Variation on a Primal Theme (Poetry)

VARIATION ON A PRIMAL THEME

A wizard told me a strange tale ’bout a

future simian of transmuted sight,

reborn to light new and unheard of fires,

unique, but not for long a neophyte.      

Hear him scratch, digging for he knows not what,

roused by the two-legged beasts who plunder. 

No alliance will he broker with them. 

He’ll only hold them somewhat in wonder.

He will ponder the riddle: why these beasts,

keenest of mammals, their assets intact,

has him mimic their coarse proclivities,

despite the rude ribaldry of the act.

What storms of mind, what spasms of the heart

render keepers as possessed as the kept?

Is it some passion or idiocy,

something drunk or some foul bed where they’ve slept? 

He’ll evade this boorish display no less

than a hidden hornet’s nest, but he’ll probe

his newfound heart and soul and signify

by a scratch fore and aft of his earlobe.

Some strange mogul of the id will teach him

that reason lies within his gifted touch,

not to be deceived by cookie fortunes

inside nut shells, cocoanut husks and such.

All alone for what he’s compelled to prove,

only by instinct will he construe it,

no cricket, frisky frog or tipsy toad

as intrepid as he to pursue it.

Like his human forebears will he then note

a grip his primate’s paw has never known, 

a distension from fetal hunch, as from

some covert nucleus suddenly grown.

A new current in the brain, a new stretch

of skin, new quickening concentration,

new sight with which to see, new vigor in

the mind, free of animal fixation.

Erect with his new and riveting thoughts,

each moment will face him with a new door,

entranced at the sun’s elixir, over

which only lymphatic sight glanced before. 

The blink in his eyes will become a flash,

opening the shutters to seek and find,

the tongue, rash with sparks of speech, feet in stride

with drummers in far corners of the mind.

Thereafter, in a sedentary pose

he’ll peruse what miracle has been wrought,

his chin cupped in upturned hands so as to

buoy the sacred head busy with thought.

Hands will rest upon hips as if to hold

in regal place the new vertical line

drawn from the earth beneath his feet and the

celestial heavens by his robust spine.

      

But a click of the heels together won’t 

transport this pilgrim home or make his day.

He must trample the serpent’s lair, eat grass, 

trusting soil and rock to meet him halfway.

He must be quicker than quick sand, kick stones,

walking and running for all that he’s worth,

with dagger speed cutting the air in front,

ready for the next hard place in the  earth.

From nature below his feet and the grand

heavens above his keen head, he will learn.

When he finds his way back to the other

mammals, some of them will greet his return,

though they will be reticent to applaud.

But eager for requital he will chance

To don friendly footwear and on two legs

will with open arms break forth into dance.

The caper this time will be all his own,

no mimicry, no burlesque, no pretense.

To no drummer but his own will he jump.

He’ll sing his own tune and make his own sense.

How reads the weird tale after that, in what

precise place will he be consigned to dwell?

No oracle, no reading of the stars,

no fervid prophet’s tongue can yet foretell.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com

I welcome feedback.  Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net

Forrest Gump (Movie Review)

                                      Forrest Gump

                            (2 hrs & 21 min, color, 1994)

Absurdist comedy in motion pictures has been around now for quite some time.  When I think of this genre, my mind jumps immediately back to “Dr. Strangelove” and “The Graduate” and to the1960s in general, when it began to stake out a place for itself in the mainstream of even Hollywood product and has since become entrenched in the movie audience’s fertile field of familiarity.  There is a difference between absurdist comedy and screwball comedy.  The latter has been around ever since the 1930s.  A screwball comedy is humor that has not a single serious thought in its head – pure fun, tomfoolery, escape.  The absurdist, on the other hand, takes the drama of the real world very much to heart but tweaks it until it makes ridiculous sense.  The absurdist gives the world a chance to laugh profoundly at itself.  Absurdist humor, if it’s worth its salt, is also sobering.

The 1994 classic “Forrest Gump” is absurdism of a very high caliber.  It takes the late twentieth century just far enough out of the bounds of painstaking realism without undermining its basis in fact.  It does not make the world as we know it and have absorbed it disappear; it makes it stand on its head and shake off all allegiance to probability so that instead of its bare facts we get a slant upon its giddy and relevant truth.  

