What kind of goddess are you? is the central question. Your body and spirit have a “grain” much like wood does – we call it “temperament. Going against this spoils your future. Your ego has work to do, figuring out who you are and what kind of strategy you excel at. What tools fit naturally to your hand? We think, we remember, we discuss, we write and we dream. Jung tells us that in your dream, you are everyone.
You Are A Seeker – You are self-defining and self-validating. You are on a quest. You wish to explore your possible incarnations.
Goddess Danger – The worst hazard of self-reflection is not navel-gazing (micro study can be very revealing) but solipsism. Aloneness may in fact be Hell. We can never lose touch with those around us because it is others we are fighting for, not for Self alone. Many warlords, sensing your promise, will try to recruit or outright capture you. Avoid warlords who fail to treat you with respect. In our increasingly autocratic world we are very familiar with Aging Babies who want the rest of us to nursemaid their fussy, immaturity because Growing Up is Ouchy. For God’s sake, for your own sake, for the benefit of the Universe and in hope of Eternity, don’t cater to or worse yet, BECOME one of THOSE. There is no shame in telling others you are “finding yourself.”
Goddess Challenge – Set a Spirituality Schedule to reflect your needs and interests. Appoint time to be absolutely alone, for meditation and reflection. If you cannot find a room to yourself, a closet will do. You can sit in the meditation position or assume any position that allows you to be comfortable enough to become physically forgetful. Concentrate first on building a life that allows both inner and outer growth. Surround yourself with people who respect this decision.
Goddess Opportunity – This is a journey. Accept it. Begin a journal with 1. “I” and write down your meditation thoughts and desires. This can be a poem, a fantasy, a checklist – whatever pattern occurs to you as supportive of your desires. Make a list of goals. Accept that it will evolve, transform. Push shame away. This is about YOU. Of course as you mature, your goals will evolve, and your journal will reflect that. When you have completed your Time Alone – ten minutes to an hour – whatever works for you – pat yourself on the back. What an achievement! You are started on a path of making changing Nightmares into Dreams and making dreams come true.
Planning & Mapping: Goddesses lead a designed life. A diary (also called a Training Journal) offers the ideal format in which to plan. Attempt to quantify the difficulties that you feel and assess possible reactions. Just because a situation is tough does not mean it shouldn’t be explored – on the contrary:
– A goddess repels takeover – You are your own goddess – not somebody else’s hired emblem.
A goddess feelsinstinctivelywhat she needs to defend – your soul will reveal it to you – through relationships, through instinct, through time and through dreams.
A goddess knows when to let down her guard – there are times to connect, to share, to Love.
A goddess learns from mistakes and hones her art. There is no Failure: only Learning. All education is precious.
Goddesses look for opportunities – Resistance training sharpens our game. We are each other’s cuttle bones, as well as cuddle bones.
Goddesses aren’t afraid of difficulty – the more time it takes the more fun it is. Your life is a long story, full of exciting challenges. Goddesses love gathering around the campfire to share adventures.
The First Resistance – Often savage, it comes from yourself. Slowly we realize we have hijackers inside our brains wrestling for control. You can recognize these by their negative content. They clearly wish to subdue us into clones which is NOT HEALTHY.
Becoming a Goddess – It is this resistance that first marks our goddess status. Congratulate yourself. You are on the road.
Training Journal – Carefully assess your desires versus the demands on you. List expected results if you gave in to either. Develop a concept of health. Is “freedom” staying up all night, consuming whatever substance makes you “feel better”? Clearly not. Assess the negative voice; “You’re weak”, for example. Being “in flight” from the negative voice is actually giving it mastery, so you must stand up to it. Learn to answer back – “I’m in training. I did better today than yesterday.” Keep track of your achievements. Even really small ones: “I meditated for 10 minutes” are significant.
Accept mystery: Life isn’t “win or lose.” It can’t be quantified because we are magical souls with magic coursing through us. Sometimes it’s impossible to figure out and must simply be absorbed, not rationalized. Learn to enjoy art and accept the relief it offers. Reflect back as much magic & mystery as you can muster. Your tastes will develop according to your growth – that’s a good thing. Treat yourself like a loving sensei who wants the best for you.
Models & Mentors: Always survey possible models. Who do you admire?
Is it
Bruce Lee? “The difference between a goddess and an average man is laser focus.”
Is it Carl Jung? “I am not what happened to me I am what I choose to become.” Read. Study. Educate yourself. Develop your own models.
“Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego falls with it” – Colin Powell
“Don’t let your ego get in the way of your success”- Tony Horton
“The ego seeks to divide and separate. The spirit seeks to unify and heal.” – Pema Chodron
CHASE You’re scared to leave because Bex is out there.
JAZZ That’s not it. I’m here because I want to be. I can handle Bex. His pride is hurt but he’s basically lazy. I don’t matter that much to him. He spent all our time together trying to convince me I was worthless and making him look bad.
CHASE Sounds like my dad. Except I really was all he had. His only son.
JAZZ You’re not responsible for him. Bex wanted me to believe that I was stuck with him, but he wasn’t stuck with me, that I owed him a debt that kept mysteriously increasing.
CHASE Ouch. I need a shower. Want to come?
JAZZ Oh, no you don’t! We’re not finished yet! Why come after Corso? Why pick this college?
CHASE You really want me to roll in it, don’t you? Can’t you just be a good soulmate and fill in the blanks?
JAZZ Total honesty. Full disclosure. Tell each other everything, don’t you agree?
CHASE Maybe.
JAZZ So when Bex bothers me you want me keeping it secret?
CHASE Hell no! Point taken. (forcing himself to reminisce) I just couldn’t get it out of my mind that nothing bad happened to Corso. No jail time! No publicity. No fines even. They made him promise not to work with children, but he’d graduated to teenagers by that time anyway. I gradually realized the money was to control me, so I wouldn’t tell the police. Blood money. What a bad deal that was. He wasn’t controlled! Rewarded, if anything. I might as well have been protecting him. When I looked him up – there he is running “perceptual studies” at a prestigious college! That sound like “punishment” to you?
JAZZ That would be punishment for me, but I get what you mean.
CHASE So I decided to kill him. It’s the only way. I mean, Corso’s a monster, right? And he’s only getting worse. I grew up, I bulked up, I legally changed my name, I disguised myself every way I could think of. I mean, he hadn’t seen me since I was a squeaky-voiced platinum haired tot of thirteen.
JAZZ But let me guess. He recognized you right away.
CHASE He just assumed I couldn’t live without him. I was there to bring him souls!
JAZZ You confronted him?
CHASE He says the university knows all about his “spot of bother.” There’s no official record. To hear him tell it, we were co-victims!
JAZZ Co-victims!
CHASE Yeah. Of religion. Of repression. Of the fifties, of his parents – you name it. But he’s fine now. Happily married, to a nice older lady who just happens to be rich! He’s “freed” himself, see, from his horrible past and he just wants to liberate everybody else.
JAZZ What a bastard.
CHASE So either I get the goods on him or I kill him. There aren’t other options. If that makes me a monster, then, that’s what I’ll be.
JAZZ Hard luck on me, having a monster for a soulmate. What did I do to deserve this?
CHASE Clearly you attract monsters.
JAZZ You sell us both short. If you wanted to be a monster, you would be one already. You’ve been here four years!
CHASE I got distracted. College is interesting – wrestling, debate club, research, biofeedback… Suddenly I found myself in a much bigger world. But whatever avenue I went down… he was always there ahead of me. Like, he’s the creator of everything and I’m just his mutant, the cuckoo on his clock. I want a world without Corso, a universe to call my own, but… he’s polluted everything.
