i haven't read through this but the film narrative i consumed today.. echoes my heart and my recent life story
so i felt the need to honour this... i hope this does its part.
right now my computer has been somewhat fiercely attacked by trojans, ironic
seeing the age old legend of helen of troy...
you know what they say
she was the most beautiful woman you ever lay eyes on
and an entire region went down
because of the violence surrounding her
today it has escaped into the messy, dark, and spiderweb ridden world of electronics,
that which should be the purest and cleanest of all,
a good quote:
'to talk to others who are unseen and far away is an experience which before the telephone, occurred only in
mythology. Gods, devils and angels talked from the sky across the world, but not mere mortals. [1977:372]
Suzanne Keller, 'The Telephone in New [and Old] Communities' pp281-98 in Ithiel de Sola Pool (ed.) The Social Impact of the Telephone. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
sorry but i've got ancient legends on the brain now
whilst i'm at it, the slumdog millionaire film reminded me of the indian legend[from wikipedia]
Rama and Sita
Rama
with Sita on the throne, their children Lava and Kusha on their laps.
Behind the throne, Lakshamana, Bharata and Shatrughna stand. Hanuman
bows to Rama before the throne. Valmiki to the left
Rama and Sita
are the protagonists in one of the most famous love stories of all
time. Described as being deeply in love, Sita and Rama are
theologically understood as avatars of Lakshmi and Vishnu respectively.
When Rama is banished from the kingdom, he attempts to convince Sita
not to join him in a potentially dangerous and certainly arduous
existence in the jungle, but Sita rejects this. When Rama orders her in
his capacity as husband, Sita rejects it, asserting that it was an
essential duty of a wife to be at her husband's side come good or
ill.[21] Rama in turn is assiduously protective and caring for Sita
throughout the exile.
When Sita is kidnapped by Ravana, both Sita
and Rama undergo great personal hardships during their separation.
Sita protects her chastity assiduously, and survives over a year in
captivity on the strength of her love and attention to religious values
and duty. She is completely unfettered in her resolve despite Ravana's
courting, cajoling and threats. Meanwhile Rama, not knowing who had
kidnapped Sita or where was she taken, often succumbs to despair and
tears, denouncing himself for failing to defend her and agonizing over
her safety and pain. Sita knows that it is in Rama's destiny to fight
to rescue her (she refuses to be rescued thus by Hanuman, who discovers
her), but is deeply anxious for his safety and fearful of Ravana's
power.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/07/24/1058853193538.html
A short history of true love
July 26 2003
Even
in an era of speed dating and internet relationships, history's great
love affairs have plenty to teach us, writes Amanda Smith.
Even
in an era of speed dating and internet relationships, history’s great
love affairs have plenty to teach us, writes Amanda Smith.
The
nature of true love was revealed to me at Frankston High School in 1973
where, in a portable classroom next to the bike racks, the genius of
William Shakespeare was unfolded to 35 gormless adolescents.
We stumbled our way through Romeo and Juliet,
reading aloud; for the balcony scene, the part of Romeo was
memorably recited by Trevor Giles, the school burping champion. We
were being inculcated into the rich wonders of the English language:
“Look, love, what envious streaks do lace the severing clouds in
yonder east.” What we were really being schooled in, though, was both
the desirability and the impossibility of romantic love. I didn’t get
the language, but I got the message.
The message was that
falling in love was easy. It just happened, no study or training
required. Tomorrow, I thought, I could walk into the Police and Citizens
Youth Club, and someone called Shane or Russell and I would fall
into an immediate state of reciprocal desire.
