Abelard and Writer's Block

I think the biggest cause of writer’s block is too much to say, not too little to say. We hear of writers facing a blank page and nothing to say. When I am blocked, it is not that I feel blankness inside, or openness, or silence – it’s that I feel clamor, stuffiness, a scramble of voices all blocked and mired in each others’ push. There’s too much wanting to say . . . therefore I just walk away. Go feed the birds. Check the emails. Wash some clothes . . . much like leaving a noisy billiard parlor.

And this comes from not writing something every day, from ignoring the little things that seem unimportant and unworthy of the paper or the time – saying to myself, this is unimportant – this is just complaining – this has already been said – worst of all, who cares anyway? Letting things build up and get blocked.

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I think of a book I’ve been reading, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, the twelfth century monk and nun who left a trove of love letters behind when they died. You see, they had had a torrid love affair while he was studying for the priesthood – and she was his precocious student, 21 years his junior, who never intended to take vows herself but just loved learning (from him; he was quite handsome they say). Abelard had been hired by her rich Uncle Fulbert to teach her the scripture in their original languages, Greek and Hebrew. But once the uncle found out about the goings-on under his own roof, he had his henchmen castrate Abelard in his sleep. After much pain and remorse and a lot of secrecy, Abelard took his final vows, but not before ensuring that Heloise would do the same – so they should “forever be together in spirit” – that is to say, so she would be unavailable to any other man (my opinion).

 Then, after each had taken their vows and was embedded in separate monasteries, I suppose the hormonal changes began to set in from the castration.  Abelard ignored her, took a more fatherly tone in his letters, and made little attempt to see her.  That’s when she writes one of her most straightforward, insightful, and beautiful letters to him:

“Tell me one thing, if you can. Why, after our entry into religion, which was your decision alone, have I been so neglected and forgotten by you that I have neither a word from you when you are here to give me strength nor the consolation of a letter in absence? Tell me, I say, if you can –“

Did you not love my soul? Was it the flame of lust rather than love that bound you to me? I took the veil for you! Those are her very words, though I’m taking license to extract and scramble them together from several pages of text – a letter that rankles even 900 years later.  She details all her young school girl passion and hope in him.  She reminds him that she even bore his child in secret at age 17 and gave up the baby just so it wouldn’t taint his reputation or stand in the way of his career (vows).  Yet after she took the veil, forever marrying herself to God, as she puts it, he neglected her! “In truth I have done none of this for God but everything for you,” she laments. “Tell me, I say, if you can.”

His reply is a 20-page discourse on female complaining, “. . . a recital of your misery over the wrongs you suffer,” and “your old perpetual complaint against God concerning the manner of our entry into religious life and the cruelty of the act of treachery performed on me.”  This one pivotal letter seems to be the turning point in their relationship.  I know I think differently of Abelard forevermore after reading this letter.

The way I see it, his 20-page letter is nothing but fancy rhetoric meant to act like mirrors that deflect light into crazy patterns on the ceiling. I hope she saw it that way. He never answers the question of ‘why have I been so neglected and forgotten by you.’ Instead, he performs a sleight of hand – he angles the mirrors to cast shadows on Heloise.

After that game-changing letter, she stopped the complaining – but she also stopped writing heartfelt letters. Maybe she got her answer, maybe she believed she was wrong to complain, maybe she just gave up. The female in her was vanquished, just as the male in him had been. “I have set the bridle of your injunction on the words which issue from my unbounded grief,” she writes in reply. That’s it – her letters become short and to the point, mostly questions about how the nuns ought to conduct themselves under the Rule of Saint Benedict which was written for men – the cowls, for example, she writes, “What are we to do about the cowls?”

And then he answers her about the cowls. That becomes their relationship after he had secured her in the convent and told her to stop complaining.

It is difficult to finish the book now that Heloise has been shushed – a shushing which endured even through the two decades she lived after his death at age 63.  I wish she had written something in the privacy of her monastic cell about all that she really felt. We will never know – not because there was nothing to say, but because there was so much – and who would care? she must have thought – and so she walked away from saying it.