JAZZ So he still holds you hostage.
CHASE He’s inside me. He’s like, taken over the inside of me. Robbed me of my self. I always seem to know exactly what he’ll do, or say, so in some sick way it’s me doing it. There’s no “me” any more, as long as he’s alive. My only hope is to off him.
JAZZ That’s stinking thinking. If you kill him, he still wins. You’d be linked to him forever. I refuse to lose a perfectly good soulmate. You’re nothing like Corso. He’s soulless and that’s why he collects souls. You’re real. Without a self, how could you have a soulmate? Knowing him just makes him easier to trap. If we’ve learned anything, it is that he’s up to no good. He’s a predator- parasite. We’ve got to keep that straight. Trust?
CHASE If only I could believe in souls. I don’t feel indestructible. I’m staying alive by the force of my resistance.
JAZZ You woke me.
CHASE That’s what we have in common. You resisted Bex.
JAZZ I’ll say! He worked so hard to keep me down. We recognized each other. We’re the same. (passionately kiss)
CHASE It’s only our worlds that keep changing.
JAZZ It’s love.
CHASE And we keep falling into it. “Falling” seems more than a metaphor.
JAZZ If we’re in the middle of something extraordinary, we’ve got to stop looking with ordinary eyes.
CHASE But everything’s corpses. Corso threatens life itself.
JAZZ Murderers do tend to round up the refugees.
CHASE He’s poisoning us. The question is whether it’s terminal. I wish I knew what was in that stuff he gave us.
JAZZ Who cares what he gave us? He wants you to think he’s some scientific mastermind wielding a secret weapon. We’re the ones with the secret weapon.
CHASE Some amnesiac, like scopolamine or propanolol. Without memory, he assumes we lose identity. But stress-based experiences are processed like dreams – we keep having flashbacks.
JAZZ And flash-forwards. But we all formed new memories – some of them pretty crazy I admit – but others right on target. Look at Soliz falling through my window, Zane at the toxic dump, Koo with her body-bags. Something happened to us and he doesn’t want us to find out what. Bex wants me thinking he’s all powerful and everywhere so I’ll feel weak and helpless and give up, and Corso’s exactly the same. You must have gotten close –that’s why he fired you.
CHASE He didn’t reckon with us happening.
JAZZ We have a superpower!
CHASE I’m scared the universe is setting us up, just to knock us back down.
JAZZ But the universe loves creators, and lovers are the ultimate creators.
CHASE Creation takes so long and destruction lasts forever.
JAZZ Doesn’t the green growth keep coming up?
CHASE Death is inevitable. It’s life that’s the surprise. In wrestling your attacker takes himself down. We need to find Corso’s weak spot –
JAZZ He’s not immortal, is he?
CHASE God, I hope not.
JAZZ I mean, if he keeps swelling up with everybody else’s souls he’s going to explode. The universe will take care of Corso.
I was walking down a concrete tunnel with metal ribs. It seemed to be shifting like it was alive. It was hard to keep my feet. I felt like maybe it was on a giant truck where they shift the room around to make you fall – like at Great Adventure. There was water on the floor that looked diseased so I tried to keep out of it but it kept splashing on me. I know I’m going to get sick just like my dad warned me. When I got to the end of the tunnel I was in an abandoned dump at the end of the world – signs everywhere saying things like, TOXIC WASTE and EXTREMELY HAZAROUS. The filled with gushing water and I couldn’t get back.
RAD
Abandon hope those who enter here.
(CORSOgives him a squelching look)
ZANE
Something horrible was stalking the dump. Every now and then it darted past. I think I saw fur? I’m scared of fur. It was BIG. I could hear breathing. Maybe a bear – but when it stepped near the light I saw it had scales that glittered. It was coming right after me, kind of loping, with its back legs higher than its front. In that second I realized I had created it – like it was the most terrible thing I could think of come to life. I just took off running. I knew I couldn’t outrun it – it had too many legs. I saw a chain-link fence, but I couldn’t get over that, so I went inside this shack to hide and maybe make a barricade. Most of all I was scared of anybody seeing what a coward I was – just another big talker who’s unable to cope. It was dark in there – and the floor was all torn up – I wanted to go back but – the thing was forcingme inside. It was peering in the windows so I ducked down, I stepped on a rotten board and pitched into the water. Toxic, disgusting water – smelled like sulfur – I could feel it poisoning me, rotting me, boiling me from the inside out. My skin was falling right off my bones. Then somebody said, “Wake up” and I woke up.
(CORSO looks bored and politely incredulous)
CORSO
Charming. Our research project becomes a video game.
ZANE
(Rubbing the inside of his leg)
I was never so glad to wake up. Man, I was really running. It felt like running in flip-flops. My adductors are killing me and my paraformus feels like a rubber band.
CORSO
(Dismissive)
Anything to be learned from this puerile meandering? Could it be that the concept of “flight” itself createsa concept of falling and the context of humiliation and pursuit? I certainly wish you were all more imaginative. I see I need YEARS of work with you children to exorcise these primitive fears. Nobody has time for that. Oh, well. Too late now. It is only in the course of the research that we discover how it should have been conducted.
CHASE
Flight creates pursuit? That’s a good one!
ZANE
But I had the strangest feeling like…like I was watching myself. Like I was both inside and outside me. Like maybe I was the animal too.
SOLIZ
And I was the crowd. I felt that too.
KOO
Me, too. I definitely did.
CORSO
(Silky-voiced)
Ah, lucid dreaming. At long last, something informative. Do share.
CHASE
You said I could go next.
CORSO
Research makes no promises, Mr. Quinn. Miss Loflin?
KOO
It was…so terrible. I need to get rid of it so I can forget.
` I was working in some kind of, mortuary. These body bags were coming at me down a conveyor belt and I had to unzip them and take out the body pieces. I was unzipping, unbuttoning, zipping and unzipping, but the bodies were so smashed I couldn’t even look at them. So disgusting — you couldn’t tell they ever had been people. I thought there was people and garbage and animal parts all smashed together to trick me. To make fun of me. Someone was laughing at my expense. And some of those bags contained the remains of multiple people – a mess nobody could reassemble – a mass of legs and arms and guts. I thought this was a horrible job and I remember thinking, “Nothing is worth this. I should leave college plead bankruptcy and go work at my dad’s dealership.” I wanted to throw up the whole time.
(Gagging)
But I also felt guilty for not helping them. The heads were alive and they looked at me so pleadingly. Then in one bag I found my boyfriend Bo. He was looked accusing – I couldn’t convince him he was DEAD and I was helpless. and I just KNEW he was going to tell everyone I was responsible. Just it was all my fault! I just zipped him back up. Zipped him right back up.
(Gulping water, half crying)
Then the next one was ME. I unzipped myself. I looking at my own body. I was dead and I was mangled, and I just hadn’t realized it.
(KOO’s gasping and sobbing)
I just – lost it. Take me – take me –
TAKE ME OUT OF HERE.
(SOLIZtries to comfort sobbingKOO.)
SOLIZ
So maybe Bo IS your soulmate and in your next dream you take him out of the bag –
KOO
I’m not going back there! No, no, no, no, no!
CORSO
Please, Miss D’Accosta, no sophomoric interpretations. Good guinea pigs stay out of each other’s heads.
JAZZ
Wouldn’t soulmates be in each other’s heads?
CHASE
Me, me, me! Is it my turn now?
CORSO
By all means, Mr. Quinn, since you’re so eager to share.
CHASE
(Very smug and bad-ass)
I flew all right. Right through the air. No pursuit, no humiliation, no falling – don’t I get an A? It was like being in a wind tunnel. I went to your apartment; Doc. Didn’t bother with the locks – sailed right in through the front door.
