Justice is a Gypsy...
...and life a film in the making
'But my heart is telling me...'
I can hear the turning of the key | I've been deceived by the clown inside of me. | I thought that he was righteous but he's vain | Oh, something's a-telling me I wear the ball and chain.
My patron saint is a-fighting with a ghost | He's always off somewhere when I need him most. | The Spanish moon is rising on the hill | But my heart is a-tellin' me I love ya still.
I come back to the town from the flaming moon | I see you in the streets, I begin to swoon. | I love to see you dress before the mirror | Won't you let me in your room one time 'fore I finally disappear?
Everybody's wearing a disguise | To hide what they've got left behind their eyes. | But me, I can't cover what I am | Wherever the children go I'll follow them.
Jean Cadoret de Florette [Gérard Depardieu] is a fool, a dreamer and a city slicker become Provencal carnation farmer on family land. He loves his wife and daughter, works hard, puts science to work for him, and sees the good in other people. Hence author Marcel Pagnol [1953], writer Gerard Brach and director Claude Berri's portrayal of him in Jean de Florette as a hunchback, a man deformed by shouldering the sins of the world. His neighbour, César 'Papet' Soubyeran [Yves Montand], coveting his water and given to modern business practices, is a conniving sod with a miserable nephew, Ugolin [Daniel Auteuil]. Cadoret's land enjoys a goodly supply of water but Soubyeran, with the avarice and indifferent greed of the common empire builder, blocks the ancient spring rising on the hunchback's farm, seeking his destruction before he is able to exploit the Luberon land he loves. Under the watchful eye of Jean Cadoret's young daughter, Manon [Ernestine Mazurowna], they succeed.
Recently, I've been wondering why I love my wife as I do. She suffers Borderline Personality Disorder, abuses alcohol, cuts herself with razorblades to cheer herself when down and, generally, does things arse about face. And she does all these things sporadically. More, she refuses to accept the medical services available to her, a symptom of the disorder as defined by any psychiatric publication you care to consult. Mind you, with around 1,000 South Africans dying of AIDS each day, it's surprising we have any medical services [or people to run them].
Yeah, that's for another time. I have strong views on the AIDS issue. Running countries is an ugly business, but the AIDS debacle is as ugly as it gets.
But more about me. The mental, physical and emotional cost of maintaining a family of family of five on an unqualified person's salary in an atmosphere of unmanageable madness is enormous. The day-to-day details are everything one reads in every 'survivor' book picked off the shelves holding the Top 10 bestsellers of the moment. I'm not getting younger but, despite South Africa's lack of institutionalised civic structures, society offers many ways out of such difficult relationships.
You'll find these 'outs' on the same bestsellers, all written by thrice-married divorcees with what my son politely calls 'issues'. These ways are not my ways. Yet, if I look at the Bigger Picture, that painted by the books and the considered thoughts of countless thoughtful people, I must admit to sometimes feeling considerable guilt at struggling, with every ounce of will I can muster, to sustain my 'dysfunctional' brood.
Quite sane and fully functional myself, I am comfortable with dysfunction. In fact, when all is said and done, I'm something of a professional. You'll find definitions of dysfunction in all the above-mentioned bestsellers and a fair whack of textbooks too. In fact, anybody you ask will give you a good idea what goes into making up structurally unsound relationships, family units and societies. They'll then tell you to sue for divorce. Immediately.
Ah hell, screw sanity. I'm dysfunctional, my wife's dysfunctional, we stand to raise a dysfunctional family and I'm happy with that. My son's does extraordinarily well and my elder daughter's aiming for As in her final school year. My younger daughter doesn't attend school very often, but they don't teach much there anymore and she always excels. If that's dysfunction, so be it.
So what holds it all together? One thing the books and the considered advice all too frequently fail to address is the power and nature of love. I've been learning about love recently. It's a tough course.
Over the past few months, I've been pushed to not one, but many walls. Being pushed to the wall means being squeezed of all resources and told to deliver the goods... and then some. At such times, the feeling is similar to being told of the death of someone close to you. For a short while, you move beyond despair and lose all hope of being able to cope � with anything. When I'm pushed to the wall, the blogger in me detaches and watches my response and all eventual outcomes.
To put it in medical terms, I become, to a degree, dissociated. I think this part of me does this because it knows that any rough time is transient, momentary, and short lived. It knows that life, like a good movie, goes on.
My wife, who now knows something about her condition, uses the bulletin boards, hogging my time on the Internet. She does not like her predicament, but she is powerless before it. Yet, unlike me, she has not yet been forced to give in or give up. She battles on.
I've watched others fighting alcoholism and BPD on the Web, in AA, therapy, rehabs and just about any place you care to mention. One thing that has struck me most forcibly about these people is that they are not the symptoms of whatever is reducing their lives to bomb craters of dysfunction.