The Occasional Virtue

I read a newspaper article entitled “Study: College Kids More Cocky.”  The woman with the credentials to be quoted in such an article is Jean Twenge, author of the book Generation Me and a psychologist at San Diego State University.  She has published a new study concluding that college students “feel far more superior than their elders” – at least 60 percent of incoming freshman rate themselves as above average in all areas, compared to about 39 percent in 1966.  “It’s not just confidence. It’s over confidence – narcissism even,” she says.

“There are some advantages and some disadvantages to self esteem, so having some degree of confidence is often a good thing,” she begins.  But, as she sees it, too much self esteem can cause ‘a disconnect’ between self-perception and reality.  The Greeks called it hubris, as I recall from my own college days – and it was the downfall of almost every tragic hero (and more than a few modern day politicians, I might add).

I could have composed such an article myself last week, if someone had been with me to write it down while I was driving – when a very young teenage blonde, way too sexy for her age, made a stupid move in her BMW car while chattering wildly and laughing enthusiastically on her cell phone.  The stupid move put her ahead of me with no apologies or acknowledgment of the life or mishap I had just saved her by not asserting myself and rather deferring to her blind stupidity.  She will never know she was wrong – she will never know what she could have lost or what might have happened.  And so, I felt for just that time like a silent guardian angel who had watched out for her life (and mine) while she plodded along in the insular world of her own self importance – unconscious of me, of others, of danger, of wrong, of cost, of invisible forces to which one ought to be grateful . . .

I possibly saved her life, mine too, and certainly much inconvenience at the least.  Two cars did not collide that day because one of us deferred to the other who was in the wrong. Farther up the road, we two strangers sat side by side in parallel lanes at a stop light, and I looked over to see if the young driver might at least acknowledge the guardian angel who saved her – but she was still swaddled in the bubble wrap of her own private cell phone conversation and the climate control of her car and the slightly tinted glass and probably the stereophonic sound too – protected from intruders like me, immersed, disconnected from reality – just as the author had explained. “A disconnect between self-perception and reality.”

She did not look at me from her controlled environment.  And if she had, she might have been offended by the middle aged intruder trying to make eye contact through her tinted glass. She might have called her mother to report me.  She might have made some awful sign or mean look at me.

I don’t generally speak on cell phones when I’m driving because I’m not confident of my ability to do both without mishap – but I will never shy away from talking aloud to myself.  In those ensuing moments I recounted the young driver I once had been – always two hands grasped firmly on the wheel at 10 and 2 as I’d been taught, my neck and back muscles tense with the knowledge I could die while doing this, a foot and mind always poised to break on a dime if necessary.  I was not confident as a young person – in driving or in any other aspect of life.  The driving analogy might transfer to everything I did as a youth – sure of danger, only myself to blame, poised for sudden stops, and aware that others were probably right and I was probably wrong – always.

There’s a lot to be said for a lack of confidence at times.  I said this aloud to myself as the young blonde driver accelerated to the green light and sped beyond me into the sunset.

My own children were young and growing in self esteem in the late 80’s when Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers told them daily how special and wonderful they were.  I used to think, passing from room to room with a load of laundry or a wet mop or fresh baked snacks from the oven, I used to think, “Wow, no one ever told me that when I was young . . . how nice.” But then in later years I began to notice – and I’m not talking about my own children or their friends because I think that a moderate dose of confidence is a necessary thing and I wish I’d had it, and all that – however, I began to notice an over confidence and false importance and entitlement in some members of their generation.  I could see it regularly in the malls or neighborhood setting or my children’s schools.  They deferred to no one; their kind of confidence seemed to outshine my hard earned variety in every instance – and I began to think that the self esteem inducers had somehow over shot their mark. They had aimed the arrow at healthy self esteem, which needed to be done, but they had somehow landed it in the insular world of narcissism and self importance.

