Multiple Layers of Reality in Film, and in Us

Tags

art, Consciousness, creativity, Fanny and Alexander, Film, imagination, Ingmar Bergman, layers of reality, life, Movies, multiplicity, reality

In several of his films, Ingmar Bergman plays with the notion of multiple layers of reality. This can be seen as early as The Seventh Seal, and continues with Autumn Sonata, and Wild Strawberries, culminating in what was intended to be his final film, Franny and Alexander.

In some ways, Franny and Alexander is a tour de force. It speaks to us on so many levels. It can be seen, in part, as a family saga, a farce, a fairy tale, a theatrical play, a Gothic Romance, and a supernatural horror story. It is, in fact, all these things at once.

Yet each differing perspective can be seen as a different layer of reality, a different way of looking at the same material. Each appears as a separate backdrop against which the film can be seen, which, when lifted, offers a new view, a new level of perception, a new “reality.”

We can see this in the opening sequence. The first shot reveals a close-up of what appears to be an ornate building. As the camera moves down the building, we see a row of footlights and what now appears to be a stage. A series of painted backdrops are lifted to reveal new scenes. But it is only when the last backdrop is raised that we see a child’s face, huge, behind the scenes. This is when we realize that the stage is but a child’s theater and the row of footlights are candles. The camera seems to be inviting the viewer to see through these multiple layers of “reality,” perceptions of the real, to the final revelation, the child, or rather, the child’s imagination, as revealed through his dreamy gaze.

The film continues to pull back layer after layer of curtains to reveal the tenuous and shifting nature of reality.

In the final scene, the grandmother is reading from Strindburg’s “A Dream Play.” She reads: “Anything will occur. Anything is possible and likely. Time and space do not exist. On the tenuous ground of reality, imagination reaches out and weaves a new pattern.”

Reality is seen to be not singular, but as consisting of ever-deepening layers of reality, one on top of the other, in a richly dense and complex multiplicity.

I was reminded of this film when listening to one of Alan Watt’s talks that I wrote about in another post. And I wonder if the reason Bergman’s films resonate with so many people is that we sense a truth here. We see this perspective not only in film and art, about the mystery of things, these shifting perspectives and “layers of reality,” but we see it in science, how beneath these seemingly solid bodies lies unseen, shifting worlds that swirl and collide and contradict each other.

I question often what is real and not-real, and wonder if it’s more complex than that. Perhaps it’s not a case of what’s real or not, of one or the other, but shifting perceptions of what’s real, some dark, some light, that weave together a reality that is deeper and more complex than our superficial lives allow us to see.

POSTSCRIPT: In searching for photos for this post, I happened upon Roger Ebert’s review of the film, which also, surprisingly (or maybe not so), refers to the film as having “shifted into a different kind of reality.” I’ve added an excerpt of his review here:

“There are fairy-tale elements here, but “Fanny and Alexander” is above all the story of what Alexander understands is really happening. If magic is real, if ghosts can walk, so be it. Bergman has often allowed the supernatural into his films. In another sense, the events in “Fanny and Alexander” may be seen through the prism of the children’s memories, so that half-understood and half-forgotten events have been reconstructed into a new fable that explains their lives.

What’s certain is that Bergman somehow glides beyond the mere telling of his story into a kind of hypnotic series of events that have the clarity and fascination of dreams. Rarely have I felt so strongly during a movie that my mind had been shifted into a different kind of reality. The scenes at night in the Jacobi house are as intriguing and mysterious as any I have seen, quiet and dreamy, and then disturbing when the mad Ismael calmly and sweetly shows Alexander how everything will be resolved.”

What do you think? Have you seen any of Bergman’s films? Do you think there’s more to us, or reality, than what we experience in the everyday?

I first posted this, in slightly different form, in 2014.

You Don’t Have to Love Them, Just Love

Tags

compassion, delusions, drama, Fear, hate, humanity, life, Love, Metta Prayer, partisan politics, suffering, unconditional love

A man lamented to an Elder in his Church that try as he might, he could not love his hyper-critical, unloving mother. The Elder told him, “My son, you don’t have to love her, you just have to love.”

That was a freeing thought to me years ago when I was having the same problem with a difficult-to-love mother. I knew I loved her, in the sense I cared about her happiness and well-being. But I was plagued by floods of unloving thoughts about her. Me being, probably, as hyper-critical of her as I believed she was of me, and just about everyone she met.