CORSO
If this was a true out-of-body or remote viewing experience you’ll have to tell us something you could only have seen today, something that wasn’t there when you helped me move in.
CHASE
(Making a show of deep thought)
Well, there were a lot of papers about a bankruptcy filing and restraining orders. Is that the sort of thing you mean? Shouldn’t we run right over and look? Oh, and there was a sex tape featuring you and Nurse Howk on your bed. Your bed had black sheets. She’s one smoky tomato, that girl. She has a piercing on her hoo-ha. Shouldn’t we call her in and investigate?
CORSO
Mr. Quinn, you are fired again! I knew you were a mistake! Off to the locker rooms with you. This minute. And don’t come back!
CHASE
(rises slowly, protesting)
Awwww... And I thought we were gonna be like so free.
CORSO
Every chance you are given, you destroy. I’m sure one of the alternates will be thrilled to assume your position.
CHASE
(Chucks him under the chin)
You can always find somebody to “assume the position” but you’ll never find anyone like me.
CORSO
(Swats his hand away)
Let’s hope not. Get out, now.
CHASE
Can’t I listen to the others? I swilled your damn koolaid.
CORSO
No. You are incorrigible and disruptive. You are leaving or I call security and this class is OVER.
CHASE
But I want to hear the others!
CORSO
(Upends recliner, dumping CHASE on the floor. Speaks into his earbud)
You should have thought of that sooner. Security!
CHASE
Oh all right. Jazz, I’ll be waiting for you to tell me what I missed.
(He exits slowly, hangs out behind the door.)
CORSO
I do apologize for that. That is one troubled youth. He is a thief, an impostor and a poseur. No good deed goes unpunished there, I assure you. His alternate will be more cooperative. Miss Suzino? Mr. Bliven? Chop-chop! No more stalling.
RAD
(Looking panicked.)
It’s Borden. And – I don’t remember anything.
(CORSOinspects him closely to see if he is lying)
CORSO
Hmmm. Come, come, Mr. whatever. The others have been brave. Your clothing is strangely disarranged.
SOLIZ
Aren’t your pants on backwards?
RAD
(Gulps, blushes painfully)
I know you’ll fire me and I don’t really want to leave but I just don’t remember. It’s just a blank.
CORSO
Fire you for amnesia? Hardly! I am much more likely to administer truth serum or attempt a little private hypnosis. Overcoming resistance is my raison d’être.
(Looks at his watch.)
We just don’t have the time. How about if I give you one more chance, next week?
RAD
Th – thanks.
(Is he relieved? Traumatized? Hard to tell.CORSOstretches out on CHASE’s abandoned futon, very relaxed, crosses his hands behind his head.)
CORSO
You are hardly a “still water”, Mr. Bli – er, Borden. Perhaps that is why I am more relieved than otherwise to find you run so deep. Miss Suzino? We are waiting.
(JAZZ’s face show she is desperately trying to think up a story. Coming up empty)
JAZZ
I was blind. At first I couldn’t see.
CORSO
(Sighs luxuriously)
Oh, Miss Suzino. Blindfold games! Who among us hasn’t played them? You always interest me so extremely! Pay attention, Mr. Bruden! This is how it’s done!
RAD
Borden.
CORSO
Simmer down, class. Let Miss Suzino speak. Poor little Jazz. When she enrolled in this experiment she’s all, “I can’t dream”
(mimics her voice unflatteringly)
Now it’s “I can’t see!” Whatever next? We’ll just have to do what we can to open your eyes.
JAZZ
I felt people rushing past me. I stumbled down steps into a basement. It smelled like dirt and death. Someone kicked me – I fell over a body. A dead body.
CORSO
More falling. This is a tragic class.
ZANE
Anything chasing you?
CORSO
Please, class, I’ll ask the questions.
JAZZ
There was blood.
SOLIZ
But the blood was yours. Sorry. Just saying.
CORSO
(Slams his notebook shut – rises)
Checks in your mailboxes the first of the week! See you all next Saturday! Remember – no talking about what goes on in dream lab!
VIRGINIA Go away, Leonard. I can’t bear to hear you lie to me.
LEONARD I’m not lying when I say I want you to get well more than anything I’ve ever wanted in my life.
VIRGINIA Don’t bother making me feel guilty, I already know I’m wasting your life. If only I weren’t so stupid a Mandrill, so unworthy of her poor, virtuous outsider Mongoose who is so thin, who trembles so much and who tries so hard. You have headaches too, you suffer from recurring malaria. Why should you toil so that I can be idle? I know these doctors’ bills are crushing us. Nessa sold the silver, I sold the jewelry, Thoby sold the Thackeray letters. What’s left, Leonard? Will you scheme with them to isolate me until there’s nothing left?
LEONARD I can earn money writing. I’ve proved that. You can earn money writing, you’ve proved that. But to get back in the fight we must be hardy and strong.
VIRGINIA I should never have married you. What kind of a wife can I ever be? Save yourself, Leonard. It’s too late for me. Let the wind blow, let the poppy seed itself, let the carnation mate with the cabbage. Let the swallow build her nest in the drawing room where the thistle thrusts between the tiles. Let all civilization be like broken china tangled over with blackberries and grass.
LEONARD That you demand so much of existence, still fighting as you sit among George’s flowers, shows you’re feeling better. What we must do is keep up the strengthening. A few more days, Virginia.
VIRGINIA But how can I return to you? There’s the undisputed fact of my sexual cowardice. Perhaps it’s really nothing but my terror of real life that keeps me in this nunnery. I tried telling my parents but they didn’t want to hear. Parents have forgotten their own childhood. Or they don’t want to remember.
LEONARD What did you try to tell them? You can say anything to me.
VIRGINIA I saw the spirits of evil as soon as I could speak, but because I was a girl child I was not supposed to know. Each child hugs its vice, brooding over the swollen vein, the bruised flesh that was white and sweet but yesterday.
LEONARD I told my parents that life is unquestionably vile and humanity’s nothing but an ant heap. Parents never want to hear that.
VIRGINIA That’s what I love about you, Leonard. You at least will speak the truth. Sometimes.
LEONARD It’s a fallacy to think that children are happy. They’re not. I never suffered so much as when I was a child. Children never forget injustice. But here is the heart of it, Virginia. What we write depends upon what we think. What “spirits of evil” did you see?
VIRGINIA Going to practice Dr. Head’s talking cure on me, are you? Is that the plan? I could make up a dozen stories – I see a dozen pictures. But when I open my mouth I am locked up and shut away. What is my true story? Something lies deeply buried. Shall I grasp it or let it mortify in the depths of my mind? I want to describe the world seen without a self. But I am afraid that there is no future. There are no words.
LEONARD There are words, and there is a future we shall make. Tell me. Tell me everything.
VIRGINIA When I was young, I dug furiously to uncover myself. When I discovered that I was me and not anyone else it seemed a wonderful achievement. Once I sat beside my stepsister Stella on roots as hard as skeletons, and the next day she was a skeleton. It’s strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners or in dreams. Don’t you remember that morning at breakfast when I saw my mother? You said she wasn’t there.
LEONARD I saw nothing.
VIRGINIA Cambridge educated everything but your eyes. What is the hope of talking to you? That was the morning was when I first became aware of the enemies who change but are always present; the forces we must fight even though we suffer terribly becoming separate bodies. Don’t you recognize the enemy advancing against us, pawing at his pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy.
LEONARD Marriage is the opposing force against death. A marriage of true minds can fight all enemies. Once upon a time we shared our thoughts, and fell in love. I needed someone who could hold her own, and there you were. You are the only wife I ever wanted, the only woman I have ever loved. Please, Virginia, I want you to come back to me.