I never talked about it back then because I was afraid I was wrong or just getting old – but after reading this article and seeing the data that confirms my hunch, I’ll say what I’ve been thinking for many years – that Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers might have done well to add this caveat to their daily message:  “. . . and not only are you special and wonderful, but so is everyone else – and don’t forget it!  That’s the part they left out.

Understanding Piles

I devised the strategy of “Piles” last week as a way to inspire me to begin the annual routine of ‘clearing out clutter’ from the house which is a task I am well overdue for doing this year.  Instead of the usual plan of going from room to room to clean out drawers and shelves and closets and such, I decided to jolt myself into it by trickery.  I said, “OK, I am uninspired – so I will tiptoe into the thing by the strategy of piles.  Wherever there is a pile in any room,” I said aloud to myself as I moved from the kitchen table where I have been equally uninspired to write these past few weeks, “I will work through that pile.”  That is, I would dismantle it, shuffle through it, purge it, file it, memorize it, or trash it.  I would confront the stagnant energy that sits there on piles – unread newspaper articles, clippings of things I want to do or places I want to go, scribbled ideas to write about, books and magazines I intend to read, recipes I mean to try, warranties to be mailed, and user’s manuals to be figured out.  But it wasn’t just paper piles weighing me down, I soon found out, but piles of clothes that ought to be mended or ironed or done away with altogether – piles of stuff.

I began to understand Piles as I shuffled through its energy and smelled its mustiness, saw its ghosty offspring (dust balls) scuttle away under beds and heard their flat, stale cries.  We were not so different after all – they too had lost their fizzle, their inspiration, and their drive.  Piles are prostrate things; they have no humph; they prefer corners or shadowy hideaways, never the limelight . . . their only job is to take up space and gather dust unto themselves.  Dust is the embodiment of procrastination . . . and dust will beget more dust . . .

 It’s a wonderful thing to shuffle through old energy and make it stand upright – whether in a file cabinet or between bookends or on a wall – it becomes revitalized that way.  I want to stand upright too, I thought.  And I love tossing things into a trash can that I no longer need – like cleansing the mind of obligations and leaving open space for new ideas to come in. There were piles of recipes that had been limiting me while presiding on the kitchen table where I write – Prince William’s chocolate biscuit cake, real lemon curd, and tea cookies. “The wedding is over,” I said, and tossed them in the trash.  Some promising recipes I filed away in a drawer to be forgotten and perhaps cleaned out next year; at least they are no longer on the kitchen table where their stagnant energy becomes nagging energy every time I sit down to write – pulling at me and draining me.

 I thought the job of dismantling piles might be done in an hour or two, but it took the better part of Memorial Day weekend.  I had been inspired.  My trickery had worked – not only were the piles disrupted, but the books on shelves were sorted, the drawers purged, the closets stirred around and given light, the vitamin cabinet reorganized, the refrigerator and freezer cleaned out, and the birdbaths washed and refilled.  Clothes were thrown into category piles for either donation, or washing, or tossing.  Karen Kingston, the author of at least two feng shui books which I like so well, writes in her monthly e-newsletter, http://www.spaceclearing.com/html/blog/ that we wear only 20 percent of the clothing we keep.  An honest assessment of my own closet and drawers proves her right.

There was one persistent pile, however, that held more energy than the rest; it protested loudly each time I moved it – to the floor near the trash can, to the floor near the recyclables, to the floor near the donations – nothing seemed right.  It was my pile of mostly unread "Poetry" magazines which I had habitually stacked up since early 2009. I kept waiting for the perfect quiet evening to read them with diligence and focus, to digest them.  But that perfect evening (without tiredness) never came.  Having saved the best for last, they had soured.  So I carried them back to the room where I read, spread them out on the floor, shuffled them, stirred them, made them go out of order – and then left them that way, on the floor to breathe, for the rest of the day.  That night, Memorial Day Monday night, I cracked them open, one at a time – not reading every word, but selectively perusing them for the things I liked.  It was the third-to-the-last book I picked up (the July/August 2009 issue) that made my holiday weekend of cleaning and bustle all worthwhile – in it, a poem called, “Poet as Housewife” by Elizabeth Eybers, translated from the Afrikaans by Jacquelyn Pope:

Always a broom leaned against a wall,
meals never on time, if they come at all.