The Elder’s advise seemed to lift a heavy burden from my shoulders. I didn’t have to love the hyper-critical person, but I could be loving in my words and actions toward her, and gentle with myself for my shortcomings as well. I could love her humanity, her challenges, her struggles, and be compassionate toward her inability to be what I wanted, as well as compassionate toward my own inability to live up to my highest aspirations.

But how do we do that in these hyper-partisan times where so many people and political leaders acting out in ways that are hateful and violent and dangerously unreasonable? With the rise of tyranny and fear-mongering; the assault on truth, plain hard facts and overwhelming evidence? One worries about the fate of our nation and democracy itself, not to mention the fate of the world, plagued by firestorms, hurricanes, floods, with so little effort directed at making the changes needed to halt or even slow this global meltdown.

The world we love is being threatened by those we have come to hate. What is a loving-minded person supposed to do with all these intense, negative feelings and fears?

The answer is: You don’t have to love them. You just have to love.

But what do I “just love,” if not them? How can they be excluded if we’re “just loving” without a particular object to love?

Then I realized something, and it was like a hard, obstinate, ugly dam had been broken and the love I’d been withholding and resisting broke loose. The anger and resentment I’d been nurturing and justifying, and the fear that had been terrorizing me, were swept away.

The thing I realized is that genuine Love—the unconditional, not the personal kind —isn’t an add-on, something we choose or chose not to have. Genuine Love, the big kind with the big L, is the ground of being upon which all of us rest, that supports and sustains us all, the loving and unloving, the good and bad, the tyrant and saint.

We’re all delusional in one way or another. All living our lives on limited information and understanding about the world around us and each other, about what’s right and what’s wrong, about who we are, where we came from, and what our purpose is. Whether we like it or not, we’re going to rub up against each other and each other’s delusions, no matter what we do or how we chose to live. We can’t get out of it. We’re stuck with each other. And while things may get better for us personally, at the same time they are getting worse for others. And new challenges are on the way.

That’s where the compassion of genuine Love flows, from the realization that the one we are prone to hate or fear for their hateful deeds is just delusional, a rube to his own delusions, as we are to ours. Our sympathy, our love, extends to all of us, because we are all suffering, even while not condoning the acts that cause our suffering, and doing what we can to relieve it.

We can “just love” the whole human drama as it has rolled out over the centuries and through our own few days of existence, knowing that it will continue to roll on without us, perhaps forever in the way delusions always seem so real while they last.

But beneath all the drama that is heaving us about like storms at sea, is this deep sympathy, this oceanic peaceful presence of unconditional Love that supports and sustains us all even in the midst of all the turmoil we are experiencing.

Within that maelstrom, we each, like tiny bubbles thrown up and tossed about, clashing with each other, opposing or uniting, go about the business of being separate and apart until the delusion of our bubble of existence dissolves and we know each other as we always have been and always will be, an essential part of the underlying, unifying whole. Part of that tender, exuberant, endlessly creative flow of Love.

To sum it up: Don’t love “them,” just love “Us.”

This Metta (Lovingkindness) Prayer, which can be adapted by anyone to fit any circumstance, helps to bring that loving aspiration into focus:

In gladness and in safety, may all beings be at ease.
Whether they are weak or strong, great or humble, wealthy or needy, omitting none,
The wise or foolish, friend or foe, neighbor or stranger,
Those who have wronged us and those we have wronged,
Those who love us and those who do not,

May all beings be at ease!

May all beings have happiness and cause of happiness.
May all beings remain free from suffering and the cause of suffering.
May all beings remain unseparated from the sacred joy and that is free from sorrow,
May all beings rest in the boundless and all-inclusive equanimity that supports and sustains us all.

In Defense of Joy

Tags

beauty, delight, inspiration, Jack Gilbert, Joy, life, Philosophy, poetry, spirituality, Zen

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

Jack Gilbert, from “A Brief for the Defense“

The title of this poem is so interesting. How sometimes we feel we must defend our pleasures, our moments of delight, in the face of so much suffering in the world.

Finding the balance between wanting to save the world (as if I could) and wanting to lay all that aside and just savor it while I can, has been a lasting theme in my life.

More and more I’m tending toward the latter.

My favorite treatise on the subject is the tale of the Zen monk being chased over a cliff by a tiger. He grabs hold of a vine to keep from falling, while a hungry alligator snaps at his heels in the river below. Just then, he spies a juicy red strawberry hanging nearby. He reaches out with one hand to pop it into his mouth.

“Oh, so delicious!” he sighs.

As do I.