VIRGINIA
(dazzled)
Oh to be a wife, to be wanted, would be so complete! Is it possible, Leonard, after the terrors, the disgusting dangers we have seen?
LEONARD If it isn’t I don’t want to live either.
(She holds out a hand to him. They clutch hands briefly)
VIRGINIA Sit down, Leonard. You look silly on your knees.
(She looks away. LEONARD sits)
VIRGINIA I used to make the family laugh. They thought me clever. But when I chased the evil spirits through a hole in the escallonia hedge, I resolved to tell the exact truth and write down the phenomena I’d seen. But no one believed me, and at that moment the laughter turned against me. I said, must not we find some way to get outside ourselves, to give our brains a wider scope? My parents declared God was dead and the world empty and meaningless. Father said to be weak is to be wretched. He said that Society is a ravenous appetite, and Nature is a state of war. You’ve laughed at me behind my back, I know you have. You, my own husband, want to get rid of me, to lock me up forever and steal my money.
LEONARD I love you, Virginia. Maybe it’s a bad thing to love you as much as I do – it cuts me off from the outside world. But the outside world is worthless and your world is so rich. When I went away to school for the first time I was shocked and appalled by the horrifying corruption of dirty-minded schoolboys. It marked me. Then I realized all of humanity are mean, nasty, untruthful, cowardly, and cruel. Perhaps I’ve been searching for a world that doesn’t exist.
VIRGINIA Perhaps we both have.
LEONARD If you will care for your health – if you will allow me to care for your health – you’ll recover. As you’ve recovered before.
VIRGINIA Nessa won’t rest till I’m brought low. When she was ill with typhoid Savage wanted to put her in a home but I backed her up! I told Savage I would care for her. Now look at what she’s done to me. You betrayed our secret, telling Nessa I’m a frigid failure as a wife. She told Clive and now everyone knows. They’re all laughing, jeering. plotting behind my back. You were sent to Ceylon to break the natives and now you’ve been sent to break me. I have been derided, insulted, sacrificed and betrayed, by all of you.
LEONARD Virginia, I am on your side. My eyes were opened in Ceylon. I was an anti-imperialist wallowing in the fleshpots of imperialism. But I changed. Now I support the independence movement with all my heart. All problems can be solved by science and logic, Virginia. It was I who was a failure as a husband. It was my marital duty to arouse you but you seemed so afraid of me. At my wit’s end, I asked your older sister for help.
VIRGINIA Does she offer lessons in humiliation? She knows how better than anyone. Is it my fault that I hate my legs being pried apart? I should never have married you, but I couldn’t bear to remain a spinster. I was struggling at everything, and you seemed so different. You said you liked women. You said you admired women’s minds.
LEONARD It’s true. Women feel more deeply, think more deeply, talk more deeply.
VIRGINIA Yet men demand obedience. You want me to obey you but I never will. You know nothing about me. Did you know that before I tried to die I read a book? Would you like to know which one?
LEONARD Which book did you read?
VIRGINIA It was your book. Your book that I read.
LEONARD My book?
VIRGINIA Your book about me.
LEONARD (a gratified author, in spite of everything)
You read The Wise Virgins? What did you think?
VIRGINIA So you admit it’s about me!
LEONARD Virginia, please. I’d love to discuss my book with you.
(She hesitates, turning away her face, then facing him with rage)
VIRGINIA
You locked me away so I’d never find out!
LEONARD You were ordered rest cures long before you met me! I don’t believe in guilt or blame. Honestly, I wanted you to read my book as soon as you were well.
VIRGINIA I won’t be stamped and stereotyped. You have publicly lampooned me as a frozen, dowdy, fussy, futile woman.
LEONARD Not true at all. I called you my Aspasia.
VIRGINIA “Cold and snowy, like the rocks.” You said.
LEONARD I’m a bad writer. I agree. I’ve got nothing of your genius. I can never explain what I really want to say. If it’s any comfort to you no one else likes or understands it either. Sales are awful. All I was attempting to do was contrast the world of a poor Jew from Putney with the rarified aristocratic Olympus for which he yearns.
VIRGINIA You hold my world in contempt because you can never be a gentleman.
LEONARD Virginia, you hold “your world” in contempt.
VIRGINIA And then the hero marries the other girl. The stupid, cow-eyed one! It’s a betrayal.
LEONARD It’s just a bad novel, I’ll give you that. Don’t laugh at me. Not everyone is born with your gifts. Consider my perspective. Any rational mind must inevitably face disillusion and depression. I tried to show how poor Harry just couldn’t escape his past. He couldn’t but I think we can. I probably shouldn’t have published it but Arnold was willing and I couldn’t bear to waste all that work and all that suffering.
VIRGINIA What can you, a prizewinning Apostle from Cambridge, an imperialist potentate of a subject country, possibly know of real suffering?
LEONARD Virginia, I’m a Jew from Putney. All my life I’ve been spat upon. Job is the only book of the Bible I ever understood. Who ridiculed who first? I trained myself to avoid personal feeling. Admit you despised me. Your set. You made me into a joke.
VIRGINIA My set despises everyone. That’s what we do. It’s self-defense, from growing up amongst the most monumental hypocrites.
LEONARD You despised me personally. Be honest. You hated kissing me. You could barely bring yourself to marry me.
VIRGINIA But I did it, didn’t I!
LEONARD You wanted to shock them. You were competing with Nessa to see who could be most scandalous.
VIRGINIA I wouldn’t dare compete with Nessa. Competition is a male thing. It’s a brutal, endless game. I think all competition should be abolished.
LEONARD But it’s all you ever do! Your flirtation with her husband –
VIRGINIA (cringes visibly)
Oh God, not that. Somehow that memory turns a knife in me more than anything. How it catches at me, the fangs of that old pain. I know I lost Vanessa forever. She will never forgive me. I simply couldn’t comprehend why she married such a strange, intolerable creature with his twitching pink skin and a jerky laugh. Before Clive, Nessa and I drifted together on a sea of seducing half-brothers, hiding together beneath the dining room table. We spoke a special animal language.
LEONARD But you were no longer children. Vanessa waited till twenty-eight to marry.
VIRGINIA Who would willingly grow up? I never wanted to. As soon as you’re pushed out of the nursery, the happy moments vanish. Vanessa was the bowl of golden water that brims but never overflows. I lie prostrate at her shrine and still she won’t forgive me. When she brought home friends from the Slade they laughed at me behind the door. You can’t think what it feels like, having one’s self so thoroughly extinguished.
LEONARD I do know it. That was my exact experience at both St. Paul’s and Cambridge. St. Paul’s was a disgusting brothel, but at Trinity I met G. E. Moore. He taught me how to ask the important questions.
VIRGINIA
And what are the important questions?
LEONARD The most important question is why. Why can’t Vanessa forgive a mere flirtation? She must know by now that Clive sets out to bed every woman he meets. You at least resisted him.
VIRGINIA But I did wrong. Clive and I made common cause against my sister, his own wife. Some things should be sacred.
LEONARD
Wasn’t it true that he respected your intellectual work more than he could ever appreciate Vanessa’s daubs?
VIRGINIA Leonard! How can you!
LEONARD
If it’s the truth, shouldn’t we say so?
VIRGINIA
I tried speaking the truth, yet here I am locked up among the imbeciles. And weren’t we just arguing whether all imbeciles should be killed?
LEONARD You’re hardly “locked up with the imbeciles” at Dalingridge Hall!
