Ophelia, Understudy

I've been thinking a lot about Ophelia ever since I ran into this striking Redon painting first thing at the National Gallery: http://www.wikiart.org/en/odilon-redon/ophelia-1905 . I love it because it's not dreary; for once she gets some color. Not like in the Forensics exhibition on at the Wellcome, which includes an Ophelia-like death mask in wax of a young woman found in the Seine -- blank and totally robbed of any personality in the celebration. So what I want to know is, why isn't the play called the Tragedie of Ophelia? She's the one totally effaced. She doesn't get a lot to say or do -- it's like she's stuck in the dreaded understudy role, without any billing, waiting in the wings the whole time to get out there and actually say some lines, and only when someone else has finally kicked the bucket towards the end does she ever get a word in edgwise -- other than 'Yes/no m'lord' like some kind of secretary. Of course, by that time she's already imploded under the strain of taking endless dictation. 

He tells her what to wear

How to cut her hair

When to sleep, 

What to cook, eat, read, watch

She's playing his hopscotch

But the rules keep changing...         

He tells her when to wash, when to dry,

When to smile, when to lie,

Whom to talk to

When to do it over again

He'd take her for a spin

But she keeps failing..

He tells her when and where to work

As if he's god, not a jerk

When to come, where to go

How to think, what to know,

That he's 'just playing'...

He says his put downs are ruth

But he's redefined the truth 

She thinks that it's her  

Since he's told her, over and over,

Whom to be and whom to love

But it's not working..

(disclaimer: my poem above is based on real life, hence the gendered pronouns -- although, statistically, women and younger people are comparatively interrupted and ignored yet perceived as garrulous...yup...)

Ophelia's effacement and self-effacement, of course, is an unacceptable state of affairs for most of us.

For example, ah, but what if the un-sassy Ophelia had a Sassy Gay Friend? http://youtu.be/jnvgq8STMGM

Taylor Swift has a lot to say about not drowning yourself or anyone http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNoKguSdy4Y

Redon decided Ophelia should get to have some kind of voice, primarily through color:
http://www.wikiart.org/en/odilon-redon/ophelia-2
http://www.wikiart.org/en/odilon-redon/ophelia

The choose your own adventure "To Be or Not To Be" even has an active Ophelia you can play as:
 http://36.media.tumblr.com/41dc210c8421e3942ac02c0f3a73aa22/tumblr_mrlc6kD3fd1qehhkqo1_1280.png

A friend told me about the Ophelia selfies trend. I've so far refused to look at them in case they're too alluring. I think we should celebrate Ophelia in life, in living technicolor rather than in ashy silence. I don't want to fall prey to her siren song, pretending the water is the more welcoming answer... (see if you can spot all the Shakespeare bits I stuck in there ;):

Ophelia, Siren

Come in with me, the water's fine
Underneath its skin set yourself free
Once through the glass it's clear
The world's an inverted fishbowl
And the water is reality.

Take my hand, like the boy in Splash, 
Turst in me and you'll still breathe
Unborn children start life underwater
And merpeople swim uncluttered
Delighting in liquid liberty.

The atmosphere above’s too thin to live

While the sea, la mer, is our mother

The little mermaid lost her voice on land

But I have found mine in the river

Singing, let’s sink into density.

Underwater, light thickens and the odd angles even

Downwards is not murky hell but clear heaven

In this consecrated riverbed all the angels appear

Heartbeats, amplified, echo in my ears

Hear the sea stars quire in harmony.

This muddy vesture of decay

Slowly dissolves, floating away

The nutshell cracks, and the willow boughs sway

Above a land maid no more

Come learn with me what we may be.


Well, that one's easy :) we ought to be stars in our own lives, and not let someone else write them! (At least Cleopatra and Antony got shared billing? ;)

  

Mars and Venus

Cliched title, I know...but I stumbled upon this guy's site today and wanted to reblog it. It is written as open letters on how to be a considerate partner, and it is bittersweet.

I think the author (who writes from and of a typical 'male' perspective) takes a little too much responsibility and I wish he would write similar letters from the other side too. But on the whole his letters really moved me, on the theme of how one lover's intentions may be valid to them but still leave the other feeling alone; how their communication style may seem reasonable but it's of no use if the beloved doesn't 'get it', which doesn't necessarily make either one stupid but does put a spanner in the works...