They remain the people they were when those symptoms arrived.
Granted, the people I relate to tend to fall into a certain personality type, but that doesn't increase or diminish their courage. Nor does their abundance or lack of any personality trait detract from the super-human effort needed to smash or drag themselves from one volatile day to the next.
Chris Locke has elaborated on the deeper meaning of the title of his next book, No Love Lost. I'm pleased Locke has turned his avuncular pen, acerbic humour and
Were he to have sought whatever it is he holds in store for us in the uncertain state of Schrödinger's Cat, I'd not be as keen to read the views of a person whose writing entrances me as much as it drives others to distraction.
That said, Locke is one to cover all his bases, and so we are treated to a little lecture on the dual meaning of 'no love lost'.
If we allowed the physicists to have their way with us, we'd all end up as energy operating in fields. Science tells us there is nothing else. As 'energy operating in fields' constitutes 'something' as opposed to 'nothing', and as it is all we have, 'nothing' is beyond our comprehension. Using the simplified version of the physicists' Bible, Locke describes love in much the same way as physicists do energy.
Bend, fold, spindle, crush, blast, burn or deep freeze it, love does not go away. It can manifestly change, blossom, mutate, grow, decrease, flower, explode, hide, or die but it does not disappear. Love is definitely 'something' and there is always enough to go round.
Considering Jean de Florette, Bob Dylan's lyrics, my dysfunctional life, Chris Locke's forthcoming book and the nature of love, I could not help but be reminded of the following:
The quarks and leptons are the primary actors in the cosmic 3-D movie, and like real actors, these particles interact among themselves. Understanding the interactions took physicists most of this century; but today they understand them rather well. Using high-energy accelerators which probe matter, physicists found that the complexity of the world disappears at tiny distances, and the interaction between quantum particles becomes simple and falls into symmetrical patterns. A simple picture of reality emerged with the realisation that the complicated interactions among quarks and leptons are in fact mediated by a definite set of quantum particles called gluons. As the name implies, gluons cause quantum particles to stick to one another – gluons are the glue that holds the world together.
The Cosmic Code Heinz R Pagels 1983 Michael Joseph Ltd. p231
Well yes, as if I needed to point that one out. Sorry, but perhaps I needed to hear it. Love is like gluons. It holds us together. If anybody has a better definition [beyond St. Paul's over-traded thesis], please drop me a mail using the link at the top of this page.
For now though, with Jean de Florette having been done in, Bob Dylan wearing his heart on his sleeve, Chris Locke writing a new book and my wife and I being held together by a dead French farmer and an unknown number of love bead's, lets move on to the second film.
'I love ya but you're strange...'
I march in the parade of liberty | But as long as I love you I'm not free. | How long must I suffer such abuse | Won't you let me see you smile one time before I turn you loose?
I've given up the game, I've got to leave, | The pot of gold is only make-believe. | The treasure can't be found by men who search | Whose gods are dead and whose queens are in the church.
We sat in an empty theater and we kissed, | I asked ya please to cross me off-a your list. | My head tells me it's time to make a change | But my heart is telling me I love ya but you're strange.
One more time at midnight, near the wall | Take off your heavy make-up and your shawl. | Won't you descend from the throne, from where you sit? | Let me feel your love one more time before I abandon it.
Bob Dylan | Abandoned Love
Ten years later, in Manon des Sources, we find Jean de Florette's daughter, Manon [Emmanuelle Béart], a mountain girl shepherding goats on her father's land in the Luberon. Unrecognised by César and Ugolin Soubyeran, the men responsible for her father's death and dispossessed by their murderous deceit, she uncovers the two farming magnates' duplicity and the source of the spring blocked by them. With quiet resolve, she exploits César's guilt and plays off his nephew's hopeless love of her against the affections of a stranger. Reclaiming her birthright, Manon reveals their roles in Jean de Florette's death. In a devastating final twist, César is found to be her father and both De Florette's and his lands fall into Manon's hands, lending due weight to the origin of her name in manouche [gypsy], manqué [shortage], manoeuvrier [manipulator], and manoir [manor or house]. Although she is the spring from which justice flows, the circumstances surrounding Manon's birth cast her as the source of all that which has gone before. The most memorable, beautifully photographed film diptych I've seen, Jean de Florette / Manon des Sources reflects life without compromise, showing justice's double-edged sword cutting through woolly notions of right and wrong. No matter how good these films, they remain representations of life, photographic frames passed before our eyes in a manner mimicking movement or justice's inevitability. Back in the can, they revert to frozen images; stolen moments carefully choreographed and spliced to a righteous dance we view at will. Justice is not inevitable, but when it does put in an appearance, it usually cuts both ways. The truth of Claude Berri's films lies in the unerring message that none of us is innocent.