A New Tenderness Toward This Body

Tags

age, art, beginnings, body, death, endings, life, Louise Gluck, Love, poetry, prose poem, tenderness, writing

Francisco Zúñiga (1912-1998)

Crossroads

by Louise Glück

My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer
I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar,
like what I remember of love when I was young —

love that was so often foolish in its objectives
but never in its choices, its intensities
Too much demanded in advance, too much that could not be promised —

My soul has been so fearful, so violent;
forgive its brutality.
As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you cautiously,

not wishing to give offense
but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance: it is not the earth I will miss,
it is you I will miss.

A New Beginning for Our Ending

I too feel a new tenderness toward this body that holds me so tenderly in return, within its soft, wide confines. That moves me and moves with me wherever I go. That holds within all that I am, memories and emotions that ebb and flow, that mere touch, taste, scent, releases. And even now, after all this time together, when a foot or knee fails, when bones creak and muscles sigh, and the weight of you seems too much to bear, still, still, you gather me in your arms. You hold me near, breathe me in, lift me up, and lay me down. You try so hard to be what I need, to do what needs doing. Too often I have railed against you, dismissed you, disowned you. Let me see you now as friend, as lover, as mother. As dear to me as sky and earth and tree and sea. Let me cherish you as you have cherished me, and when the end comes, let us rest and rise together.

Joy Amid the Turmoil: A 2020 Recap

Tags

2020, Blogging, Covid-19, life, new year, Politics

The year 2020 may have been the most turbulent year any of us have ever known. Blogging in such a year was challenge enough. Trying to recapture that whirlwind may be beyond any of us.

But I will try. And at least it ends on a note of joy.

Looking back at my first blog post of 2020, I wrote about how challenging 2019 had been. My wish list for 2020 was the same as my 2019 list, as one year had not been enough long to bring the happy endings that I had hoped for. My wish list for 2021 would be a repeat of the last two years, except I’ve put wish lists on hold for the time being. Things are too uncertain, and the turbulent times are still with us.

For me, the turmoil of 2020 did not begin with Covid, but blew in on the tailcoat of 2019 as I wrote about in From the Tailwinds of 2019, Hope Lost & Its Glimmer.” My February post “I’m Praying for You to Die” detailed more of the trauma. But Covid only compounded the turmoil, as noted in March’s post Homeschooling Again & Who’s the Boss.

In April I wrote about The Joy and Grief and Everything in Between that came with Covid, the mixed feelings and emotional turmoil so many were feeling as we tried to survive the initial lockdowns and isolation. We did not realize then how long all this would be going on, the horrendous death toll it would bring, or the economic disaster.

In May I wrote about Poetry in the Time of Corona. It must have resonated with a lot of readers as I saw it move into my :Top Ten Posts” list and rise to number 4.

In June during all the racial strife, the police brutality and protests, I began a series of posts about my “Brushes with Blackness,” how Black lives and Black culture colored my whiteness, and helped shape my sense of justice, fair play, and compassion for others.

In August I wrote the unsettling and surreal world in which we all were living in Still Waiting to Land . . . . I wrote: “Clearly we live in interesting times. A curse? Possibly. A cleansing? Hopefully. No wonder we feel as if the rug has been pulled out from under our feet. And we haven’t quite landed yet.” I still feel that way.

I followed that with Wildfires Everywhere, Politically and Literally about watching wildfires gobble up California and cast an eerie and ominous red glow over the land, even while the Democratic National Convention was providing a glimmer of hope midst all the devastation.

In September I wrote Grieving for America, and Getting Past It, and then my favorite, just after the election, Truth and Love Wins, and I Can Breathe Again.

Unfortunately the political turmoil did not end with Biden’s victory as hoped, and perhaps even has gotten worse, which seems unimaginable. Yet, for me personally, 2020 has still ended on one ecstatic note.

At the beginning of this year I wrote: “The one gift 2019 gave me (which is huge and fills my heart!) is hope for my granddaughter when she came to live with me. Hope that she will remain in my care, happy and safe, healthy and strong, responsibly cared for and dearly cherished as she grows into a young woman.”

That gift kept growing in 2020. Everything I had hoped and planned for concerning my granddaughter’s welfare came true, as I wrote about in My Arms Are Empty, but My Heart is Full. She is happy and well and living the life of her dreams with her aunt and uncle: surfing, hiking, biking, movie nights snuggling on the couch, reading the Harry Potter series together before bed, laughing with her new best friends at school, and telling me all about her fun-filled days on our weekly video-chats. She was asked recently what the best thing about 2020 was. She answered, “Moving here. Else I wouldn’t have this life I love.”

