Life imitates art ...



interplanetary astronaut

The remarkable visionary 1968 science fiction film "2001: A Space Odyssey" 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.



This picture of actor Keir Dullea in the role of an interplanetary astronaut, 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 before our eyes and then is transformed into a heavenly "star child" ... a fascinating rendering of science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke's existential 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:



... 40 years later

This scene has prompted controversy largely concerning confusion between the imaginary world depicted and the real; but in truth, the same drama is being played out today as portrayed by the gracefully aging Mr. Dullea himself, pictured 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.

Stanley Kubrick, the reclusive director, apparently destroyed all the props for the movie because he didn't want them reused for lesser movies or sold as memorabilia.

... 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

"Naughty"

"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 (1908-86)


The great love of de Beauvoir’s life was arguably not Sartre but the American novelist Nelson Algren (1909-81). She would visit him in Chicago, finding his small rundown apartment in the Polish section to be “refreshing, after the heavy odour of the dollars in the big hotels and the elegant restaurants which I found hard to take.” His friend, the photographer Art Shay, took a snapshot of her just after she had emerged from a bath, seen nude from the rear, with her rather elegant upper half and sturdy buttocks and legs. He wrote: “She had taken her bath. It was while she fussed at the sink afterwards that I had the sudden impulse. She knew I took it because she heard the click of my trusty wartime Leica Model F. ‘Naughty man’ she said”.



Buried beside Sartre with his ring

de Beauvoir observed of Sartre that he was “a warm, lively man everywhere, but not in bed”; but of Algren, her “Division Street Dostoievski”, she readily admitted that, at age 39, she had entered into the first sexually fulfilling relationship of her life. Their affair though intermittently intense over some 17 years was fitful. Algren was moody, undisciplined and insecure, and his literary star blazed briefly and then fizzled, while de Beauvoir moved on to enormous success.

The relationship had a nasty aftermath when de Beauvoir wrote about it in her 1954 novel The Mandarins, to Algren’s fury. Until his death in 1981, he was recalling the affair bitterly, although upon de Beauvoir’s death in Paris five years later, she was buried beside Sartre wearing a silver ring that Algren had given her nearly forty years before.

"Nevermore!"

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

   ... Poe (1809-49),  "The Raven"

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; these attempts happen 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.

Grief is not date-stamped. Lines written by John Donne (1572-1631) or Ben Jonson (1572-1637) or Anne Bradstreet (1612-72) cannot be surpassed in controlled agony, nor can Poe's anguished "nevermore" lament resignedly muttered repeatedly in his poem "The Raven". But where words leave off, music begins as in Chopin's (1818-49) magnificent Nocturne Op.48 No.1. It was described eloquently by a contemporary as a work 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. There are fevers and cold sweats in this music; it is not healthy music, and it is not to be performed in a robust manner, but rather rendered almost as if in a somnambulant daze, with a tremulous delicacy of intensity, as if it were a living thing whose nerves were being operated upon, where every touch might mean life or death”:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_vZtpjNKVE&feature=player_embedded]

Perhaps Beethoven’s (1770-1827) weighty "marcia funebre" of the Eroica Symphony plumbs the pathetic depths of grief as powerfully as any ... so much so that people reportly were unnerved, even spooked by it in early concert performances ... a work considered then in 1805 to be a dramatically "new", even "revolutionary" kind of music:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJj9EydBM5g&feature=player_embedded].
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 (1809-92) eloquent words:

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