We wouldn’t have
to run away or die in a suicide pact. In the olden days when the play
was written, families feuded and marriages were arranged, but not any
more. Me and my Romeo would be free to live happily ever after.
advertisement
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE='JavaScript1.1'
SRC='http://campaigns.f2.com.au/js.ng/cat=features&ctype=story&Params.richmedia=yes&site=age&adspace=300x250'></SCRIPT><NOSCRIPT><A
HREF='http://campaigns.f2.com.au/click.ng/cat=features&ctype=story&Params.richmedia=yes&site=age&adspace=300x250'><IMG
SRC='http://campaigns.f2.com.au/image.ng/cat=features&ctype=story&Params.richmedia=yes&site=age&adspace=300x250'
HEIGHT='250' WIDTH='300' BORDER='0'></A></NOSCRIPT>
advertisement
The
contemporary irony of romantic love is that the easier it seems, the
harder it gets. We live in a society where we never have been more
free to fall in love with whomsoever takes our breath away, be they
married, of the same sex, or of a different creed or class.
Yet
we also live in an age where enduring love has never seemed more
difficult to sustain. We have developed high expectations of what we
want from love. The philosopher John Armstrong, author of The Conditions of Love,
says of our romantic aspirations: “Love is the source of all value.
It stands as one of the great ideals of existence, the lamp that
illuminates the whole of life.”
We want love to provide the
deepest pleasure and meaning. We want it to last, but if the reality
falls short of expectations we move on, in search of the real thing.
Taking
away the barriers that kept lovers of yore apart has not provided the
key to long-lasting relationships, but it has not diminished our
desire for love and romance either. Nor has it diminished the
popularity and imaginative power of the old stories of forbidden
passion. Yet, when our ideal is to live happily ever after with the
one we love, why are our great love stories tragedies?
Romeo and Juliet die with the fresh wonder of their passion intact, before they get anywhere near the boring and tricky bits.
Shakespeare
did not invent the tale of the star-crossed lovers, he just did it
better than anyone else. Romeo and Juliet had been doing the rounds in
novella form in Italy, France and England for more than 100 years
before Shakespeare reworked it into a play in 1590-something.
Its
enduring appeal lies in its representation of perfect, pristine young
love. Romeo and Juliet fall in love at first sight, their feelings
for each other are entirely mutual and neither of them has a problem
with commitment. They die with the fresh wonder of their passion
intact, before they get anywhere near the boring and tricky bits. Not
for them negotiations over what to do with the toothpaste cap or
whether to have chops for tea.
Romeo and Juliet gives us an image
of the gloriously exulted state of loving and being loved that
subsumes all other considerations, even though the play makes it
clear from the start that it will end badly. For them, it ends in death
because they cannot live without each other. For us, the end, if it
comes, will more likely be in separation because we cannot live with
each other. What then, is the continuing relevance and seductive
charm of this centuries-old tragic story?
Romeo and Juliet
cannot have the love they want. We have all felt at some time cruelly
treated in matters of the heart. “Why is the measure of love, loss?”,
Jeanette Winterson asks at the beginning of her novel Written on the Body.
This haunting sentence reaches into the pain that the end of love
brings. It encapsulates the horrible paradox that love is most valued
in its absence. Even in the happiest of committed partnerships,
there is pain.
Etymologically, we have chosen to forget that passion actually means suffering, but the old stories remind us of this truth. Romeo and Juliet
gives us a picture of love, however pure and true, that is thwarted.
The details of our own emotional lives may be more confused than
theirs, but the pain is the same. There is consolation and solace in
that.
Another consoling aspect of Romeo and Juliet is
that the lovers are not to blame for their situation. They are caught
in a family vendetta not of their making. By the time Juliet
realises that Romeo is a despised Montague, it’s too late. They have
already gazed into each other’s eyes and seen love.
This idea of blamelessness is elaborated even more strongly in the older story of Tristan and Isolde, a tale of fatal passion from the Middle Ages.
Numerous prose versions of Tristan and Isolde
first appeared in France and Germany in the 12th century. Tristan is
an accomplished and loyal knight who is charged with the
responsibility of finding and delivering a bride to his uncle, who is
King Mark of Cornwall. The Irish princess Isolde is chosen and a
marriage arranged. Details vary in the different versions, but most rely
on one key plot device: a magic love potion. On the boat trip from
Ireland to Cornwall, Tristan and Isolde accidentally drink this love
potion. The effect is instant and powerful, and the pair cannot keep
their hands off each other.
