Whatever I say about director Christopher Nolan’s version of the Odyssey (3 hours plus with Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland) doesn’t matter because it is a world wide film sensation and should keep the studio doors open for a while longer – provided everything doesn’t go up in flames which is very likely.
A line from one of the spirituals of my formative youth refers to “God send a fire, not a flood next time.” I was struck by a 16 year old French girl who spoke good English saying how fast the fire travelled and how afraid it made her.
Plus nationally we are desperately short of fire persons.
Unsure of Mr. Burnham’s exact standing in matters requiring decision rather than intention, an awful lot of that vast number of people drawing benefit and doing not a lot must surely come to “earn your money” through fire service, street cleaning, rubbish collection. Six weeks’ money max, then you can only draw if you do the jobs on offer. And very few “mental problems” benefit from doing nothing.
I’ve never been in the loop with any kind of professional performers, I mean the ones who do whatever they can to keep going. But in success – I do think relentless exposure – now more exposed and more relentless than it has ever been – skews perception and consciousness.
A recent article about the so called (not ever by me) “supermodels” took the form of an interview with one of them
– as disagreeable, charmless and as leathery as elderly cow thigh. She obviously didn’t want to do the interview, or got into it and wished she hadn’t – and so do I. But she clarified something for me – stages of exposure.
There’s your moment, however long it lasts: there are middle stages – often more than one where you go off the rails, get back on them and learn something (oh I do hope you learn something): and then there is review, when you are for one reason or another looking back.
There are many who get stuck in stage two, endless recycling of ineptitude, bad habits, sin and redemption. I get very tired of “look what I suffered.” Yup. Sure. Anybody ever ask where you are in this – surely, powerless as a child – but older ? Don’t you have a responsibility in this ? Or is responsibility a word so old fashioned that we don’t use it any more ? The victim of circumstance is rarely the whole story.
See it, learn from it, accept that (as actress Samantha Moreton says in an interview this weekend as good as the aforementioned model’s was bad) the past is always with you.
She isn’t quoted as adding “… but you can’t live in it” – but I will.
My past is very much part of my present and I presume that will continue to obtain going forward into the future. I am as soppy and sentimental as the next person, maybe more than many but I was taught to look and to see, to ask questions, to watch, to understand (took a long time) the value of being a witness which is what I am writing about. In this context, it is nothing to do with the law or breaking it. It is to do with the Great Law life itself.
Don’t misunderstand me when I call it the Great Law and think that I put life above everything – I don’t.
Death is part of life, however you get there. But I do think if you are going to live, you must learn. And I am endlessly moved by watching how people learn and what they learn, and by extension, what it means to them.
For example, it is just as hard to be a handsome man as a beautiful woman . So it’s thrilling when the Jude Laws and the Robert Pattinsons are eventually allowed to act – and found to be rather good. As long as you are “just” beautiful, you are in grave danger of turning into a presence rather than a performance.
There are faces and feelings you respond to before you can define them – like a dog sniffing acutely and the hackles go up. Not much you can do about that except be mature and reasonable, and nobody is always so.
But you can notice and think – and no machine can do it better.
Annalog 