The next one:
It happened again. Each time I think, nah, not this time, but it happens each and every time. The moment it hits Cary Grant that Deborah Kerr didn’t show up because she was in an accident and is now paralyzed, I start to cry. Slowly seeping at first then full scale blubbering by the time they are in each other’s arms. Every time.
Winter must be cold for those with no warm memories.
(An Affair to Remember for those of you living under rock.)
It was again super warm today. It’s been terribly warm the past week or so. Though, Saturday was extraordinarily windy. I drove out to Willow Park (west of Ft. Worth) to visit my friends K. and T. and their lovely families. As I drove out, around 11:45am, I noticed that the wind was brushing the dust off the top of a ridge and carrying it along. By the time I left to return to Dallas, the sky was a thick shade of peach tinged with light grey. You could smell the dust, feel it in your nose as if you’d just shaken out a table cloth that had sat on the table untouched for years.
Apparently, this sort of dust storm is normal in west Texas and unusual here. It was amazing and creepy.
Saturday night I went to the opera with Miss P. Lohengrin. Romantic Wagner. I confess freely that I hate the heroine. She swears an oath never to ask her mysterious knight in shining armor’s name, rank or origin – the making of this oath is a sensible act in context, I can believe she is right to make it. A day later, the night of their wedding, she falls prey to suspicious thoughts that he will leave her by the same miraculous method in which he arrived and she asks him his name, rank and origin thereby killing all happiness and hope. Her betrayal means, of course you have guessed (this is a Romantic opera, after all), that he must return from whence he came. My thinking is that it is classic, twisted female logic at it’s finest – well, since I fear he’s going to leave me, I’ll make damned certain that he does – I just want to smack her.
Especially the performance that I saw. This crazy, defeatest turn in her thinking is out of line with the character the director portays to us in the beginning. At the start, she is given to be this flibbertigibbet with her head always in the clouds, sweet to a fault, trusting, unassuming. Even with the machinations of the villain, this jump from unaware innocent to raving, suspicious wife is too much for me.
I suppose you could chalk it up to my being unsusceptible to the tragedy of human folly born of love. You could say, rightly, that I don’t appreciate the tragedy of these sorts of stories because I’ve never fallen into a love that robbed me of my senses, my perspective, my grasp of reality. I’m okay with that. Though, An Affair to Remember does have its section of silly human folly born misery, but it does make some sense and everything works out just fine in the end. Perhaps this is why I like it as opposed to why I’m glad to be rid of characters such as Elsa – she drops dead in the end as her betrayed beloved glides away in a boat.
Yes. I think that must be it… characters who ruin everything because they think too much and cannot accept that good things can simply be… they irritate me and I am glad when their end comes as a direct result of their fatal (ha ha) flaw.
Some things just are. Good, bad, tragic, amazing. Some things just are.
I didn’t do so well in upper level English courses because I didn’t accept that the author had to be saying something. But I am not an artist. Maybe every artist is trying to say something. Perhaps this is why I like portraiture. Most of the time, the only thing being said is that this is a person and this is their personality, or at least that small portion of it I can convey with my brush or my lens. Or at least, that’s how I look at portraiture, it makes museum trips much easier for me.
2 comments:
Cool post with interesting thoughts.
I guess I'm having trouble imagining a situation in which wanting to know your fiance's name is an unforgivable betrayal... "Elsa's procession to the cathedral" is a beautiful piece of music though.
Seems to me that artists, writers, etc. usually create because they want to communicate *something*. Maybe some writers are just in love with the sound of their own voice. And maybe some painters just like the ritual of brush on canvas. But I find that good ones want to make some kind of connection, use their tools to try to dig into something particular about life.
For a portrait, if you can successfully convey something about the subject's personality, you've just communicated a whole lot. And I agree, not every piece of literature has to have a hidden symbolic subtext -- not everyone who dies tragically is a Christ Figure for example. But that doesn't mean nothing at all is being communicated. Anyway, them's my $0.02.
In my experience, young artists in particular are "artists" because their parents are rich and they could afford to do whatever they wanted. Most of the time they have nothing to say. (I am bitterly referring to snotty FA students.)
I do think you love portraits because, if the portrait is from an actual sitting-like a commission, it is fascinating to consider the artists' own subjectivity regarding the sitter. What parts of the individual's features are emphasized or softened? You are more interested in the thought that goes into the representation.
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