The love potion is the perfect symbol
for what it feels like to fall in love. It is an utterly intoxicating
experience. Love also feels like an external force that is out of
our control. It does not seem to be a process of deliberate choice or
free will. This lends a certain amoral power to romantic love.
Isolde,
like Juliet, falls in love with the wrong man, but it is not her fault.
The potion causes a passion too strong to be resisted or denied.
Although she dutifully marries King Mark, Isolde continues an
adulterous liaison with Tristan for years. They even run off together
for a while, although they can never be together in any socially
sanctioned way. There is much lying, deceiving, pain and suffering.
We
still tell ourselves that love is an uncontrollable force. A common
modern-day scenario is where a married man falls in love with a woman
who is married to someone else.
In the burning need they feel
to be together, two families are split apart. The spurned spouses are
thrust into a future they never expected, and the children must
learn to negotiate complicated domestic arrangements and the fraught
emotional terrain that comes into existence between their parents.
Nevertheless,
the contemporary view is that if this new couple are really in love,
if it is the real thing, then why shouldn’t they take their chance at
happiness together? Their feelings for each other are more important
than the distress or disadvantage they bring to those around them.
Such is the depth of our attachment to romantic love and its promise
of fulfilment that we privilege it above other considerations.
Until
late into the 18th century, marriage in the West was transacted more
regularly for social and economic reasons than because of that strange
alchemical reaction called love. In Medieval and Renaissance Europe,
unauthorised couplings like those of Tristan and Isolde, and Romeo
and Juliet threatened the social order and so their stories had to
end with their deaths. The only consolation back then was a
transcendental reunion of the lovers post mortem.
Over the past
200 years, we have gradually redefined our rights and expectations
about love and marriage to give ourselves greater emotional freedom to
seek happiness in this world, rather than wait for the next. We have
done it, though, by perpetuating the old belief that true love
recognises no boundaries or conventions.
As Maria sings in West Side Story, the 20th century musical retelling of Romeo and Juliet: “When love comes so strong, there is no right or wrong.”
If West Side Story’s
Tony had lived on, would he have felt the same way about Maria years
after the giddy rush of infatuation had died down? Would Maria still
be singing his praises? The point with these sad love stories is
that we never need know.
Romeo and Juliet die with the fresh wonder of their passion intact, before they get anywhere near the boring and tricky bits.
One
pair of history's great lovers who do live to tell the tale is Heloise
and Abelard. In France in the 12th century, this nun and monk
conducted an extraordinary debate on the nature of love. In 1132,
Heloise wrote to Abelard: "God is my witness that if Augustus, Emperor
of the whole world, thought fit to honour me with marriage and conferred
all the earth on me to possess for ever, it would be dearer and more
honourable to me to be called not his Empress, but your whore." This is
hot stuff coming from a nun to a monk, but then, 15 years earlier,
they had had a love affair that was the sex scandal of the century.
Peter
Abelard was a brilliant and dashing philosopher who had been employed
by a canon of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris to tutor his bright
young niece Heloise. The pupil and her tutor soon added romance to the
syllabus. Then, as now, a sexual liaison between a teacher and a
student was outlawed (this is one of the few taboos around relationships
between consenting adults that we have retained). Heloise becomes
pregnant and has a son. In an attempt to appease her uncle Fulbert, the
lovers marry, but Fulbert is unforgiving. He has Abelard castrated.
In
pain and shame, Abelard retreats into a monastery, where he spends the
rest of his life. Against her will, Heloise is sent to a nunnery, also
for the rest of her life. Abelard writes of all this in his
autobiography, The Story of My Misfortunes. In it he claims
that he seduced Heloise for sex alone and that it was lust, not love
that he felt for her. He also believes that it was fortunate his
testicles had been cut off, because he was now able to devote himself
entirely to God.