Days without dates through which she moves
empty and stubborn, slightly confused.

Ironing hung dejectedly over a chair,
gestures that come from who-knows-where.

Old letters unanswered, piled together,
papers and pills stuffed deep in a drawer.

Thankful to be part of your heart's great whole
yet devoted to the limits of her own small skull.

O orderly biped, take heed,
leave her alone -- let her read.

A Bode to Squirrels

Frozen-eyed
Squirrel in my garden plot,
I’d throw a rock at you
If the neighbors weren’t watching.

They run across the driveway
Like thieves with loot,
raccoon-eyed squirrels with
Zinnias on their breath.

Askance-eyed
Squirrel in my garden plot –
Your brood is watching
From the owl house you stole.

I know you know, have shown you so,
Without neighbors on my tail
I’ll throw rocks at you.

See Jane Stitch

I’ve caught the Jane Austen bug after so many years of saying I didn’t like her books at all – who wants to read the minutiae of social discourse, I used to think, of which the sole goal is to arrange a “propitious marriage that secures a profitable future . . .”

 It’s as though one pot of money had been given to the British at the beginning of civilization, and Jane Austen’s characters were charged with the job of making sure it flowed into the proper channels via favorable marriages via influential connections via properly honed qualities and tempers. Money is an unwieldy river that needs coaxing and damming up and guidance lest it go astray.  Marriage is the levee.

For the young woman poised on the brink of marriage, time is a blank canvas to be used for long walks of discovery through meadows, daily practice sessions on the pianoforte, daydreaming at the embroidery hoop, social discourse at a ball, lace making and sewing, and much practice in the female art of letter writing.  One Austen heroine spends her time “nicely dressed sitting on a sofa doing some long piece of needlework of little use and no beauty.” Austen’s books chart the meanderings, the twists and turns, and the flood walls encountered by young women as they navigate toward this singular goal.

I did not enjoy Jane’s writing back in my early years as a mother when time was so hurried and my own love of writing was in holding for nearly two decades . . . and every minute was earmarked for something practical such as folding laundry or feeding a sourdough or . . . never mind.  Every minute was earmarked.

 When I read Austen now, however, I no longer resent the young woman’s expanse of time, but rather laud her for it and rest humorously in the suspension of time she endures.  Enjoy it while you can, I say.  I immerse myself in that useless needlepoint – for the supreme pleasure of watching Jane stitch.

In Jane’s world, a visit to a relative 30 miles away was meant to last no less than three weeks and more politely three months.  Her heroine's time was spent in all of the above mentioned ways, adding a broadened social circle that might likely result in a marriage proposal before she returned home.  Letters traveled, giving the news that some rich relative was sick, and by the time it reached his heirs, the old man might be buried.  A fortnight later, when all ‘hopefuls’ had gathered round for the reading of the will, they’d find out which lucky soul had inherited all the wealth (think male and oldest and nephew – nephews seem to inherit quite often in her books).  The rest would go home dejected and anxious as to where one’s resources might be cultivated next.

Refinement, discourse, position, title, civility, eloquence, approbation, disapprobation, means, defilement – these are the words she uses on every page, words that make all the difference in one’s social standing.  The discussions, habits, and carefully observed gestures of her characters, most of them derived from her own circle of friends and relatives, are mulled and cogitated and rehearsed again and again through page after page – and the only plot that underpins all these nuances is for the girl to be married well.  Most of her heroines do so, even as some of them equivocate and consider their losses and gains.

