To thine own self be true

Caught a dragonfly inside a jar”
–Joni Mitchell, “The Circle Game”

You are the mighty sea
You are the breath that brings
Each new day to me”

–the great Johnny Clegg remembered

The city wakes up with the dawning
People run to catch their bus
We almost sleep in, we’re both yawning
And rushing out is not for us.

–excerpt from one of my songs

And I my Robert Frost

And we note our place with bookmarkers
That measure what we’ve lost”

–Paul Simon, “The Dangling Conversation”

couched in our indifference like shells upon the shore. You can hear the ocean roar.”

–Paul Simon, “The Dangling Conversation”

–Paul Simon

And I remember the city by dusk-
colored lights in September,
walking the streets with
myriad strangers,
amazed at the stillness
of prairie all around us.

We had come like moths
drawn by this illumination
of night, curious and half-awake.
I looked into your eyes
and it was all I ever wanted.
and we were happy there, aglow.

Jesus of Montreal (1989) on DVD. French with English subtitles. (Adults only)

Earnest young actor Daniel Coulombe is offered a chance by an older priest to revitalize an annual Passion Play with stations, performed at a Catholic church on Mount Royal in Montreal. Casting himself as Jesus, he recruits Constance, a soup-kitchen server; Martin, an actor he finds voice-dubbing for porn films; Mireille, a sexy ads actress who’s been told she can’t act; and Rene, a documentary voice-over actor who wants most to perform Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be”. This is the cast who ends up playing multiple roles in a modern retelling of the Crucifixion and Resurrection using sites on Mount Royal.

The movie quickly and abruptly segues from casual realistic, cobbled-together rehearsals into very sincere, serious, graphic scenes of the actual finished play in its first powerful performance. Particularly unexpectedly strong scenes like Jesus breaking bread with the audience, His walking on water, being whipped and stabbed on the cross, and His being raised from the dead have a verisimilitude that convince many of the audience what they are witnessing is real and that Daniel is a great actor and actually Christ-like. (Even Rene gets his wish to perform “To be or not to be” set appropriately against the Christ narrative. The extras also dispense Christian life-wisdom in the Resurrection scene climax.)

Director-writer Deny Arcand’s masterpiece is beautifully photographed on Mont Royal and includes Montreal skyscrapers, hospitals, film studios, and even the subway. This creates a pointed larger modernistic, juxtaposed context for the telling of Daniel’s story, especially after the midway point when the hypocritical, conflicted, sold-out priest informs the troupe that the Church wants to shut the play down before a second performance. As he says, “Institutions live longer than individuals.”

The secular-religious plot moves into high gear for further social commentary by developing absurdist satire of exploitive advertising and the ‘star-making’ machine through scenes in which Daniel rescues Mireille in a parody of the money-lenders temple scene and in which he is tempted by an incredibly slick entertainer promoter-lawyer in a skyscraper parodying Christ’s temptation by the Devil. The climactic arrest of Jesus scene that follows is clever and rife with irony as is the “Last Supper’ pizza scene on the mount.

Suffice to say, that Arcand continues to throw huge, ironic twists and curves from this point on to the end to the picture and the end of Daniel’s metaphorical journey. What can go wrong does go wrong with believable failures and abject suffering in public places. As Rene correctly predicted, “Doing tragedy is dangerous.” The long surprise-ending rolls out poetically, ironically, realistically, and absurdly.

But there is a logic and many truths to all that Daniel experiences and the viewer, much like the audience at the play, witnesses. And Arcand leaves the viewer wondering, like the priest: What is more important? Honesty, truth-telling, and realism, or fiction, pleasure, and happiness in this too-oft brief and harsh modern existence?

Highly recommended for viewers who enjoy clever satire, symbolism, highly-engaging, and thought-provoking cinema. A perfect film requiring no edits.

To pre-address a potential heart attack, put 2–81 mg aspirins in a pill case in your vehicle, by your bedside, and on the main floor of your house.

A drowsy fly trembled on the worn wooden window screen. The April breeze was cool and, looking down to the breaking ice on the river below, I wondered how many times both my cancer-stricken parents had stood there, by day and night, contemplating the familiar, yet ever-changing panorama.

Behind me were piled some fifty boxes of packed belongings that represented their now-gone, irrelevant past. My inheritance. Ready for moving day. Lit by the sun from another window in the living room, the brilliant pink hydrangeas I`d bought her the first day I came to stay lived blithely on without my mother.

The ceiling fan stood still, though a black clock–a gift from the newspaper–ticked monotonously. On the floor, a cooler from long ago picnics inquired about the possibility of another summer. A cold heating pad sat aimlessly on a chair for her return. In the corner stood the crutches from a fall she never told me about. On the floor a dark braided oval rug my father, weak from chemo, had lain on nine years before, lovingly cleaning it with a tiny vacuum. By the window, the tv screen was clean once more, its nicotine haze wiped off.

On the wet lawn outside, two deer edged up the bank cautiously–one male, one female, nibbling the grass. Life was, indeed, tough enough though spring had chosen now to return. In the end, there was no choice, you see. I spared the fly and turned away from the window.

************************************************************************************

Notes: Apparently I was meant to revisit the fly and another take on death, more close and personal, two decades later. There is much that is implicit/explicit about time, the past, memory, change, process, time passing, death, and finally life, rebirth, and choices here in this piece. Nature, as always, plays a role in whatever destined moments of being. For my own part, I know the timely deer represented/were my parents.

Everything is there to be seen and observed, internalized and finally understood and appreciated. Writing has been my great luck. It embodies who and what I am and whatever truths of life and love experience. And perhaps you`ll agree that we all, like the fly, deserve another chance to live and experience another day and season.