Expansive Perspectives

In order to connect and weave and articulate myself in respect to the other - for no man is an island - I read and write and listen and watch. In close observation I learn.

What underlies our health and happiness?

A healthy bank balance? A nice house with everything in it and 2.4 children, a nanny, a couple of dogs, and a couple of cars in the drive?

Perhaps this is what the film I watched, tonight, is trying to explore. What makes us belong, feel at home? Which motifs, themes, archetypes, the stuff of myth and fairytale relate to our deepest desires, dreams, dreads? What do we really long for and how do we settle (or not) on what we've had handed to us?

Opportunity knocks. Voltaire's sensible mind seeks consolation for the absurdity of life in the tending of one's garden. Best to crack on with that by yourself: think twice before hiring a gardener, as the film I am about to recommend for this weekend may avert.

Full of the kind of nightmares that inspired Fusili’s incubus, marked by destiny, disturbed to the point beyond unease (obsessed), plunging into, digging into, cast into, sinking into depths; underground, in the ground, hiding out, buried, uprooted, sawn down, bludgeoned by the little white girl, trying to wash it all away in a bath, try sleeping now to this bed time story, better not sleep, only the dark ones sleep well after a day of poison and scalpels, all this and more fable and horrifyingly dark inner depths in Borgman

by Alex van Warmerdam, presented at Cannes Frestival in 2013, a tremendous, nearly surreal yet perfectly domestic pièce de résistance against rhyme and reason, perfect for these nervous locked-down, house-bound times, to remind us the dualist mind won’t get us anywhere fast.

Find it and watch it! Be entertained! Remain haunted and lift its freshly sown turf to unearth more hidden meanings, not even the director/writer/actor Alex himself can very clearly reveal to himself: it all resides just beneath the surface of his conscious thinking, for having been raised a Catholic and gifted with a vivid, child-like imagination, forever boyish in appearance. Allow yourself to indulge in the often random and nearly absurdist plot twists until you are no longer quite sure they don't actually resemble some of your crazier living memories.

Perfect Conditions for Learning

Preceding this film I watched tonight, I read Viruses in the Dynamics of Life by Craig Holdredge, where the duality of life and its dichotomies are highlighted as the main barrier to understanding the riddle of illness or dysfunction. Why not take an alternative look at Covid-19 to discover how little we even ever wanted to know about the virions so easily overcome - or better yet, integrated - by standing, in sweet surrender to what IS, that sweet-spot of Ever Becoming (All Creation, God or Existence), in love, in mildness.

The only problem there is in life is a managerial one. Having this problem is all that life is really ever supposed to be about. It leads to discovering significant anwers for the progress of Humanity. Reciprocity will form the parentheses in which the response will come. Dare to ask the question and innovation will come; you will be mobilised; you shall transform. Only in relation to the other can the one be manifest.

This sense of relating has been highly compromised over time recently (in modern times). This is no longer just a problem, but the seed bed for dark and dense disease.

_{Another fairly surreal film, with much food for thought, to watch out for, touching upon similar themes of alienation, disconnect, repetition over creativity, a general lack of inspiration and loss of perspective is Vivarium (2019, Lorcan Finnegan) with Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots.}