In her convent, Heloise reads all this and is
mightily hurt and angered. She writes a letter to Abelard that begins a
famous correspondence between them. She asks him why he has rewritten
their history. It was love, she says, and she has never stopped loving
him. In one letter she tells of how she still has sexual fantasies
about him, during the Mass. He writes back telling her to get a grip
and to love God, not him. Heloise has a view of human love that
embraces both the sacred and the profane. Abelard believes that God is
for love and woman is for sex.
Like Heloise and Abelard, the
real-life love affair of Antony and Cleopatra was complex and
contradictory. By the time they got together as lovers, Antony and
Cleopatra had both been around the block a few times. They each had
had other partners, children, careers and responsibilities.
Antony
was a successful soldier and statesman by the time he took up with
the Egyptian queen in 41BC. Cleopatra had a thing for powerful Romans.
Before Antony, she had had a relationship and a child with Julius
Caesar. What's difficult to know from historical and fictional accounts
of Antony and Cleopatra is whether it was love, lust or ambition that
drove them on a crazy course of self-destruction together. They formed a
political as well as romantic alliance and took on the Roman navy.
They thought they could have it all. They lost the battle and their
lives.
While Romeo and Juliet is the greatest teenage love story of them all, Antony and Cleopatra is about a middle-aged affair. For this reason, it's a much more ambiguous and messy relationship.
Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton as Cleopatra and Mark Antony.
Shakespeare's historical source for his play was Plutarch's Life of Mark Antony.
Plutarch was a strong supporter of Roman imperialist values, which
means his account portrays Antony as a disgracefully irresponsible loser
and Cleopatra as a dangerous foreign temptress. Writing some 1500
years after Plutarch, it is Shakespeare who turns them into great
lovers.
John Bell, the artistic director of the Bell Shakespeare
Company, says that Shakespeare invented a complex psychology for these
lovers and that "historically, Cleopatra may have been far more
pragmatic and ambitious than Shakespeare makes her". Nevertheless,
Shakespeare keeps us guessing about the nature of the attraction
between Antony and Cleopatra. "I find love in this play very hard to
define. It's certainly a grand passion, but whether it's true love is
harder to say. I think that's what Shakespeare is throwing at us," Bell
says.
In the play Cleopatra demands to know: "If it be love
indeed, tell me how much." Antony replies: "There's beggary in the love
that can be reckoned." For him, love has no value if it can be
quantified. Antony and Cleopatra are the most extravagant and reckless
of all great lovers. Their appetites for luxury items, banqueting and
dressing up, as well as for each other, are enormous. This abandonment
to sensuality is ultimately unsustainable, but it gives Antony and
Cleopatra their timeless fascination.
Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor fell in love while playing Antony and Cleopatra. The 1963 movie Cleopatra
has gone down in cinema history as Hollywood's most spectacular folly,
and the Burton/Taylor love affair on set was as scandalous as that of
the legendary lovers they were playing.
The relationship was a
thrilling combination of fantasy and reality and there are many
parallels between the two couples. Taylor's excessive number of
husbands had given her the reputation as a femme fatale, while Burton
was known as a big-drinking ladies' man. They continued to perform
their relationship as Antony and Cleopatra.
Their conspicuous
consumption and volatile behaviour towards each other held the rapt
attention of the media and the public for more than a decade. They were
a new kind of celebrity couple cast in the mould of a very old story.
Taylor and Burton retain the aura of great lovers. They represent an
archetype that has no equivalent among more recent celebrity pairs.
Posh and Becks, Tom and Nicole might be remembered as famous couples,
but not as great lovers.
Burton and Taylor also played a part in
the shifting attitudes to romance and sexuality in the early 1960s.
Brett Farmer, who lectures in film history and culture at the
University of Melbourne points out that Burton and Taylor got together
in 1962, the year that Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl was published.
"Which
told us that not only did good girls have sex outside marriage but
that they were enjoying it and could be empowered by it," Farmer says.
In 1963, the year that Cleopatra was released, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique.