Forrest Gump (Tom Hanks) is a deep south fellow with a pea-sized brain but with unheard of motor attributes and an innocent and trusting nature.  His life story through which we are conducted is as unlikely as any fictional adventure can get – unlikely, but likeable, yea, even loveable to many including myself.  In the course of the narrative, thanks to a loving but feisty mother (Sally Field), he goes from playground “idiot” as a child to college football star to Vietnam War valiant to industrial millionaire to loving father.  He turns out to be an effortless match for every crisis faced by the Baby Boomer generation.  Hanks is one of the very few actors who in my estimation are equal to giving him force and dimension and soul, and he does so superbly without compromising the characterization’s unusual premise.

While Gump is unspoiled by the onslaught of staggering world events, he finds that challenges of the heart are much more formidable.  One challenge is the bitterness he encounters from a lieutenant under whom he serves and whose life he saves in the midst of combat.  It seems the lieutenant loses both legs and resents Gump for depriving him of the honor of dying on the battlefield in the tradition of other fallen heroes in his family line.  Gary Sinise portrays him in realistic mode, becoming a kind of dramatic straight man to Gump’s outrageous innocence and comes to play a very vital part in the narrative.  Much of the absurdist comedy’s sobering effect derives from the stark contrast between the two figures.                  

The other challenge of the heart is the childhood sweetheart Jenny (Robin Wright) who weaves in and out of Forrest’s life and is slowly worn down by his good intentions and patience, before their relationship reaches a bitter sweet conclusion.  I will not say anything more about that or the relationship with the lieutenant for the benefit of those who have not seen this classic.  All I will say is that Forrest may not have much of an IQ, but he has a king-size heart, acquires a heap of common sense and gives pure pleasure as we  watch him wend his way.

There are some nitpickers who have accused the movie of glorifying brainlessness.  How so?  Does “Tobacco Road” glorify poverty and ignorance?  Does “Lord of the Flies” glorify juvenile malevolence?  Does “Young Frankenstein” glorify grave robbing?  What we have in “Forrest Gump” is a motion picture with a wide wingspread that encompasses a host of issues and emotional plateaus. The character of Gump is all of us denuded of our guile, sophistication, and self-possession.  His story gives us a kind of uncluttered window on the world we know, and he makes something disarmingly pure out of passive aggressiveness.

Robert Zemekis takes the directing honors.  Eric Roth wrote the cockeyed screenplay, derived from a novel by Winston Groom.  It won six Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director and in the eighteen intervening years has never been out of circulation.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com

I welcome feedback.  Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net

Sunday in the Park with George (Stage Musical)

                             Sunday in the Park with George

                                (2 hrs & 26 min, color, 1985)

“Art isn’t easy.” 

Those words of dialogue that are uttered in the second act of this landmark work of musical theater should ring true for any number of people – certainly for the patron who attempts to penetrate the mysteries of a painterly image, also for those who aspire to put something on canvas, and most especially for those who attempt a whole new approach to the craft.  I know for a fact that there are many practicing painters among my readership, and it would be a shame if any of you should leave this world without seeing this miraculous achievement in words, song, choreography, set design, technological prowess, visual virtuosity and soulful resplendence.  It draws its audience many fathoms deep into their ethereal selves.  That any finer tribute could be paid in theatrical terms to those who wield the brush or to creativity in any artful form is inconceivable to me.  It has been twenty-seven years since it skyrocketed to critical and public acclaim on the Broadway stage.  And what we have here is a televised presentation that was mounted in 1986, one year after that premiere, and is now widely distributed in DVD.  (Netflix has it.)  Recently I revisited the disc and was so moved (once again, as way back when) that I have purchased my own copy for future revisits.       

The George of the title is the Frenchman Georges Seurat, who lived a very short life from 1859 to 1891.  Seurat introduced a new kind of dot-like brush stroke, his canvases consisting of thousands of tiny flecks, so close to each other that it remained for the eye to combine them into amalgamations of colors that fused and formed light-struck surfaces.  No mixing on a palate was required.  The work to which he devoted two solid years of his life was “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” a landscape with many individuals in their Sunday best clothes casually posed in profile on the sloping bank of a river, and it languished in back rooms for many years afterward before finding its audience.  Today it is a revered portrait hanging in the Chicago Museum of Art and the focus of this musical.