So for all the turmoil of 2020, and whatever upheaval 2021 might bring, I can comfort myself with that huge gift of joy.

David Whyte, Putting Down the Weight of Aloneness

Tags

aloneness, Creative Nonfiction, David Whyte, Everything is Waiting for You, inspiration, life, poetry

Henri Matisse

I’ve long been a fan of David Whyte’s poetry and this one is no exception. It seems it may have been written especially for these times, when so many of us find ourselves cocooned in our homes, feeling alone, cut off from everything.

And yet, even here, all alone, he writes, is this “swelling presence” of the everyday and ordinary, this “chorus” of the mundane that surrounds us. This “conversation” with kettles and cooking pots, doors and stairs is a grand symphony that accompanies our solo voice. Yet these intimate and animate objects, like a constant companion that comforts and supports, just waiting for our interplay, go almost unnoticed.

My elbow leans lazily on my desk and my hand cradles the mouse as I stop to stare at this brilliant invention before me. Then I lean back in my chair and continue typing thoughts into cyberspace. The wall clock behind me waits patiently for my wayward glance, ticking out the seconds so it can tell me the exact time when I need to know.

Yes, everything, everything is just waiting for me. Somehow these objects and I are woven together, seamlessly creating this life we share. We are never alone if only we would look and see.

Everything is Waiting For you

by David Whyte

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

Links to more poetry by Whyte

Something in this Sleeping Earth

Opened at Last

Melt into that Fierce Heat of Living

 

Still Waiting to Land . . . .

Tags

change, humanity, interesting times, life, pandemic, personal, Politics, uncertainty

Last summer brought an abundance of roses, so many I did not have enough vases to hold them all. And I only picked those hidden from view!

This year the roses are few and those poorly formed, although our watering and fertilizing and spraying have all been the same. But the baby quail, and deer, and turkey! We’ve never seen so many baby critters trailing through all our yards, hunkering under the bushes, and flying up into the treetops!

This week a heatwave has been forecast, with temperature over 100 for ten days straight and up to 112 degrees. Clear skies, zero precipitation.

But twice this week, instead of heat, we got warm rain. One time lasting all day, and today our house shook with thunder. The rain fell so hard and thick it looked like hail. And they say it never rains in California in the summertime!

A sign of the times, this unexpected mixture of drought and abundance. And not limited to nature. So much seems surreal.

Mailboxes ripped up and sorting machines thrown into dumpsters right before an election!

Walls of moms, and dads with leaf blowers, being tear-gassed by storm troopers!

The first Black woman chosen as VP on a major political ticket!

A diplomatic treaty signed between the UAE and Israel!

Open warfare between teachers and governors over whether to open schools or resort to distant learning again!

Hoards of unmasked worshipers swamping the beaches in Orange County, despite a pandemic that is killing hundreds of thousands of Americans!

What does it all mean? How will it all end?

We are lost within the grey fog of war.

Clearly we live in interesting times. A curse? Possibly. A cleansing? Hopefully.

No wonder we feel as if the rug has been pulled out from under our feet. And we haven’t quite landed yet.

My Arms Are Empty, But My Heart Is Full

Tags

children, grandparents, guardianship, life, personal

Moonbeams by Jessie Wilcox Smith

My granddaughter who had been living with me this past year is visiting with her Aunt and Uncle this summer, 300 miles away.  If all goes well, she will be staying with them  while starting second grade.

My long, hard-fought struggle to win permanent guardianship of my 7 year old granddaughter was finally won. Which means I must decide what is in her best interest: To continue living here with me and her grandfather in virtual Covid-isolation. Or to allow her to live with younger, more active caretakers who love her dearly and can provide a far better life for her than we can.

I chose the latter, of course, but not without anguish.  I miss her dearly, despite the daily face chats, photos, and reports of her adjustment. She loves her new “awesome” bedroom with the pink walls and loft-bed where she and her new dog Sasha can hide-away beneath and play. She has a “real” sidewalk to ride her scooter now, not a long steep driveway that leads to a narrow road. The beach is only minutes away, and already she’s surfing, and standing(!) with Uncle’s help. She’s in a musical theater day camp where she plays one of the lost boys in Peter Pan. She has two active caretakers to play with her and put her to bed and teach her new things every day. They are the kindest, most loving couple I know, and they are so excited to have her there, filling their home with love and laughter.

My arms are empty and I ache for her. I know despite all the good that has come and is coming her way that it’s not easy to adjust to so many new changes. But she’s strong and resilient and wise beyond her years. Before we ever contemplated this move, she was reading a book about a girl who was anxious about a new move,  going to a new school and making new friends. She said, “Grandma, I don’t get it, why kids are always so scared of change? It’s just a new school! She’ll make new friends! It’s nothing to get so dramatic about!”