In this climate of sexual liberation, Elizabeth Taylor as a latter-day
Cleopatra, "was a woman who was very aggressive, even predatory, in
her sexuality", says Farmer.
"Part of the fascination with the
Burton/Taylor romance had to do with the way it was offering a new
model, one which was very different to the domesticated suburban
bourgeois marriage which had been the ideal for much of the 1950s."
Nevertheless,
the Taylor/Burton model of sexually liberated passion was no more
sustainable that of their prototypes Antony and Cleopatra.
Taylor
and Burton loved at the vanguard of the progressive social movements of
the second half of the 20th century. Feminism and family law reform
have brought with them options and freedoms for all of us in the West.
This also means that more people are single more often than ever
before.
Since couples do not have to stay together till death us
do part, there is now a fluid marketplace of unattached people seeking
new partners. For some, this is an exciting time. For others, it's
daunting and confusing. Finding someone to fall in love with does not
seem as easy as Romeo and Juliet made out.
A burgeoning romance
industry has responded to this marketplace of need. Introductions
agencies, internet dating, and now "speed dating" offer professional
help in finding a partner. Internet dating uses the technology of the
information superhighway, but speed dating is a peculiarly 21st
century concept in a different way. With streamlined efficiency, you
get to date 15 people face-to-face in one evening.
In an upstairs
room at the Grace Darling Hotel in Collingwood, 40 men and women
are chatting away eagerly, if nervously. The sexual energy that's
flying around the room reminds me of schooldays with Romeo and Juliet,
except here they are better groomed and better mannered than my
classmates and I were. The participants are in their 20s, 30s and 40s
and they have paid $69 for a Saturday night of speed dating.
The
room is set up with long tables. The men are all sitting on one side of
the tables, the women on the other. The champagne is flowing. Every
eight minutes, a hooter is sounded and all the men get up and shuffle
along one place. They then get eight minutes to impress and be
impressed by the woman sitting opposite. And so it goes on for the rest
of the evening.
After each mini-date, if you want to see more of
that person, you indicate your interest by ticking his or her name on
your list of dates. At the end of the night, the organisers discreetly
provide phone numbers to those who have given each other a tick.
Speed
dating comes from Los Angeles. It was developed in the mid-1990s by
Rabbi Yaacov Deyo as a way for Jews to meet and form relationships with
other Jews. It's a new twist on Jewish traditions of matchmaking.
Speed dating has extended way beyond its Jewish roots and spread
around the world.
Katia Loisel runs Perfectdates, which organises
monthly speed-dating nights for straight and gay singles in Melbourne,
Sydney and Adelaide. The current popularity of speed dating lies in its
efficiency. "Where else could you meet 15 people in one night?" she
asks. "You know they're single, you know they're available, you know
that they're willing to talk to you. You're not going to get rejected,
no one is going to tell you to go away."
First-time participant
Trent is a retail manager who works 60 to 70 hours per week, so he
does not have a lot of time to work the social scene. He wants to
maximise his chances, so at this fast-tracked dating event, Trent
thinks he has "got more of a percentage chance to meet somebody nice".
This
sprint version of the mating game is brilliantly suited to a culture
that breeds romance-hungry, time-poor individuals. This year, Deyo
has also published a book on the subject. The blurb for SpeedDating: A Timesaving Guide To Finding Your Lifelong Love
says it will take you, "Beyond your first date to help you reach your
goal: marriage in the quickest possible time to a person you love who
will cherish the real you forever". There's an awful lot of aspiration
in that one sentence: I want undying love and I want it now!
We
all believe we deserve love. We believe we are all entitled to it. In
this democracy of love, we have reformed our society and our
institutions to accommodate our most intimate desires, but we have not
yet found a way for all of us to find and keep love. Perhaps we have
been unsettled by the freedom, however much it is preferred to the
sanctions and strictures of the past. Falling in love with the wrong
person no longer means making an unauthorised match. It more likely
means a coupling that sooner or later fails to fulfil the needs of
either or both parties. Even so, we remain remarkably faithful to the
ideal that romantic love has the power to transform and give meaning to
our lives.
