitely not a happy or even hopeful end.

Several themes are explored by the film, including child abuse, illegal immigration, failure of communication, racism, prejudice, morality, homelessness, the generation gap, war, rich vs poor, the dehumanising aspect of modern urban life, lack of responsibility towards one fellow human beings… It is a clever film and one that skillfully manipulates the viewers’ emotions. Several scenes grate on our nerves, others draw out pity from us, in others we feel angry, helpless, repulsed, horrified. Yet, we are also detached and curiously uninvolved by Haneke’s characters. We cannot make up our minds if they are heroes of anti-heroes, protagonists or antagonists. We vacillate unsure of where to place our loyalties. Villains become victims, sacrificers become the sacrifice, situations that seem black or white, become curiously gray as more scenes are revealed to us.

The experience of watching the film for me was similar to experiences I have had sitting on a bus and watching the people getting on and off. Or when I am people-watching in an airport or a train station, or perhaps glimpses of lives as the train rushes past the lit windows of apartment buildings. My vivid imagination connects people and their lives and builds stories with common threads in them, significant stories of universal relevance: The search for love and acceptance, the pursuit of happiness, the need to be understood and appreciated for what one is. Haneke does this with consummate skill and in his choice of scenes, he gives the viewer significant clues to decipher.

This is no escapist flick, no pleasant tale to delight and amuse us. It is dark, confronting, intelligent and challenging. It will make you think and demand from you the viewer an active interaction. It is not a film that you will watch passively. It needs rumination upon and a second viewing that will perhaps leave you with more questions than you had when you first saw it. Perhaps that is what all great art should do, make us ask questions rather than give us answers.

MOVIE MONDAY - JOSEPH CONRAD

“We live, as we dream - alone.” – Joseph Conrad

Jósef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (1857-1924) at age 15 ran away from his native Poland to seek his fortune in the world and ended up in Marseilles. There he signed on as crewman on a merchant vessel and spent the next 15 years sailing the seven seas. At 30 years of age he landed in London and decided to settle there. He married and began writing novels - in English. Now, what kind of English he learnt aboard merchant sailing ships late in the 19th Century might well be imagined, with crews comprising Greeks, Italians, Chinese, Filipinos, Indians, Galicians... However, his genius overcame all difficulties, linguistic or otherwise, and he is now known as one of the greats of English literature, Joseph Conrad. His works include the novels: “Lord Jim” (1900), “Heart of Darkness” (1902) and “Nostromo” (1904). He also wrote short stories.

Conrad is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English, though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties (and always with a marked accent). He wrote stories and novels, often with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an indifferent universe. He was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English sensibility into English literature.

While some of his works have a strain of Romanticism, his works are viewed as modernist literature. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many authors, including D. H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Gerald Basil Edwards, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Graham Greene, and many others. Films have been adapted from, or inspired by, Conrad’s “Almayer's Folly”, “An Outcast of the Islands”, “Heart of Darkness”, “Lord Jim”, “Nostromo”, “The Secret Agent”, “The Duel”, “Victory”, “The Shadow Line”, and “The Rover”.

Writing in the heyday of the British Empire, Conrad drew on his native Poland’s national experiences and on his personal experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world, while plumbing the depths of the human soul. Appreciated early on by literary cognoscenti, his fiction and nonfiction have gained an almost prophetic cachet in the light of subsequent national and international disasters of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The most famous movie adaptations of his works are: Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Sabotage” (1936), based on “The Secret Agent” (1907); Richard Brooks’ “Lord Jim” (1964), and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” (1979), based on “Heart of Darkness.” Conrad sold the American screen rights to his fiction in 1919. In the next year he composed a screenplay entitled “The Strange Man”, based on the short story “Gaspar Ruiz”. He did not like to work for the film business, and did not know about screenwriting – not surprisingly, the studio rejected his script.

For Movie Monday today, I am reviewing a film that I had not seen before and was unfamiliar with, but which is based on Konrad’s short story: “Amy Foster”. The film is known by this title or alternatively by the name: “Swept from the Sea” (1997). It is directed sensitively by Beeban Kidron and there are some excellent performances by Vincent Perez, Rachel Weisz, Ian McKellen and Kathy Bates. One of the big pluses of the film is the excellent score by John Barry, that goes hand in hand with the action and beautiful cinematography of the bleak and windswept Cornish coast, where the action is set.

This story is one that Conrad must have felt very deeply about. It is about the survivor of a shipwreck of a migrant ship that was making its way to America and was full of Ukrainian immigrants. Yanko is the only survivor and his arrival in the small Cornish village is greeted by prejudice, suspicion and finally enmity. He is only treated kindly by Amy Foster, a wayward young woman who works as a servant in one of the farmhouses, is shunned by most villagers but even her own family. The two misfits fall in love and the whole community subsequently ostracises them.