She knows this from experience. She’s had so many changes in her young life and she’s learned to take it all in stride and make the most of it.

I know this is the best possible outcome, and I’m thrilled for her, and for my daughter and son-in-law. She knows that I will be visiting often, and she’ll be coming here to spend holidays and summer vacation. This will always be her home too.

It’s what her parents said they wanted for her also. Years ago they chose this Aunt and Uncle to care for their daughter should something happen to them. They trusted them then, as I do now.

Still, it’s not easy letting go. My house feels so empty without her. My arms crave her warm body. But my heart is full. She’s safe, she’s happy, her future is secure. She’s is cherished, and so very, very loved. God is good.

“What I Regret Most, Failures of Kindness” – Graduation Speech Goes Viral

Tags

Advice, George Saunders, Graduation, Hayden Carruth, inspiration, Kindness, life, Love, poetry, Regret, speech

With graduation season upon us, I thought I’d re-share the most inspiring graduation speech I ever read. One by the acclaimed writer George Saunders that went viral several years ago. Below is a slightly altered version of my original post as well as the poem by Hayden Carruth that inspired his speech.

It’s not often you get major writers speaking of such mundane and seemingly trite things as “regrets” and “kindness” to students graduating from ivy-league schools. But that’s what Saunders spoke about at Syracuse University in 2013.

You can read the whole speech HERE.

Saunders starts out with this amazing statement:

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded…sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

Then he lists sensible ways to learn how to be kind:

Education is good; immersing ourselves in a work of art: good; prayer is good; meditation’s good; a frank talk with a dear friend; establishing ourselves in some kind of spiritual tradition – recognizing that there have been countless really smart people before us who have asked these same questions and left behind answers for us.

Because kindness, it turns out, is hard – it starts out all rainbows and puppy dogs, and expands to include…well, everything.

But not to worry, he says, because kindness, hard as it is, becomes easier as we grow older. As life kicks us around a bit we learn to become more kind, because we realize how much we need it, and depend upon it, and want it for our loved ones.

Most people, as they age, become less selfish and more loving. I think this is true. The great Syracuse poet, Hayden Carruth, said, in a poem written near the end of his life, that he was “mostly Love, now.”

And so, a prediction, and my heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love. YOU will gradually be replaced by LOVE.

Wow. To be replaced by love. I can’t think of a more worthwhile goal to strive toward for anyone starting off in life. Or winding down, for that matter.

Here is Carruth’s poem.

Testament

by Hayden Carruth

So often it has been displayed to us, the hourglass
with its grains of sand drifting down,
not as an object in our world
but as a sign, a symbol, our lives
drifting down grain by grain,
sifting away — I’m sure everyone must
see this emblem somewhere in the mind.
Yet not only our lives drift down. The stuff
of ego with which we began, the mass
in the upper chamber, filters away
as love accumulates below. Now
I am almost entirely love. I have been
to the banker, the broker, those strange
people, to talk about unit trusts,
annuities, CDs, IRAs, trying
to leave you whatever I can after
I die. I’ve made my will, written
you a long letter of instructions.
I think about this continually.
What will you do? How
will you live? You can’t go back
to cocktail waitressing in the casino.
And your poetry? It will bring you
at best a pittance in our civilization,
a widow’s mite, as mine has
for forty-five years. Which is why
I leave you so little. Brokers?
Unit trusts? I’m no financier doing
the world’s great business. And the sands
in the upper glass grow few. Can I leave
you the vale of ten thousand trilliums
where we buried our good cat Pokey
across the lane to the quarry?
Maybe the tulips I planted under
the lilac tree? Or our red-bellied
woodpeckers who have given us so
much pleasure, and the rabbits
and the deer? And kisses? And
love-makings? All our embracings?
I know millions of these will be still
unspent when the last grain of sand
falls with its whisper, its inconsequence,
on the mountain of my love below

Poetry in the Time of Corona

Tags

coronavirus, inspiration, life, poem, poetry

John Singer Sargent

Leaf shadows thrown by the morning sun against a creamy wall.

Soft, sensuous folds of a warm blanket tossed across my knees.

My grandmother’s hands wrapped around a mug as I sip sweet coffee.

So much I fail to see in the time of corona.

Or seeing, fail to note,

Or noting, fail to feel

What once I felt.

Poetry all around me.

— April 30, 2020