The play is a witty, mirthful, multi-faceted musical with a huge cast and a libretto that stands very much alone in the halls of fame.  Two genius minds essentially brought it about – the composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim, a man of many original concepts that have made stage history over the past half century, and a writer named James Lapine (who also directed the original stage version).  The director of this televised version is Terry Hughes.  But there are numerous technical wizards who engineered the unusual stagecraft that gives visibility to the Seurat technique in terms that the average member of the audience can comprehend.  Translucent scrims play a vital part in visualization.  Actually, the production as conceived would have been an impossibility not too many years earlier.  The technology had not yet been invented.  Much use is made also of overlapping dialogue/lyrics and scenic juxtapositions.  The play would be a delight just to watch, if its content were run-of-the-mill.  But there are delights upon delights upon delights, for both the eye and the ear.

The narrative is a work of fiction inspired by the idea of Seurat.  Next to nothing is known about his private life.  George (portrayed by a fabulous Mandy Patinkin with a voice that contains almost as many contrasting shades and dimensions as the painting) is a kind of Everyman Artist, and Dot, the woman in his life, is brought to exciting life by an equally fabulous Bernadette Peters.  What a twosome they make – impeccable chemistry!  She is at first both his lover and his model.  The opening scene has her standing grumpily in the hot sun wishing they were back at his studio making love, while he sketches and sketches in the shade.  The lyrics she bounces about are hilarious, reflecting her mixed feelings about him, loving his art but feeling discounted.  They are of course in Paris of the 1880s on that La Grande Jatte island on a Sunday, a place where the working classes normally strolled about, with occasional high society visitors as well.  Here the scenery is manipulated by Seurat’s wave of the hand to suggest the phase to which his concept of the painting has evolved at each given moment. 

During Act I we meet an assortment of colorful, highly energized  characters – George’s mother and her nurse; a German couple trying to enjoy their day away from sweaty labor; two dithery, giggly young women with eyes out for available young men; a woman-chasing chauffeur; a soldier; a fellow artist of Seurat, his wife and bratty girl child; a boatman and his dog; a baker (whom Dot later marries when she gives up on George); and an elderly American couple from the deep south licking their French pastries and making snide conversation about the country they are visiting.   The nineteenth century scene comes to a climax during the first five or so minutes of Act II, when Seurat has finally gotten everybody positioned on the canvas precisely the way he wants them.  They all act as if they are Seurat’s captives, not happy with their poses or profiles and complaining about the heat under their thick clothing and parasols.  The sequence is a real hoot; it almost makes me double over with laughter. 

Then for the rest of Act II we find ourselves in America a whole century later, in the 1980s.  Another George (also portrayed by Patinkin), descendent of Seurat, is displaying a new invention called a chromalume and honoring his ancestor by the showcasing of “A Sunday Afternoon” in an adjoining gallery.   He is making his presentation assisted by his grandmother Marie (again, Bernadette Peters), a ninety-eight-year old senile woman who is the daughter of the original George and Dot, still hanging onto life decades later.  All the performers we saw in Act I return playing various individuals reacting with varied opinions to the works on display.  George bristles under some of the inane comments he hears, voicing his irritation to the audience.  He walks patiently nevertheless in Seurat’s shoes “bit by bit putting it together” and is finally confronted with the question of where his artistry might go in the future.  He gets some very unexpected help in resetting his sail, and the play reaches a final and heart swelling peak.

In spite of the comedic tone, there are moments when we do get some sobering insight into this obsessive man’s soul and spirit.  Dot accuses him of hiding in his work.  He replies that he does not hide in it; he lives in it.  “I am what I do.”  He demonstrates that claim when she informs him that she is about to give birth to his child (to be Marie of the second act) and that she is going to marry the baker.  He is compassionate with her but encourages her in her decision.  He cannot give her what she wants; the baker can.  It is that simple for him.  And the process by which the painting emerges, the day by day sweat and labor, is wonderfully envisioned.  The scene in which he works on the canvas all alone behind a scrim is a phenomenon of music, lyrics and controlled lighting.  There simply has never been anything else quite like it in the history of theater that I know of.

     

The show ends the way it begins, with George considering manifold possibilities and naming the qualities of which canvas art consists:  “Order, Design, Tension, Composition, Balance, Light and Harmony.”  Each word is sounded out as if it were a chime or bell being rung.  For me the play rings many exciting bells, and I am not a painter.