VIRGINIA You’re wrong. In this castle beats the very heart of idiocy and evil. Aren’t you the one who said the most dangerous imbeciles are running the nation? Here I am at home among the hunters, where the miner sweats and dies and maiden faith is rudely strumpeted.
LEONARD But you used to love George! He told me you’d make an adorable wife.
VIRGINIA Perhaps I’ve been given too much time to think. Get a sense of proportion, the doctors keep telling me. So now I stare for the first time into the very mouth of doom. Look your last on all things lovely.
LEONARD Virginia, if you don’t want to be called crazy, you really must explain yourself. Whatever do you mean?
VIRGINIA George behaved little better than a brute. He never let me alone for a moment. That he was the pet of duchesses hardly excuses him. And yet it was Gerald who broke my hymen, when I was six years old. It’s a painful process. and now I freeze like ice. Give up on me, Leonard, there’s no awakening the dead. I’m ruined by incest, I’ve even desired my own sister. I’m locked up because I stew in murder, just as Laura did. I long to slice Gerald’s fat, transparent flesh, to take a rifle and shoot George directly in his smug, piggy face. Or could I bag him with a net and killing bottle? And why shouldn’t I turn on my tormentors? I suffered, I was helpless, why should I be the one forced to writhe with shame? I longed to be petted but instead was trapped in a cage with lions as sulky and angry as they were ferocious. I’m just a little monkey and little monkeys are too easily squashed and trampled. It’s too late for me, Leonard. My body is spoiled forever by George and Gerald.
LEONARD (shocked)
George? Gerald? These are pillars of society, your own half-brothers! It’s so unbelievable.
VIRGINIA George drowned us in kisses, me and Vanessa. Each kiss was an amputation. I used to sign my work, “One of the Drowned.” Oh, those horrible parties! The oppressive gatherings of Stephenses ground one to a pulp. Because I wanted to discuss Plato I was told I had no conversation. George was so angry! After I removed my ball gown and stripped off my gloves and stockings, he would come into my room and lock the door.
LEONARD But how can any of this be true? How could nobody have noticed it?
VIRGINIA Everyone did notice it. People contrive to bend it to the conventional heroic shape because he kept insisting on the purity of his love. I saw him kissing Countess Carnarvon behind a pillar at the opera! And now she’s his mother-in-law. I asked to join the British Sex Society, dedicated to the study of parent/child incest, but they wouldn’t let me in. Now that you know, you’ll have to spit in George’s face at the club.
LEONARD We don’t belong to the same clubs.
VIRGINIA Then when you thank him for this execrable house, challenge him to a duel. Will he at least feel some regret? Will he take the pigeon gun and blast himself instead? Then the aristocracy will hate me because it’s all my fault. Yet is it not a noble work, letting light in upon the evil Duckworths? Probably he’ll feel nothing. Possibly some vague imbalance.
LEONARD Let’s try to be objective, Virginia.
VIRGINIA If only I could! What a luxury that would be! How I hunger for the objectivity of beloved Macaulay or the stern analysis of cherished Carlyle. Lockhart’s ten volume Life of Scott was the best present I ever received. Reading relieves all my pain, but they won’t let me read anything here. In spite of them I’m continuing to learn. Only life itself matters, nothing but life – and the process of discovery, the everlasting perpetual process, and not the thing itself at all.
LEONARD
Virginia, I am speechless.
VIRGINIA
Now you know how it feels. I used to think it would be enough to have someone share my loneliness. But if no one believes me, the solitude is total. The Duckworths are guilty of nameless atrocities, and you’re complicit. You locked me away here, so I couldn’t speak. As soon as I open my mouth they try to destroy me. It’s a conspiracy of hush.
LEONARD If this is something you’ve only just remembered how can it possibly be true? It sounds mad.
VIRGINIA I don’t think memory is always at the forefront, Leonard. There’s only so much a human being can bear. Memory comes and goes. One requires tools to think with, to make sense of one’s experience, and these tools are alternately dull and sharp.
LEONARD Well, there are some things no one wants to think about.
VIRGINIA It’s clearer in my mind than the bad, stodgy meal I was force-fed yesterday. Our summer place at St. Ives, in the dining room; I must have been six years old. Eighteen-year-old Gerald lifted me up to a high ledge and explored my private parts. I fought and I struggled but I couldn’t get away. I could see his face in the dining room mirror. It was the face of a demon. I’ve seen that face since, on the drooling men who expose themselves in the park. Now I no longer look in mirrors. I can’t cross a puddle. The depth looks back at me, concealing malicious, hairy arms to reach out and grab. I can’t go forward, I am stuck in the loop of the six, no power even to lift my legs.
LEONARD The loop of the six? I don’t understand.
VIRGINIA
I was learning numbers. Six was my number. But I couldn’t close the loop.
LEONARD
This was Gerald you say? But Gerald is your publisher!
VIRGINIA I know! If I am not a madwoman, then the world itself is mad. What was I to do? I wrote a book and my incestuous brother was a publisher! Who else would even look at my work? When I delivered my manuscript to Gerald I was in such acute despair – so near the precipice!
LEONARD Did you tell anyone?
VIRGINIA I told Nessa and she told Dr. Savage. Who is an idiot, as you well know.
LEONARD I can’t believe it. Gerald seems so – so – well, ordinary. So completely controlled.
VIRGINIA Get out of here! I’m sorry I told you. I wish I was dead!
(She is tearing at her own throat – he rushes forward to hold her hands down, lifting her body out of the chair)
The use of force is all you know!
LEONARD Virginia, I love you.
(He kisses her neck, she becomes a dead weight. He lowers her carefully into the chair, arranges a blanket on her knees)
VIRGINIA When you touch me, I feel nothing. My body goes dead. That’s how I froze when George came into my room, night after night.
LEONARD Oh, Beloved!
VIRGINIA Don’t. He called me that. I don’t want to be loved, I want to be believed.
Following her honeymoon Virginia Woolf attempted suicide and was sent to recover at her half-brother’s estate, Dalingridge Hall.
CHARACTERS
Virginia Woolf: a sensitive young artist having a breakdown
Leonard Woolf: her new husband, nervous, forceful, an “outsider”
Dr. Craig: bluff, elderly, genial, doctor to the wealthy
Dr. Hyslop: a fashionable eugenicist
Two orderlies: rough & tumble Cockneys ALF & BOB (orderlies & doctors played by the same actors)
(Scene 1: Dalingridge Hall, An ostentatious faux British castle with all the updated luxurious mod-cons. A pair of white-coated orderlies maneuver a stretcher into a sickroom.)
ALF Hold up a mo, let’s have a fag.
BOB Buckle her in, and then we’ll have a fag.
ALF Now that’s right stupid, that is. Tie her up, the job is done. No time for a fag then.
BOB Oh, right. I get you. Where can we stow her? She’s heavy.
ALF Tall as a man and strong like one, so they say. Prop her up over here. Careful, now, you got me shin!
(They lean the stretcher against the wall facing the audience. Fumble with cigarette packs. ALF sits on the bed.)
BOB I don’t like her looking at us.
ALF Oh, she’s well out of it. Off to dreamland. Took the mickey out of her, they did.
BOB So what’s up with this one? Trying on hats and ordering jewelry too much for her?
ALF I heard it was her honeymoon what sank her!
BOB Oh, Lord!
(they both guffaw)
BOB Wonder it doesn’t happen routine-like, what with the shock and all. I mean, she’s not used to seeing the farm animals getting frisky in the spring. She’s not walking to church with the village lads. She’s not sharing a bed with the brothers and sisters. So everything seems right and proper until the big night and then –
ALF All hell breaks loose!
(they laugh uproariously)
BOB So, you seen the husband?