Anyway, this letter was my favorite because it pins down the elusive issue of how one half can interpret 'banter' badly, whether well meant or no, and why it's not cool for the other half to accuse the unappreciative recipient of being 'too sensitive' et al.

http://mustbethistalltoride.com/2014/07/21/an-open-letter-to-shitty-husbands-vol-8/

PS Those two very planets often appear in conjunction when seen from Earth ;)

Of Swans and Snow

It has finally started snowing round here and it is both exquisite and confusing. One moment the sun is out and the sky is a crisp blue, and the next the air is all aflurry with swirly flakes and grey clouds, and then both together. If it's a foxes' wedding when it rains + shines, what gets hitched when you add snow to the mix? Mermaids? Platypus(es?pi?)? Perhaps it is the preserve of the arctic fox. Or maybe, another pair of swans somewhere mate for life.

After today's brief flirt with a snowscape, I was walking through the garden looking at the budding snowdrops that mean that hope is here, when I heard a sound like the beating of gigantic dove wings overhead -- and it was a flying swan, followed by another that must have been the mr/s. I did not know that swans could soar, along with snowflakes. I had not attended to Yeats' description of the clamorous wings of the wild ones of Coole.  http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wild_Swans_at_Coole_(poem)

It was probably inevitable that I would soon stumble across comic swan ballet videos. I spent quite a lot of yesterday giggling (well, guffawing) at this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsRNDo8Upys and Youtube obviously remembers preferences.

http://youtu.be/1z0UudWrPKY comic relief man-swan

http://youtu.be/WQcMFLpmv7s the Miranda Hart equivalent

http://youtu.be/IW3GAjAKges the original, now ruined for us all ;)

The thing is, that swans don't die like that. The classic poets supposed they died in song, hence the 'swan-song,' but even Shakespeare, the Swan of Avon, got it wrong. Apparently, the swan death making the rounds of the news is of one that died of grief, of its own volition, after losing a swan family member. I would hesitate to believe it but it came out of China and the same country produced the remarkable, groundbreaking Wild Swans memoir. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wild-Swans-Three-Daughters-China/dp/0007463405

The gutsy, wistful protagonist reminds me a little of my godmother, another remarkable woman who left her totalitarian past behind, to teach young ballerinas in small town America. One of these later grew up and became my mother. The Swan Lake theme was de rigeur as a household melody.

Like swans, there is something pensive rather than cheerful about snowfall. I am convinced that the snow on the Kashmir peaks is the real reason why they became the backdrop for India's latest film adaptation of Hamlet or Haider http://youtu.be/OwCZR_15JM0 . It is harder to imagine the fraught soliloquys being murmured to a potted palm, while Hamlet broods against a tropical sunset and swats mosquitoes (although jungle Hamlet has happened, it is not quite the same).

In 'India's Switzerland', the slopes of Kashmir are not neutral but disputed territory; they are also home to the snow leopard, a species as fragile as the region's peace. http://www.livescience.com/18694-endangered-snow-leopards-living-kashmir-photos.html In the film, Haider inherits a heritage that is already ruptured; Kashmir is the last bit of the subcontinent to be Partitioned, the 1947 division that resulted in the largest scale human migration, and accompanying massacre, yet known. Brother, it was said, killed brother: Haider finds the seam of the split, gets under the region's skin and gives its pain an outlet, juxtaposing the personal against the national tragedy.

The film is so moving that it has become a box office hit at home, and so disturbing that it has been banned across the border. It raises issues of not just revenge but of fratricide and sacrifice, ends vs. means, and questions whether the ideologies behind these are worth their cost. While man after man bleeds out in the snow, Haider, like the dying swan, is unsure whether to give into grief profound, or rage against the dying of the light. He struggles to break the cycle, to sacrifice hate; he fights against the normalized insanity of a daily life with no good choices and inextricable consequences, one where pulling the nuclear trigger will only wipe out twinned nations; where taking an eye for an eye will eventually leave everyone blind.  

After the film ended and  the shock wore off slightly, I tried to cope with it all by setting it down in a requiem, a gravedigger's song. Finding it again later, I liked it better than I remembered. The tune is sort of like this: http://youtu.be/BEm0AjTbsac and it goes:

shoveling snow 
laying him low 
soul rises high
up to the sky 

laid in the mud
by his own blood
bullets above
shattering love

brother on brother
from the same mother
rewriting twin fate
to share the same hate

an eye for an eye
still weeps the sky
steeped in a night
stretches out beyond sight

moonlight on snow
mountains below
rivers run red
bones dry in their bed

cradle to grave
chancel to nave
circles of life
broken in strife

to be or to not
to end or bear thought
to take life or live
to let blood or give

to battle with breath
to rage against death
show mercy to pain
fight fire with rain

look life in the face
break the cycle with grace
turn daggers to rust
give honor to dust

melt lead in the sun
teach toddlers to run
meet grief with peace
bury strife with heartsease



After all, if sun and snow, fire and ice can coexist; and a pair of birds can stick together through water and air, and life, then surely the land can hold us all; a little plot of earth is all that we will need in the end, just enough to make a snow angel.