 Jane Austen herself must have thought daily about such losses and gains.  Her own parents would have loved for their aging daughter, nice looking enough, to finally say yes to one of the lucrative suitors who came her way. She did say yes once, just to make everyone happy, but changed her mind the next morning.  If a young woman married well, her entire birth family might be snared from the fate of having to dig their own potatoes (that phrase is spoken by Jane’s mother in the movie, "Becoming Jane").

 It is believed that Jane actually fell in love with a young man once – but he was not an eldest son and she was the seventh child with no stipend to bring to the marriage – therefore the connection was not “sensible.”

 Jane wasn’t thinking straight for her times.  Something in her made her think that marriage ought to be about love.  Some of her heroines have the same problem.  But Jane wasn’t stupid either.  Her own family tottered on the fence of having to dig their own potatoes every day.  Poverty is a real live wretch that lasts forever, maybe even longer than love.  She knew this.  Her first published book, Sense and Sensibility, is all about that internal struggle – the emotional versus the practical.  If only the two could be combined . . . and that’s why Jane wrote books, I’m convinced.

 Most of her heroines do get married off – for both love and money.  It must have satisfied her to make it that way.  But in our author’s real life, neither was to be her fate.  You see, there was another problem, as Jane saw it.  Jane really liked to write – and those real women in her circle, more than a few, either died in childbirth or gave birth year after year as though taunting fate with such a prospect.  There were others who had died in a different sort of way before childbirth took them – that is to say, they died to their girlhood dreams and pleasures.  One favorite niece "died" to the book she had nearly completed writing under Aunt Jane’s encouragement.  There’s no copy in existence, but there is a letter to her Aunt Jane which ‘closes the book’ on writing forevermore – for she was “a wife and mother now.” A letter back from Aunt Jane offers heartfelt condolences.  By that age, already a published author and resigned spinster, Jane must have understood the gravity of those early life decisions she had made unwittingly.

 I haven’t read all of her books yet.  I’ve started those at the beginning of her career when she was prime marriageable age, and I’m working my way chronologically to the one she left unfinished, Sanditon, when she died at age 42.  I hope she has it all figured out by then; many generations of women are counting on her.

Learning to Smoke

I’ve never liked talking on the phone, something I procrastinate doing even when calling my own children . . . it seems so awkward holding a device to the ear while talking to someone of whom you can’t even see the face . . .

Cindy would call me every night when we were young teens, 13 or 14, and I dreaded that phone call.  It would go on for an hour or more – I hardly had anything to say because I didn’t want my parents to hear me – and my mother was always in the kitchen and my father was always in the adjoining room watching TV.   Betwixt the two, everything I said could be heard.  Cindy was “boy crazy,” as my parents said, everyone said it – she was in love with Randy Rice at the time, the Methodist preacher’s son, and she would talk on and on about when they’d be married and how cute their children would be, the names she’d give them, names that went well with Rice, and the sound of her new name which would be Cindy Rice, how does that sound, say it, she’d say – so I had to say Cindy Rice into the phone over and over till she was satisfied with the sound – and of course my parents heard it too – always plagued with teenage embarrassment because of things like that.

 Cindy had a private phone line in her bedroom. Cindy could have anything she wanted just by asking – her own horse, colored pantyhose and eyeshadow, clothes from Asheville which was 100 miles away, parties at her house that included boys and the dreaded spin-the-bottle game, and membership in an Occult book club.

 I was the beneficiary of most of those books from her book club because Cindy didn’t read much and she always asked me to choose the books from her monthly selection list. That was my introduction to palmistry, astrology, yoga, meditation, and all sorts of things that were just coming to the forefront (but certainly not to the mainstream) in the early 1970’s. Maybe that’s when I began to love new books, that wonderful woody-ink smell . . .

