Life imitates life ...

Stanley Kubrick, the reclusive director of the remarkable visionary 1968 science fiction film "2001: A Space Odyssey", apparently destroyed all of the props for the movie because he didn't want them reused for lesser movies or sold as memorabilia. The film suggests that the entire history of humankind from the ape-like creatures foraging and fighting in the opening scenes to a climatic ill-fated odyssey to the planet Jupiter, has been the result of manipulation by extra-terrestial forces.

The picture of actor Keir Dullea in the role of an interplanetary astronaut [above], remains as a photo icon of 60-70's pop-culture lore. In a perilous bid for survival, he matches wits with “HAL”, a spaceship computer gone amuck, only to become ensnared in a surrealistic Einsteinian curved space-time realm where in a remarkable sequence, he ages dramatically and then is transformed into a heavenly "star child" ... seemingly a film medium rendering of science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke's metaphor for being and nothingness set in the vastness of space. This particular movie scene is depicted here, synced with Barber’s Adagio for Strings affording a curiously haunting atmosphere of dignity and wonder:

This scene has prompted controversy largely concerning confusion between the imaginary world depicted and the real; but in true life, the same drama is actually being played out today as portrayed by the gracefully aging Mr. Dullea himself [below] some 40 years later, caught as all are, in the same curved space-time realm, albeit not traveling in a speeding Jupiter-bound spaceship, but essentially beset on a speeding planet in a holding pattern around the sun.

... the pleasure principle

"Personally, I think that the unique and supreme delight lies in the certainty of doing 'evil' -- and men and women know from birth that all pleasure lies in evil." ... Baudelaire [pictured in 1863 at 42]

... the ethics of ambiguity

"Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us therefore try to look truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting" ... Simone de Beauvoir

"Nevermore!"

"Vainly I had sought to borrow … surcease of sorrow. Darkness there and nothing more.” ... Poe






The fairy tale image of the friendly giant found dead in his orchard lying under a soft blanket of tree blossoms by bewildered, adoring children conveys a wondrous sense of beauty in profound sadness. Such poetry, if we can call it that, attempts through sheer force of will to burst the fetters of aching pain, or at least to alleviate it through absorption in a happy past. But not just in fairy tales; it happens in music and art too ... however, alas, all in vain! The clear and present reality is agonizingly stark, for the heart does not lose something -- it loses everything.

The profound emotional impact of catastrophic tragic truth was not lost on Poe with the anguished "nevermore" lament in his poem "The Raven" ... nor on Chopin neither in a magnificently intimate work, his Nocturne Op. 48 No. 1 composed in 1841, whose “chief subject is a masterly expression of a great powerful grief ... told in an agitated recitando; celestial harps come to bring one ray of hope, which is powerless in its endeavor to calm the wounded soul, which sends forth to heaven a cry of deepest anguish”:



Perhaps though it is Beethoven’s weighty "marcia funebre" of the Eroica Symphony that plumbs the pathetic depths of grief as powerfully as any ... so much so that some people were reported to have been frightened by it in early concert performances of the work, considered then in 1805 to be a "new", even "revolutionary", kind of music. In this noble and expressive passage of fugal music we might well be present at the actual obsequy of a renowned and deeply loved person, with all that is good and great looking on as bodily remnants of insensate dust are respectfully and ceremoniously dispatched; and the motto might well be Tennyson's eloquent words:

"In the vast cathedral leave him,
God accept him, Christ receive him."

“Oscar Wilde: 'Do you mind if I smoke?' Sarah Bernhardt: 'I don't care if you burn'”

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at it.

Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know
not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment,
that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one
now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?

------------------------------------------------------
Pictured here is the gravedigger scene in the Shakespearean play "Hamlet". The actor (err ... actress) is Sarah Bernhardt at 56, one of the few women to play the role, and arguably the most famous actress of the 19th century. Her Hamlet tour opened in 1899 in Paris, and continued for two years showing in London, Scotland, Switzerland, Austria and Hungary. The tour attracted considerable attention in the literary press at the time. An interesting piece of contemporary published criticism has “Madame Bernhardt’s assumption of masculinity ... so cleverly carried out that one loses sight of Hamlet in one’s admiration of the tour de force of the actress”.

The gloves are off though as the same critic assesses the very scene pictured above:

“This skull, too, which had “lain in the earth three and twenty years,” instead of being brown, discolored, was of a staring and indecent whiteness, as of bone boiled and bleached. It was not pleasant to see the grinning object handled so callously. Some of the dramatic effect, too, went by the board in this; for what’s the use of bringing in the ironic emblem of mortality if it is treated as lightly as a lap-dog? Indeed, I feel sure that Madame Bernhardt treats her lap-dog more considerately, for it would be strange if she made gestures with it as unconcernedly as she does with the skull. If my eyes did not deceive me, she tapped the grinning teeth with her finger; and she certainly is far from objecting as genuinely to the odor of mortality as Shakespeare makes Hamlet when he asks if Alexander “looked o’ the fashion i’ earth, and smell so? Pah!” Here the actor is expressly directed to “put down the skull”, but Madame Bernhardt could not only endure to hold it without “Pah!” she seemed to forget what it was she had in those eloquent hands of hers, as she emphasized feelingly the lines on imperious Caesar by gesticulating with a skull of a former acquaintance.”

Bernhardt began touring internationally in 1880, travelling in special luxury railway cars and appearing for big money in cities across Europe and the United States. Reportedly not the most beautiful or even the most talented, she knew how to cultivate her stardom. She worked like a pack horse, her French patriotism made her a national emblem; her wit, temper tantrums and willingness to try new things ensured that her worldwide super stardom would last from her first hit in 1869 through to her death in 1923.



Sarah was as famous a personality as she was an actress. She painted, sculpted and wrote; she engaged in violent feuds and equally violent love affairs. She obligingly slept in a coffin for photographers, though she used a normal bed for more private slumber. Her romantic conquests were legend involving royalty, and countless famous artists and actors of both sexes. She is famously quoted as saying "We ought to hate very rarely, as it is too fatiguing, remain indifferent a great deal, forgive often, and never forget."

... a precise duty

"If we are honest—and as scientists honesty is our precise duty—we cannot help but admit that any religion is a pack of false statements, deprived of any real foundation. The very idea of God is a product of human imagination.... I do not recognize any religious myth, at least because they contradict one another...". Paul Dirac, antimatter progenerater, Solway Conference 1927 [pictured centre in 1947 with Oppenheimer at his right, developer of the atomic bomb].

... the delicate art of seduction

"It wasn't the way I looked at a man, it was the thought behind it."
Gloria Grahame