From my description you might think that this is a “chick flick”, but I found it quite robust and the central theme is deeper and more sinister than an ill-starred romance. The supporting characters, especially the Doctor (Ian McKellen) and the daughter of one of the landed gentry in the village (Kathy Bates) have their own stories that form the backdrop for Yanko’s and Amy’s romance and the changing relationship of these two characters with the leads is an interesting subplot. Amy’s relationship with her family is another subplot that explains much of Amy’s character and actions.

Overall, I enjoyed the movie greatly and as an adaptation of a literary work it was well adapted, acted ably, directed sensitively and was full of atmosphere. It is well worth seeing and will please most, I think.

MOVIE MONDAY - JEUX D' ENFANTS

"Can there be a love, which does not make demands on its object?" - Confucius

A French movie for Movie Monday, today: “Jeux D’ Enfants” by Yann Samuell (2003), its English title being “Love me if you Dare”. This is an odd film, but nevertheless one that I watched with great interest and in the end with great satisfaction, as well. If you have seen “Amélie” or “L’ Auberge Espagnole”, then this is film is like them, but nothing like them. It was described on the DVD packaging as a “Romantic Comedy”, but I beg to differ – it’s neither comedy, nor terribly romantic, yet there are scenes in it that make you laugh right out loud and other scenes that remind one of “Romeo and Juliet”…

But what is it about? Julien and Sophie are the hero and heroine of this film, he a typical French boy, and she a “dirty Pollack” as she is called by the other school children. Their friendship begins in childhood where they play a game of dares revolving around handing each other a biscuit tin in the shape of a colourful merry-go-round, only to be claimed if the dare is successfully completed.  The dares become more outrageous and dangerous as the children grow to adolescents and then to adults. Love and sex intrude in unexpected ways and the relationship between Julien and Sophie becomes more complex, more destructive – for themselves as well as for the people around them.

The characters of the film are hardly likeable, and yet they are irresistible in their raw energy and vitality. In them we recognise parts of ourselves that we actively bury deep inside us lest they manifest themselves and destroy us. And yet it these hidden parts of ourselves that drive us and motivate us, and it is these self-destructive forces within us that move some of us to the ultimate love experience that transcends death itself. Both Julien and Sophie are struggling with difficult home situations, and it is their families that force them to seek each other out and find in each other support but also a challenge to deal with their relatives (selfishly, but that is how one preserves oneself!).

The film is tremendously creative, visually rich and full of life and passion. It is an allegory of love, a film that analyses relationships that teeter between love and hate, that balance on the razor’s edge of insecurity, it is about people in love who constantly test each other’s love, that dare each other to prove their love no matter what. The ending itself (although predictable) is not what it seems and it this ending that puts the whole film into perspective in terms of the allegory hat I mentioned earlier.

Guillaume Canet (Julien) and Marion Cotillard (Sophie) are perfectly cast and play superbly under the expert direction of Yann Samuell. The soundtrack is memorable as it includes several renditions of “La Vie en Rose”, which is perfect for the film. Watch it, it's well worth it!

HYPATIA OF ALEXANDRIA: 4 BOOKS & A FILM

"We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate." – Henry Miller

Occasionally on Tuesdays I review some books I’ve read. Today, I give you two novels (and two more books!) about Hypatia of Alexandria. Who was Hypatia? By all accounts she was stunningly beautiful, dazzlingly brilliant, yet always modest and kind, living in an age when women were mere chattels. She is history’s first female mathematician, as well as the first female astronomer, inventor, and natural philosopher. As the daughter of the last head professor of the Museum of Alexandria, she practically grew up in the Great Alexandrian Library, where all the world’s knowledge was kept, for in addition to being a child prodigy, she was a voracious reader. A little more about her life, before I review two novels that I have read, which are based on her life.

Hypatia of Alexandria (about 370 – 415 AD) was the daughter of Theon of Alexandria who was a teacher of mathematics at the Museum of Alexandria, Egypt. The famous museum was a centre of Greek intellectual and cultural life, and it included many independent schools and the great library of Alexandria. Hypatia studied with her father, and with many others including Plutarch the Younger. She herself taught at the school of philosophy, whose slant was Neoplatonist. She became the salaried director of this school in 400 AD. She probably wrote on mathematics, astronomy and philosophy, including about the motions of the planets, about number theory and about conic sections.

Hypatia corresponded with and hosted scholars from others cities. Synesius, Bishop of Ptolemais, was one of her correspondents and he visited her frequently. Hypatia was a popular lecturer, drawing students from many parts of the empire. From the little historical information about Hypatia that survives, it appears that she invented the plane astrolabe, the graduated brass hydrometer and the hydroscope, with Synesius of Greece, who was her student and later colleague.