One day after school Cindy decided to bring her horse into her bedroom to keep us company while we read each other’s futures through palmistry and astrology from the books she had acquired. The horse was well behaved and just stood there – like an elephant in the room, you could say. Cindy’s mother, a former debutante from Asheville, and perhaps the only lady who still wore hats to the grocery store, came home, walked past Cindy’s bedroom, and calmly said – just as calmly as if she had announced there was ice cream in the freezer for us to eat if we wanted it, she said, “Oh my . . . Ceen-thee-ya (Cynthia) . . . whot is that hoss doing in yor bedroom . . . “ and she didn’t even wait for an answer but rather went to her own bedroom and closed the door (softly).

Cindy’s father died suddenly when he was in his early 40’s, and I always assumed it was a heart attack but I’m not sure I ever knew – it was sudden – and it was a tragedy for the whole town because he was the bank president of the only bank in town, and every loan or financial deal among the populace was in direct relationship to this man. Everyone cried at the funeral, but not Cindy – she acted as though nothing had happened, and continued to talk about boys and that sort of thing after the funeral. I was embarrassed as I stood next to her and she rambled on about boys while my parents kept telling me it was time to go home.

A month or so later, Cindy was hospitalized for “water on the lungs” – and no one really knew why she had that condition, it just came out of nowhere – suddenly – and it sent her to the hospital. This was long before the days of Louise Hay’s metaphysical books linking the spiritual realm to bodily ailments – but even then, only a teenager, it made sense to me that the water on Cindy’s lungs had come from all those shored up tears that she never let loose at her father’s funeral. My mother agreed with me.

Soon after, the horse was sold, the house too, and the occult books were given to me for keeps – Cindy and her mother moved to Asheville. They lived in a small apartment where Cindy's room was no bigger than a large elephant. I visited her one summer and stayed for two weeks, the last time I would ever see her – two weeks spent around the complex's swimming pool learning how to smoke.

We chose "Eve" cigarettes, for they were long-stemmed and had a beautiful pattern of the Garden of Eden around the neck. We both loved the smell of menthol, so fresh and eye-opening. Cindy (we were 15 by now) would take her mother's car keys while she napped and drive us to buy Eve cigarettes – what angel watched over us those summer afternoons?

Cindy was already quite proficient at smoking when I arrived for the visit, impressing me with such phrases as, "I need a cigarette." Cindy reclined in the pool chaise with her legs crossed at the ankles, adroitly inhaling and exhaling the smoke as she talked. She looked so adult and statuesque while smoking, although she was really a round sort of person. Everything about her was round – her face, her giggles, the smoke that came from her mouth, her handwriting, even the sound of her name – but the contrasting shape of the cigarette in her hand somehow balanced her out, made her grow longer.  It suited her, as genteel women are wont to say when being nice.

 I, on the other hand, was the kind of teenager with many sharp protrusions of bone that shot up from where one hardly knew there ought to be a bone – and this cigarette in my hand felt to me like one more unwieldy offshoot that ought to be severed. I never mastered the elegant hold of the cigarette between my fingers.

 I also never mastered the inhalation – that wonderful, promising smell of menthol. The smoke would get to the middle of my throat and then be huffed out – some internal force made it do that – and the smell of chlorine from the pool would waft over to me just at that instant . . . mixing with the menthol it made me feel that I was drowning. I never admitted my fear of inhalation and drowning to Cindy; I felt like a fake – it didn’t suit me.

 I am not against smoking at all, never have been, and I would never advocate more bans on smoking . . . no more laws, please!  In fact, I think I am far more tolerant of smoking than most smokers . . . but I am not a smoker . . .

 . . . for I will forever in my mind link pool chlorine, drowning sensations, long boring conversations, nausea, sudden deaths, and the memory of Cindy’s water on the lungs – to the smell of cigarette smoke. It was a waste of time – listening to Cindy talk about all the cute boys in Asheville, struggling to see her face through billows of dirty smoke that were destined to cloud and divide our future.