ALF Oh yes, he was hanging about. Wringing his hands.
BOB So what’s he look like, then? One of them muscle-bound rowing blues?
ALF No, no, no. Nervy bloke. Just back from the East where he’d been sorting out the blacks.
BOB Oh, Lord! Used to carrying a big stick is he?
(they gasp, cough, laugh and fall about)
VIRGINIA
(groggily)
What is this place? What vast forces of good and evil dropped me here? I burn, I shiver. I turn, I tumble, I am stretched. I am nailed like a stoat to the stable door.
ALF Oh my jugs and jiggers, she’s coming out of it. Look here, you take that end.
BOB Hold her up, hold her up!
ALF She’s heavy, I’m telling you. They feed them women up like Strasbourg geese. Look sharp now.
BOB There’s hell to pay if she’s not buckled in.
(They get her on the bed. Much buckling and strapping.)
VIRGINIA Who are you? Where am I? I have been diving through seas of horror to come up rotting in dirty ditchwater. Don’t touch me!
(She starts struggling when it’s too late. She’s already buckled in. The men rest, gratified but exhausted.)
ALF Nothing to fear, my lady. You’re all right now. You’re safe here at Dalingridge Hall.
(His last words reverential)
VIRGINIA Dalingridge Hall! Now the agony begins, horror has seized me with its fangs! I am turned, I am tumbled, I am stretched and everyone pursuing!
(She starts screaming)
ALF Hypo! We need a hypo!
(ALF and BOB rush about panicked. Enter LEONARD. Exit orderlies.)
LEONARD What is it? What’s happened?
VIRGINIA Dalingridge Hall! They’ve taken me to Dalingridge Hall!
LEONARD Virginia, your brother Sir George and his wife Lady Margaret have kindly lent us this splendid mansion. They’re staying up in London and have left it all to us. Up to date comfort. Plenty of servants – French chef – the food is magnificent. Eleven bathrooms! Spotless, hygienic, – the nurses are impressed I can tell you.
VIRGINIA Now this monstrous ugliness is explained. I hear the crack of antlers as if the beasts of the forest are rearing, plunging among the thorns. One has pierced me. One has driven deep within me. You have left me to undergo this squalid humiliation served out like soup by greedy, casual scullions, coarse, ogling, brushing, destroying everything, smearing even our love with impure fingers. “What is this secret sin, this untold tale, that art cannot extract nor penance cleanse?” Don’t you understand? ALL DEATHS ARE ONE DEATH.
LEONARD
Would you like to see Sir George?
VIRGINIA
George! That obese alligator who used to roll me round my bed of an evening as if I were a minnow shut up in a tank with a frenzied whale. I would rather touch a decaying dogfish than that man’s body.
LEONARD Hush, Virginia. George is an Adonis, a true man of the world, adored by great ladies and parliamentarians alike.
VIRGINIA George has the eyes of a sow! Or is it an elephant? Sows look so much like elephants on the Duckworth side of the family. He used to fondle me so I couldn’t read my Greek. The very locusts deform the trees with their lusts.
LEONARD George claims chastity until hi marriage. That’s more than I managed.
VIRGINIA What liars men are! George was a pig, snuffling, rolling, grabbing, calling me Beloved. How he tortured both of us, me and Vanessa alike, Greek slaves in the harem promised him by Eton. He smothered us with caresses until Nessa told Dr. Savage and Dr. Savage made him stop. George told Dr. Savage he was only comforting us for the illness of our father.
LEONARD Virginia, you’re romancing. Dr. Head says longing for adult attention creates a wish-fulfillment leading to ideas like these. He says the only way out is the talking cure.
VIRGINIA So it’s wish fulfillment that has trapped me in George’s house? Dr. Head is another booby, Leonard. We were right to dismiss him. He knows nothing.
(she grabs him)
Don’t you understand that we are poured to the very edge of the abyss, Leonard, where we shall be broken together into nothingness and flames? Help, help! Get me out of this thing!
LEONARD Dearest, you threatened to harm yourself, remember? You attempted suicide.
VIRGINIA You left the veronal unlocked. I thought it was an invitation. My father praised the Duke of Bedford for having the courage to shoot himself. Surely you longed to be rid of me. I’m a bad bargain all around.
LEONARD
No Virginia, no. I love you. I moved heaven and earth to save you.
VIRGINIA But I’m already dead, Leonard. I am certainly in hell. Fallen in a duck pond and strangling in duckweed! Quack, quack!
LEONARD Virginia, why do you reduce me to madness too? If you could only comprehend how insane you sound.
VIRGINIA You can’t think what a raging furnace it is to me, madness and doctors and being forced. I am bent like a tree under a remorseless gale. The crass blindness that poisons childhood still threatens bitter storms. Children will be trodden under. Speech is false. The demand to submit must always be returned with cries of pain, hate and rage because that’s all they understand.
LEONARD You were violent, Virginia. You attacked your nurses. Don’t you remember?
VIRGINIA I was defending myself. They attacked me! Forcing food down my throat. I will go down with my colors flying. Father used to say, “Face the inevitable with eyes wide open.”
LEONARD You vomited on Lily and you struck Susan with a platter of cold meat. You must eat to gain weight, Virginia. Then the voices will subside, the doctors say. That’s why they’ve ordered a rest cure.
VIRGINIA Those doctors! My life is a constant fight against doctors’ follies. That cretin, Savage? He’s not fit to be about. Borrowed from another century.
LEONARD Four doctors and all of them in agreement. You know this, Virginia. You chose Head yourself – because Roger Fry recommended him – Vanessa suggested Craig and I found Hyslop.
VIRGINIA Really, a doctor is worse than a husband. I’ve given up expecting doctors to listen to reason. If only those pigheaded sawbones could see I speak the sober truth without excuse! Alienists know absolutely nothing. Their vanity is as profound as their ignorance. What does their “treatment” amount to? It is all eating and drinking and being shut up in the dark, sequestered with lunatics.
LEONARD The food here is delicious. May I bring you some?
VIRGINIA Once when we travelled by train to St. Ives the lemonade spilled on the sandwiches and turned them into mush but Nurse still made us eat them and I was sick and then I was punished. Leonard, don’t you see that when I am weighted with food I can no longer make the moments flow together. I become an excreter, an excretion. No, of course you don’t see. You’re in a conspiracy, plotting against me. I see your grinning, I know your subterfuge, I hear you sneering behind my back.
LEONARD Virginia, the people who love you are trying to decide what’s best for you. I’m trying to make the best decisions I can.
VIRGINIA You’re punishing me for disappointing you. For being a bad wife.
LEONARD When you’re well, you admit you’ve been mad.
VIRGINIA My sister wanted to be rid of me. While she threw away our father’s possessions I lay in bed and heard the birds singing Greek.
“What bird so sings, so yet does wail? Tis the ravished nightingale Jug, jug, jug, tereu she cries And still her woes at midnight rise.”
LEONARD You’re hurting yourself with all this wild talk. No one can understand anything you say.
VIRGINIA People know very well enough but it’s a secret. King Edward spewed the foulest possible language amongst the azaleas and yet they crowned him. “Swallow, my sister, O Sister Swallow,” I sing. If I become king of the lunatics shall I escape molestation? God, I wish I were dead. I will soon have to jump out of a window.
LEONARD These violent oscillations, Virginia! If I could only get you to see! A whirlwind brings madness in its wake!
VIRGINIA How long can any man love a woman without driving her mad? How long can I protect my clean visions from the odious masculine point of view – from the egotism of men? You crack my brain like a thrush cracks a snail – hammer, hammer, hammer.
LEONARD I am not your enemy, Virginia.