The old stories of great lovers point to a love that
will never go away, no matter the obstacles, dangers and threats that
are put in the way. The tragic way each of them resolves comforts our
own sense of love's difficulties. In the endless telling and re-telling
of their stories, the love lives on.
Amanda Smith presents Great Lovers, a six-part weekly series on ABC Radio National, starting tomorrow at 5pm.
so
anyway... back to the real world, where we all lie to each other
endlessly, and put up pretenses because we think it helps, when really
it only fuels the emotional mould grow into a stinking huge monster in
the cubhoard... aka that skeleton you haven't touched in awhile.
anyhow... i've just got something important to say after all this legendary, historical, awe-inspiring....
drivel some might say.
fanciful romantic bullshit others may most eloquently describe it as.
and teenage angst and daydreams for those most well-informed among us, the mothers
there's a jewish saying,
god couldn't be everywhere, so he made mothers.
well you know, i'm going to extend it,
god couldn't be everywhere, so he made families
because a family should never hang upon one thing, one person, and one constant need
i once heard some young men complaining about their full time job, how little they get paid, and how no women
have to work like this.
i simply turned around and said,
excuse you?
no women have to work like you do?
did i just hear correctly?
i'm sorry but women have that 24 hour a day job called
being your mum, or your grandma, or your sister, or your best mate, or whatever woman it is that takes care of you
and do they get paid a single cent for it?
no
so dont complain, because we work endlessly, and if we complain?
our men go bitch to their workmates about how hard they work all day.
a highly highly interesting phenomenon social skills are.
i also have something to say about gossip.
having attended a public girls school i have some experience with gossip.
just a little bit you might say.
just a little touch of fate, as lisa mitchell in neopolitan dreams so nicely describes it.
we people love to speak, i mean we were born with tongues and brains, so why not?
where's the harm in words?
the magic and power of words has long been forgotten in this day and age,
of course there is no harm in words,
i mean today the playground rhyme goes
sticks and stones may break my bones,
but msn and facebook won't hurt me
anyway. we people love to speak, and its lovely when you hear of a pregnancy,
or a marriage, or a betrothal, or a 21st birthday, and 18th, a 16th, a 50th.
they're all wonderful traditions, celebrated in speech, shared with via the tongue and
our handiest and sneakiest tool in history.
the tool of language.
written
spoken
sent
in every kind of way
and just as every beautiful thing carries a dark side, one unseen by most,
language and the magic of the spoken word, carries the darkest of all
rumours
secrets
jealousy
gossip
sparks of violence
and lust
taking sides
warring with each other
scheming against the enemy
as i have said, and continue to say,
i trust very very few,
and even then,
i only truly believe what i experience myself,
and luckily i can experience other's memories,
when they are vivid enough.
do not believe gossip
unless you see it yourself.
my mothers golden rule.
and one that i abide by
always.
of course there are times in emergency when you feel you should believe
there are always times when you feel the rule should be broken
i tell you that is when the rule matters most
when it seems most unimportant, most trivial
also... apparently i am a whore
i always smile at this thought
well of course i am a whore
because there lies a place in my heart for every man and woman walking this earth at this moment in time
and in every previous moment in time, and in every moment in time to come
so therefore i am a whore in a complete sense.
because i fall in love, and i refer to every kind of love, that of a sister, of a mother, of a young child for her mother,
that of a teenager for her lover, that of an age old woman for her most trusted animal companion
and i fall in love too easily
so judge me as you will,
it will only come back to haunt one person
treat me as you will,
it will only come back to haunt one person
and i speak for every being on earth
treat as you wish to be treated
act as you would wish another to act towards you
that is the most important golden rule of all
again
all the best in every single possible way
may the love we're sharing spread its wings,
fly across the earth and bring new joy to every being that is alive
loka samasta sukino bhavantu
Britta
No comments:
Post a Comment