Eve cigarette photo credit:
www.unionroom.com/.../2009/05/eve_cigarettes.jpg

The Power of One Good Meal

Holy Thursday –  This is the evening when, as children, we would go to church and watch the men of the parish reenact the “washing of the feet" ceremony which takes place at the Last Supper.  Father TJ, in the week leading up to Holy Thursday, would entreat all the able-bodied men, who rarely amounted to a full dozen even when they all gathered at once, to show up for Thursday evening mass – and they would dutifully sit at the front of the church while certain passages regarding the Last Supper were read – and they would remove their shoes and socks as instructed, while Father TJ and a young assistant with a towel and basin would go down the line in a mock representation of the washing of the feet – pouring real water over each man’s feet into a basin held beneath.  While Father TJ poured, he would repeat some passage about washing the feet – or maybe he said, “do this in memory of me” – I don’t remember.

 There would always be some smiles from the men whose feet may have been tickled by the cool water – or by the silliness of it – or maybe by the self-acknowledged “crustiness” of their own feet – you asked me to be here, don’t forget . . . they may have been thinking this while Father TJ was thinking or doubting the same thing, for sometimes he would smile too.  We young girls and our mothers in the pews could never know the exact reason why each man smiled – though we could often guess rightly by the “otherways” appearance of some of the old men – or we would learn the reason later from my twin brothers, teenagers at the time, when they exclaimed the horror of some of those men’s feet – whew!   That's the kind of thing they would have said.  I think Father TJ would often remark a similar thing the next day, or another day, when he was invited to our house for dinner, remark with his keen Irish-eye-laugh – whew!

 But the ritual went on the next year, nevertheless – important – no matter how awkward or silly or disgusting it may have been.

 Just the other day I was thinking about my favorite movies, trying to make a list of them in my mind, suddenly realizing that my top three favorites were similar in that they all climaxed with a “last meal” kind of scene – not just any last meal but a symbolic meal that has taken a lifetime of preparation to accomplish (we feel this somehow).  In each of these movies, “Babette’s Feast,” “August Lunch,” and “Of Gods and Men,” there are tears in the eyes of those people sitting at the table as they sip the wine and eat the food and join in their common humanity – and the scene is filled with love, absolute love, forgiveness, understanding, and togetherness.  It is a Last Supper scene, I came to realize while I was walking and thinking about my favorite movies – and that must be a universal theme or archetype that humans recognize in their hearts and spirits, something Joseph Campbell has probably written a book or chapter about, I concluded.

 In the Danish film “Babette's Feast,” all the stodgy men and women of the village church finally forsake their rigidity for the “sinfulness” of enjoying a feast together – and their lives are resurrected, converted to actual living, because after that meal these old people dance in a circle as though they were being initiated into the circle of life – and all from the miracle of good food and wine taken together.  In “August Lunch,” my next favorite movie, an Italian comedy, old stodgy life is unexpectedly pushed out of its daily routine.  After numerous attempts to return to this routine, which just makes everthing worse, our hero finally succumbs to what becomes a "final meal" that converts everyone at the table – and the movie ends with dancing, love, and togetherness.

 The third movie, which I saw just one week ago, “Of Gods and Men,” is based on the true story of the final days of a group of Benedictine monks in Algeria who are destined to be murdered by terrorists – they know the danger, though they don’t know the fact of it, yet something in them does know – for they come together that last night and enjoy a simple meal of soup and bread and wine. The aged, good men sit around the table and sip the wine which they have obviously not sampled in decades – and this first taste solicits tears from their eyes. They listen to a tape of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. There are wordless close-ups of the old men's faces – moist eyes full of compassion, old dry skin and uneven beards that somehow seem beautiful, the smiles of forgiveness they give each other . . . it seems there are angels dancing on the table to the choreography of Swan Lake – in my imagination anyway.

The “last supper” scene of this movie – it took a lifetime of sacrifice for those monks to get to that place where they could experience absolute joy in being alive.  I know it’s a movie, a reenactment, maybe not exactly how it happened – but there is great catharsis and significance in watching such things nevertheless.