So where is the Bigger Picture painted for us by the Top 10 authors, the textbooks and most made-for-TV soaps? Is it in the movie, our appreciation of it as a parable to include in the stories of our lives, in the universality of its meaning, its message mirrored in so much that we see about us, or in the minds of those who put it together? Or is the Bigger Picture dependent on who we are as we watch the film, that succession of images scrolling before our eyes?
Is each not tied to the other? Does the Bigger Picture not grow from the image to the movie to the screen to the viewer to life and everything beyond? Can it not be that the Bigger Picture is encapsulated in a single frame taken from a single cut of a particular scene?
If I look about me, is it unreasonable for me to suppose that my life forms a small part of a greater whole, the meaning of which is incomprehensible to me? Am I not a frame in the movie of life? Is it unreasonable to assume I constitute but one image in the mind of a director making a movie I have yet to appreciate?
If I look at the images mirrored in this entry, and once I get past the seemingly immediate and arresting presence of Emmanuelle Béart, I am lost in my recollection of the films, my imagined reality of the hills of the Luberon, my readings of Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence, Tojours Provence and Hotel Pastis, the light and colour of the Impressionists, etc.
The image, or the immediate, takes me beyond where I am or who I am and this is so of every in-the-world, real-life situation.
Am I wrong, incorrect or stupid in not seeing in, for example, my wife taking a razor to her arm, the person she is, the world she means to me, the possibility of what she can become, those times and things and moments we have shared and will share, the strength, vision and hope of my family, the potential of every human being to overcome any adversity, the beauty of the unpredictable being so utterly predictable and a sense of wonder at one day being able to view the director's cut?
I think not.
Ah yes, fatalism. I am subjecting myself to the clearest possible example of the odious Grand Narrative. Whether I frame these opinions in terms of myth, legend, stories, film or religion, I am relinquishing my hold on my right, responsibility and freedom to choose.
It's a cop out.
Again, I think not. Pushed to the wall, I find [as I have found throughout my life] that, if justice is not, choice and its consequences are inevitable. More often that not, my choice, which is to love my wife despite the restrictions it appears to place on her life, my life and those of my children, is only wrong when it does not suit the grand narratives or fictions constituting the lives of others. My life does not fit the movies in which they believe themselves to have title roles.
I'd rather not walk out on the whole shebang and, with my brilliant intellect, disarming charm and devastating wit, cut a swathe through life that leads to personal fame, fortune and a succession of relationships with beautiful, intelligent and witty young women pursuing careers benefiting society at large [ho ho, I've always loved that one].
Is your life a movie or do you merely choose to view it as such? Is your life a film or do you star in the Bigger Picture? Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
The physicists tell us gluons came first. Frankly, I'm inclined to believe them.
We are all in the movie; it is the only show in town. It is not clear where the dramatic action is leading or if the movie has a plot or a director. As a physicist my interest is in how the scenery for this 3-D movie is constructed, what its parts are, and how the machinery works.
The Cosmic Code Heinz R Pagels 1983 Michael Joseph Ltd. p231
On Friday morning, my wife handed me a card she uses to buy alcohol. I took it, broke it, turfed it into the dustbin and thought, "Well, that's a positive sign." On Friday evening, she showed me vicious bruises marring her arm and chest. She was mugged on Monday or Tuesday but had decided not to tell me about it. She'd successfully hidden the bruises for four days.
I was not surprised she'd been mugged. We live in South Africa. Everybody gets mugged. Well, I don't but you know me. It's that suicidal glint in the eyes that gets to them. No, I was surprised she'd decided to hide her mugging from me and equally surprised at her reasons for doing so.
Had we moved two steps forward and one back or one forward and two back?
Whether ships or planes go down, embassies or Humvees loaded with American troops go up, the rebels move in or Charles Taylor moves out, I know what will occupy my mind for the next day or two. She's far more important to me than war or peace, famine or disease, shock or awe, politicians or blogging. She's my wife and I love her.
Call it or me what you like. Invoke gluons, fatalism, 3-D cosmic movies, irresponsibility or choice. It doesn't matter. I call it love and, as Locke puts it, after 24 years, there's No Love Lost.
Yeah, Bubba, I'm in your movie too.
Manon's story, whether we see it in a single frame or as part of a stunning filmic diptych, plays to our desire to see justice done. What goes around comes around, doesn't it? Doesn't it? Everybody says it does.
The message I take from these films is that relationships, be they insipid and boring or passionate and volatile, are better than partnerships. Where people's lives are intertwined, there is no right or wrong way and no good or bad way determining the individual's innocence or guilt. Nor can we foresee the outcome of single scenes forming part of an as yet unfinished story.
We have to wait until the whole thing's cobbled together before we can all sit back and watch it together. We'll then be in a position to judge its worth. I think, as Pagels surmises, we'll find that although we all go through it alone, we're all in it together...
...and that means sticking to those we love, through thick and thin.