VIRGINIA Then who else is? Why shouldn’t I be frightened? I wanted to spend my life innocently indifferent among the trees and rivers but instead men expose themselves whenever I step out doors. I saw a woman pinned beneath a car and horses falling in the street. Outside our scullery a man cut his own throat. His jowls were whitened as codfish. The human face is hideous. What are you doing? Don’t touch me!
LEONARD Trying to loosen your straps. You’re getting excited. Doctor!
After my fiancé graduated law school in Kentucky, we came East – where our families lived – to get married. I applied to Brooklyn College for the MFA program and was hired as a writing fellow. What followed was an experience so discouraging I can well understand why graduate students are at a high risk of suicide.
First, there’s the contrast between the high prestige of the position and the pitiable pay. You could literally make more money (and spend the same amount of time) combing the subway for lost change.
Next, there’s the “job” they want you to do, which is to prepare seriously undereducated freshman to write an essay justifying their admission into the hallowed world of academe.
I had fun developing my own syllabus, which was basically teaching critical thinking in the most fun way I could possibly imagine. A teacher “reviewer” who came to watch the class wrote me a rave review – I don’t think anyone in my life has ever praised me as much as he did. I still cherish that evaluation. But don’t get excited – the second guy (months later) disparaged me so much that if you add the two reviews together I think you’d have to give me a sad C-. But at that point, They Knew About Me – that I had no college degree -and so they were trying to get rid of me. Really, you can’t blame them – how could I prepare students to get something I didn’t have myself? And what – you may ask – was wrong with MY thinking and reasoning powers that I had not expected this?
The truth is, I had flouted “rules” all my life – they always seemed ridiculous – and because I was a “rara avis” I usually got away with it. But clearly, this could not continue. Much chastened by my brush with the universe (which represented itself as “sanity”) I did go ahead and get a BA degree in psychology from LaSalle. I even got half a masters under my belt from Springfield College until I saw that it was useless.
But back to Brooklyn. There were classes I took, of course, in WRITING – which was my absorbing interest and passion. I kept the fact that I had actually published a novel a secret because the class expressed such a tragic belief that being published was their deepest desire and most desperate and holy quest. I knew that it was the writing of the book itself – finding the subject AND the expression that was your spiritual release into the world – that was the most important absorbing and exciting. My first book was written to specifications – what was “popular” – under the ingenuous theory that I would develop important publishing relationships (my editor lost her job, my company bought out and revamped.) You could hardly brag about an experience like that.
For my class on the Novel I decided to write a novel. I thought it would be fun. If you wrote a chapter every week you would have a novel at the end.
One of my classmates was an ex-nun – a most interesting person – whose experiences strongly affected me. I effortlessly adapted her into my heroine, because my book was a mystery. Surely these are the easiest to write – they must evolve according to a plan. You have to introduce the problem, then the suspects, give clues, and make the reader care about the outcome. I had an idea it would be less emotional than my first book, which got bogged down into a bizarre love story about a fatherless girl pathetically seeking mentorship. THIS book would be all business.
I got such massive pushback from the class I’m kind of surprised I went through with it – but I was enjoying the writing and the characters were alive to me. “Criticism” in class was students laboriously reading each others’ work, describing its emotional effect on them and describing different ways things could be said. The forward motion of a novel – the sweep, the assumption of power – was thereby utterly dissipated. Everyone just rewrote the first chapters of different books endlessly. So it shouldn’t have been called “Novel Writing”, it should have been called “Paragraph Writing” – a class I wouldn’t take.
This teacher and I butted heads on all kinds of issues. First off, he said great writing couldn’t have a “happy ending.” I saw his point but I thought it shallow. Surely completion of a quest – solving a mystery – is an enormous relief. But mysteries aren’t serious writing, he insisted. (Uh oh. Since I was engaged on one.) Well, what about the Odyssey? Jane Austen? {Probably Tom Jones, if I could recall the ending.)
MODERN literature!! He insisted. We can’t have happy endings anymore!
That was when I realized the whole thing was bogus. If I was bogus, they were even more bogus. I was eight months’ pregnant at the time and this man’s feeble philosophy defied the spinning of the planets, the arrival of spring, the creation of Life itself. What a silly fellow.
I finished Pinch of Death, and still reread it with pleasure, A very charming book.
This film, probably his last, is not the movie to rescue the 88 year old filmmaker but it certainly marks an advance in his artistic life. Throughout his career, Allen has leveraged an apparently traumatically low self-esteem, inviting us to laugh at the hoops society forces ordinarily inadequate people to jump through for admiration, employment, companionship & love.
As he matured, he began implying that society itself is a crime and we are its victims (Shadow & Fog, Crimes & Misdemeanors, Hollywood Ending, Match Point, Broadway Danny Rose, Cassandra’s Dream, Interiors, Irrational Man, Scoop, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Bullets Over Broadway.)
I’ve come to believe he’s our Marcel Proust – sharply attuned to the pathos and ambition of our social signaling and teasing us with scandalous gossip about how far some of us might be willing to take our desperate impostures. What will we do to get what we want and what might we do when challenged?
Throughout his career, he has presented beautiful young women as the ultimate desirable acquisition of the good life; otherworldly angels whose psyches are completely closed to him, but whose bodies he hopes to subjugate.
Coup de Chance offers one of these mysterious creatures as its protagonist, a beautiful gallery worker “rescued” from her life with a shiftless musician by a wealthy, jealous man terrified of losing her. Yet she is bored, bored, BORED by his dull existence of object acquisition and gourmet travel and secretly falls for a handsome, exciting young man with a head full of dreams.
This film was banned from Cannes as a show of solidarity with the credible accusations of sexual impropriety by Allen’s daughter, whose story as an adult and a child, has never varied. The persona who comes across in Allen’s stories is inquisitive and clueless and needy enough to have done what he is accused of, yet most of us will never know the truth. Creator of his own worst fears, he triggered their realization. “Exposed”, discredited and cast out; still he is making films.
Artists we can unreservedly admire as human beings are rare, Picasso and Tolstoy and Byron, for example, displayed outrageously cruel, downright illegal behavior for all to see. But it’s quite possible that the sinner’s story is always the more interesting one from the perspective of our own humdrum lives. Certainly no one knows crime as intimately as a criminal.
Unlike the brilliant Match Point, the intensely immersive Cassandra’s Dream, the creepy Crimes & Misdemeanors and the tour de force Irrational Man, Coup de Chance’s plot is a mere story board, lacking the three-dimensional richness this collaborative art usually supplies, but it closes with Allen’s final gift to us, the end philosophy of his lifetime of restless questing. His last word? That each of us is a lucky miracle and that life itself is a miracle we must learn to revel in and appreciate.
If This Card Chooses You – You are surrounded by magical possibilities. Are you dreaming of eternal bliss? Floating in connectedness? In Love the boundaries of the other disappear, all is forgiveness. Merge fearlessly, knowing you will be able to get yourself back any time, soothed, improved, and healed.
We Are Warriors For Love – Love is the spirit that animates the empty spaces between humans. Once charged, these spaces become a powerful force for growth and change – uncharged they are so much dead air. This is the space that warriors protect. Love is the longing to be truly alive and to share life with the Blissed, Blessed Others.
Our Yearning Defines Us – As children we thought we knew the meaning of life but it seems we have forgotten. As warriors we fight for our ancestral memories of trust and closeness. How we long to be reminded of the ecstasy of selflessness, to re-experience the borderlessness between creatures that makes the dead universe come alive.