Orestes, the governor of Alexandria, like Hypatia, was a pagan (non-Christian). Orestes was an adversary of the new Christian bishop, Cyril (later canonised). Orestes, according to the contemporary accounts, objected to Cyril expelling the Jews from the city, and was murdered by Christian monks for his opposition. Cyril was also opposed to Hypatia due to the following reasons: She represented heretical teachings, including experimental science and pagan religion. She was an associate of Orestes. And she was a woman who didn’t know her place. Cyril’s preaching against Hypatia is said to have been what incited a mob led by fanatical Christian monks in 415 to attack Hypatia as she drove her chariot through Alexandria. They dragged her from her chariot and, according to accounts from that time, tore her clothes off, killed her, stripped the flesh from her bones, scattered some body parts through the streets, and burned some remaining parts of her body in the library of Caesareum.

Hypatia’s students fled to Athens, where the study of mathematics flourished after that. The Neoplatonic school she headed continued in Alexandria until the Arabs invaded in 642 AD. When the library of Alexandria was burned by the Arab conquerors, books were used as fuel for baths, and the works of Hypatia were also destroyed. We know her writings today through the works of others who quoted her (even if unfavourably) and through a few letters written to her by contemporaries.

Charles Kingsley has written a novel based on the life of Hypatia, simply called ‘Hypatia’ (1853). This novel is set in fifth century Alexandria and portrays decadent Romans, effete Roman Catholics, sophisticated pagan philosophers and vital Germanic warriors struggling for mastery as the world around them collapses. By setting the novel in the 5th century he was able to attack 19th century attitudes, which he believed were rending the fabric of English life. Kingsley was criticising through his novel what he considered to be destructive ‘high-church’ tendencies in Victorian England. Kingsley’s novel is typically Victorian, but nevertheless replete with atmosphere, accurate in detail and with great characterisation. It reminded me somewhat of Bulwer-Lytton’s ‘The Last Days of Pompeii’ in style.

The second novel is by Brian Trent and is titled: ‘Remembering Hypatia’ (2005). This is essentially a historical novel about Hypatia, in the tradition of historical fictional epics. Obviously, Trent has studied Kingsley’s novel and uses some of the details of the earlier work in his novel, but Trent’s version is more likely to appeal to the modern reader, in that his style is more engaging in terms of writing and plot development. The web page for this novel includes a preview of the prologue and first chapter.

I would recommend either of these books to you if you wish to learn about this great human being whose murder by a fanatical mob can be taken to be a presage of the dark ages that followed in the West, where the quest for knowledge, active scientific enquiry, philosophical thinking and rationalism were suppressed by superstition and fanaticism.

A third novel, also called ‘Hypatia’ by Khan Amore (2001), I have not read. However it sounds intriguing… Here is a description:

“Khan Amore’s ‘Hypatia’ defies categorisation. It is even difficult to decide which genre it might fall into. The book is fictionalised, yet it is strictly based upon fact, so that it cannot rightly be called either fiction or non-fiction, but perhaps demands a separate category: ‘faction’. The novel could be called a controversial erotic historical science-fiction adventure, although it might also be called a self-help book, humor, or a synthesis of hedonistic and humanistic philosophy. Like George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, this is not just another robots-and-laser-battles-in-space science-fiction potboiler.”

If your tastes are more inclined to the strictly historical figure of Hypatia, then the biography by Michael AB Deakin, ‘Hypatia of Alexandria: Mathematician and Martyr’ will be more useful. On Amazon.com, SkookumPete reviews this book:

“This is a difficult book to evaluate. Deakin is a mathematician, not a classical historian, and apart from his discussion of Hypatia’s place in Alexandrian mathematics, this biography contains little that is not already to be found elsewhere, most notably in Dzielska’s study. Deakin does a reasonable job of putting Hypatia in a cultural context, but his understanding of late antiquity is superficial and admittedly garnered largely from encyclopedias. On the other hand, he has closely studied the sources for Hypatia’s life (which he includes in an appendix) and the meagre evidence for her influence on philosophy and science. His introduction to astrolabes and conic sections is of some intrinsic interest and helps illuminate the state of knowledge in the fifth century, but since we have not one shred of writing that is inarguably Hypatia’s work, the connection is rather tenuous. Nonetheless Deakin’s conclusions give a valuable new perspective on this best-known of female Hellenists: one of a teacher with a wide range of interests, if not an original thinker.

If your tastes are more inclined to the seventh art, there is a relatively recent film about Hypatia, which I have seen and can recommend. This is the 2009 film “Agora”, directed by Alejandro Amenábar and starring Rachel Weisz, Max Minghella, Oscar Isaac. It paints a realistic picture of Alexandria, the costumes look authentic, the performances are flawless, and the cinematography - always beautiful. Ultimately, however, what makes this film so great is the way in which it puts human beings into perspective (fundamentalists ransacking the agora are like swarming ants), and in one scene, Alexandria is viewed from high above, looking sublime and utterly insignificant all at once. The film demonstrates ably the contrasting duality of human beings:  Capable of reaching the heights of reason, while also plumbing the depths of blind unreason.