Love Is Our Armor – It’s a spiral, our labyrinth, remember? We can’t go back, we can only go forward. We practice techniques and invent others as we design and redesign purposeful maps in a threatening and uncertain world. We have the collective confidence of all the brilliance of the warriors who came before us. Someone loved us once, eternalizing the golden moment, now we can re-create and perpetuate that magic.
Warrior Danger – Danger lies in narrowing, exclusionary definitions. Love must ever open outwards. As soon as we turn Love into a zero sum game with a shut-off valve focused on our own gratification, Love dies.
Warrior Opportunity – The possibilities of a warrior are endless because we have chosen, in our flexibility and understanding, to be endless. Close your eyes and assume yoga’s starfish pose. We are open to what the universe longs to teach and once we commit to pass it on, we form an unbreakable chain, free at last from the bonds of selfishness. Clasp the hand (or paw) that generously, trustingly takes hold of yours. Let’s venture forth together.
Models & Mentors – ‘to love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides” – David Viscott
“Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get, only what you are expecting to give, which is everything” – Katherine Hepburn
“Love gives you a piece of your soul you never knew was missing” – Torquato Tasso
“Love is the gift of oneself” – Jean Anouilh
“I love you for who I am when I’m with you” – Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#Haiku: Love Transfer
The secret of breaking Any bad habit Is to love Something more
If This Card Chooses You – Do you need to forgive? Or be forgiven? Most of us require both! Ask your dreams. Do you dream of home? Sometimes we dream of a home that no longer exists, or never existed. “Home” represents the state of psychic absolution where all mistakes are forgiven and forgotten.
Warriors Create The Future – We commit to the ultimate compassion that we are all in this together. Jesus suggests that understanding doesn’t arrive until we learn to be the “forgivers”. Obviously, this means we must learn – somehow – to forgive ourselves.
Warriors Create Heaven – Such forgiveness helps us achieve the state of spiritual lightness that allows a warrior to float through time, history, even the universe.
Warriors Are At Home In the World – What’s your “dream home”? A warrior’s training emphasizes understanding and managing the fragility of the human body and the objective world, and accepting our healing and unifying mandate. Once we have scoped out the terrain and the inhabitants, Warriors are at “home” anywhere.
Warriors are About Justice – But not the kind that leaves more brokenness behind. Warriors achievements and physical selves display the triumph of thought, will and love.
What Does It Mean to “Start Over”? – We don’t wish to be free of “consequences”. We want to learn and grow from our mistakes but not be humiliated and punished for them. Pretending they didn’t happen doesn’t free us. Seeing our mistakes as moves in a dance we are all contributing to frees us from painful rumination and helps escape and explain the prison of blame. “I did this because you –“… Human interactions are a tar-pit in which we trap and tar ourselves. We realize we need to forgive every chain in the event pattern if we are ever to have any peace.
It’s All About You – Robert Frost defines “home” as a place where, when you show up, they have to take you in. Defining “they” defines your group, your original home. Philosophy may provide an answer. Buddhists see history as a circle, Christians as a spiral. The question for Christians is, which direction is the spiral headed and do we have time to learn what we need to know before there’s a cataclysm? Can you define the mess we’re in and intuit your behavioral contribution? Is it possible to detach from the mess? In what group – or even in what “moment” can you detach from the mess?
Warriors’ Danger – We can’t afford to get mixed up about right and wrong. “By their fruits shall you know them.” Think it through. One avenue leads to health, dignity and growth; the other leads in the opposite direction. Don’t make the mistake of “fundamental attribution error”. The threat is NOT coming from inside the house. Martin Luther King Jr. made the wise comment that our specific brand of capitalism tends toward is “socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the rest of us.” It certainly suits corporations to lecture their employees on building a better world without incorporating any of those ideas into the bigger picture, where we have no control and they demand absolute freedom.
What Is The Bigger Picture? Health and safety for all living things to achieve their growth potential as part of a harmonious, non-exploitative whole. It is key that our resistance – which is necessary and life-giving – not embitter us.
Forgiveness Is Our Armor – Forgiveness doesn’t require ignoring the past or accepting bad behavior. It’s part of an interaction where forgiveness is a request, not a demand. Usually there is a recognition of fault or an expression of remorse: “I’ll never do that again!” When the requesting party instead seeks permission for the suffering to continue, “I can’t change – that’s the way I am” — that’ a different request. “Home” is not re-created that way. Hell is. Your opportunity is to point this out – if necessary, (because of safety) only to yourself. “If I’m not willing to try giving up my participation in this suffering because I think I’m not able to, then this pattern will continually get worse.” Time to construct a better – more intelligent map.
Models & Mentors – “It’s not an easy journey to get to a place where you forgive people. But it’s a powerful place, because it frees you” – Tyler Perry
“The practice of forgiveness is our most important contribution to the healing of the world” – Marianne Williamson
“The weak can’t forgive. Forgiveness is an attribute of the strong” – Mahatma Gandhi
“To forgive one another, we must understand one another” – Emma Goldman
“Forgiveness does not exonerate the perpetrator. It liberates the victim. It’s a gift you give yourself” – T.D. Jakes
#Haiku: Forgiveness
Returning home with Newborn eyes Strong hands Fresh translations Future’s past
If This Card Chooses You – The future weighs on you. Will you be found wanting?
Ask your dreams. The Number One question people have about dreams is, Are they prophetic? And the answer is of course YES. We KNOW the “truth’. We fear the truth. We don’t want to face the truth. We fear the continuing “losses” of age because the accretions are so hard to see. Our dreams KNOW what is going on. But they are also Art, and art – especially good art – is as mysterious, meaningful and forceful as any living thing. It changes as you change, and it changes depending on how you look at it.
Warriors Need Truth. Warriors Accept Revelation – Dreams tell us when to be afraid. Dreams warn when something is missing. Dreams uncover all the secrets you have been keeping from yourself. The first obligation warriors accept is that the truth will set you free. The second, is that although terrifying, the truth is necessary. Warriors spurn the hiding, lying, misrepresentation, that substitutes for truth.
Warriors Can Handle The Truth – We are human, we are imperfect, and we need each other. The truth is that humans need governance and law to regulate our natural blindness and selfishness (which some would call original sin) into peaceful accord. The truth is also that humans who lust only for power will eternally angle to get themselves into positions of control, exclusion and punishment. These impulses must be identified and weeded out and it is courageous, difficult, and really unwelcome work, because we creative, loving, generous warriors also have our own lives to live.
Warrior Danger – Our dreams notify us when one of these lethal persons is in our midst. Our maps & models offer a variety of plans for confrontation and escape, and a recipe for courage. At the present time, the Lethal Persons are banding together and hoarding weapons to give themselves even more guarantees for power and opportunities to enjoy our despair.
Warrior Promise – Jesus said evil will not win. The challenge is to explore what ELSE he said, indeed, what is the message of all the great teachers? People who tell you to hate one another and go to war with one another are agents of evil. The first challenge is to create peace in our own hearts, peace in our own lives, peace in our own homes, and then start developing compassion for those who are not so lucky. When brutal tactics and empty promises are exposed as family destroyers, peace destroyers and community destroyers, we see clearly that efforts to share despair come from a desire to surmount despair, and that it has never worked and is not working. Only when the goal of increasing world suffering is given up can we welcome penitents back into the community of Sharing.
Models & Mentors – “We write the future moment to moment” – Pema Chodron
“The best prophets lead you up to the curtain and leave you to peer through for yourself”
– Frank Herbert
“The greatest thing a human soul can accomplish in this world is to see that poetry, prophecy & religion all are one” – John Ruskin
“The best way to predict the future is to create it” – Abraham Lincoln
“Yesterday has gone, tomorrow has not come, let us begin” – Mother Teresa
Alysse Aallyn 