The Great Symbiosis (Essay)

For almost a quarter of a century I have been doing regular aerobic walking for exercise.  And at some point many years ago I started doing my ambulating in the Columbia, Md. Mall in the morning before the stores open, as do many others of like bent.  I find that this aging body can endure the rigor of it better if it is not exposed to the elements outdoors and if the surface for walking is level.  A tendency toward vertigo and worsening eyesight make hazardous any foot traveling up the city’s bike paths, since the pavement is so sloped.     

Switching to the Mall has brought me into contact with many more human beings than I ever began to encounter when I was fast tracking through the woods near my home.  This makes it more difficult for me to maintain the degree of insularity toward which my introverted nature inclines me.  One might walk for forty minutes on the path and never encounter anyone.  In the Mall fellow troopers are impossible to miss or avoid.  Over the years I began making it a point to greet just about everyone I pass, even though they are strangers to me.  Usually it is a simple “Good morning!”  Sometimes it is “How are you?”  Occasionally it is “Blessings on you!” or “Welcome to the new day!”  Only In three situations do I withhold my greeting.  I do not speak to maintenance workers or any of the other Mall employees while they are doing their jobs, not wishing to distract them from paid labors.  Nor do I speak to anyone reading, texting or talking on a cell phone.  They are entitled to their privacy.  Also when two or more people are engaged in conversation with each other, I feel it rude of me to barge in or interrupt their exchange, so I pass on without speaking, unless they interrupt themselves and speak to me first.  But I try to include in my greetings anyone who is alone or any two or more people together but not engaged in conversation. 

The reactions I get are ever so varied.  Some speak back, some do not, but in every case it is the face that sends the message.  I even have these facial messages catalogued. 

         

There is the STONE FACE.  Its message is “Don’t you know the world isn’t like that?  Hasn’t anyone ever told you?”  Or the SICKLY BEMUSED FACE:  “Where did they wind you up, in a toy factory?”  Then there is the INDIFFERENT FACE, tantamount to saying, “It’ll take more than that for me to see the bright side of life.”  Sometimes the indifferent ones do not even make eye contact; they go to a lot of trouble pretending they do not see me.  The CURIOUS FACE makes me squirm a little.  It says “I’m a collector by habit, myself.  Maybe I should collect you.”  I have even encountered the ROBERT DENIRO “TAXI DRIVER” face:  “Are you talkin’ ta me?  You’re gonna say good morning to me?  You’re talking to me?”  Thankfully only once or twice has that ever happened!  

All these I have described thus far comprise a very small minority.  In most cases it is better than that.  Like the FACE-SAVING FACE that seems to be confessing, “You know I’d never initiate this ‘Good morning’ routine myself, but I’ll respond in kind – anything to keep up appearances!”  There is the CONCEDING FACE: “All right, I’ll acknowledge your greeting this time; just don’t do it when you come around again.  Once is enough!  Don’t wear it out!”  The BEGRUDGING FACE is cute: “Okay, I guess I know when I’m trapped, but don’t ask me to go home with you.” 

Then there is the BLUSHING FACE: “I know I ought to be doing what you’re doing too, but why do you have to make me feel guilty about that?”  Spoken with a smile!  And I just love the SURPRISED FACE.  You say “Good morning”, and the face looks back at you and replies without saying the words, “Oh, you startled me!  And I don’t startle easily.  Can you be for real?”  And thank God for the GRATEFUL FACE: “Oh, good morning!  Thanks for making it good.”  And the DELIGHTED FACE: “I was just going to say that (‘Good morning’) myself.  You beat me to it.”  Not very often, but sometimes I am fortunate enough to get the LOVING FACE, the one that says, “Thank you, you’ve made my day.” 

The rewarding thing is that many regular repeat walkers have gotten so used to my greeting that they anticipate it when they see me approaching.  They are already smiling and saying “Good morning” back with their expressions.  You can tell they appreciate it and would feel cheated, if I did not do my usual.  A few times I have been greeted with such a big smile by someone that I have slowed down my walking and acknowledged them for it.  “Thank you for that smile.  It does a lot for me.”

Above war, hate, barbarity, and anarchy, above the jungle hell, there is, as I see it, a four rung ladder.  The lowest but certainly most important rung that gets us out of that primal state of savagery is tolerance – live and let live.  “I won’t bug you, if you don’t bug me.  I won’t stand in the way of you doing your thing.  I won’t attack you or exploit you or kill you or endanger you.  Of course, I won’t help you either.  I won’t go out of my way for you, but I will tolerate you.” 

Then the next rung to which we can rise is friendliness.  Not friendship, that’s another matter!  But friendliness, politeness, neighborliness, occasional give and take, respect. 

Above that, more difficult for people to attain, is the third rung, what we call compassion, random acts of kindness, specific things done for specific people, answering to a need simply because we are on the scene or have the capability and we care, a predisposition to heal and help. 

But then there is one more rung on this ladder, one that even exceeds compassion.  I call it a sense of irreversible kinship with any and all, and its accompanying element of urgent involvement and imperative.  It is the attitude that anyone else’s suffering is my suffering as well.  As John Donne put it, it “diminishes me.”  Their survival is my survival, their struggle is my struggle, their destiny is my destiny.  It is not “Oh pity poor them over there.”  Rather we own the suffering we see!  It owns us!  A sense of the ownership of other peoples’ lives and destinies!  “Send not to know for whom the bell tolls.  It tolls for thee.”  On the fourth rung you cannot say, “Suit yourself; it’s no skin off my nose.”  You know that it very much is skin off your nose too and that of the world.  It is the unmistakable realization that we are all bound up in the same bundle of life, as God’s creation. We surrender up the distinctions that separate – all of them. 

We visit the fourth rung only off and on.  I have to say that it is impossible to carry this mind- and heart-set with you all the time.  We cannot always choose it.  There is the moment when it seems to choose us. We catch it here; we catch it there. 

Poets and musicians and song writers sometimes are inspired by this ideal.  Take note of these beautiful words to the song “The Heart’s Cry”, from Riverdance: 

Where the river foams and surges to the sea 

Silver figures rise to find me

Wise and daring Following the heart’s cry.  

I am that deep pool, 

I am that dark spring.   

Warm with a mystery I may reveal to you in time. . .

See the eagle rise above the open plain 

Golden in the morning air 

Weaving and soaring 

Watchful and protecting. 

I am that shelter, 

I will enfold you.

I do not know how it sometimes happens for me there at the Mall during my walking, but some mornings, not most, just now and then, all those faces – the callous, the resistant, the ambivalent, the suspicious, the startled, the embarrassed, the overwhelmed, the grateful, the glad – all of them become parts of the mirror image of myself, even though I know almost none of their names and never see them under any other circumstances.  I feel a bundling with them, a symbiosis, and I am warmly blessed by it.

How do we reach rung four?  The only way is to be faithful on rung three, be compassionate, do for others, share ourselves and our resources as we have opportunity.  That we can choose, and by choosing it and choosing it and choosing it we create, we cultivate the climate, the mental and emotional and spiritual climate in which those transcendent moments on the fourth rung can take place.

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

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

The Hunger Games (Movie Review)

2 hrs and 22 min, color, 2012

The young reading public has swarmed all over Suzanne Collins’s direful, portentous fable and sent it soaring on the best seller charts, almost off those charts.  Over 800,000 copies sold in the four years since its publication, translated into 26 languages!   How can we aging literati fail to take notice, even those of us who have not read the book but have put ourselves through the feverish paces of watching and absorbing the movie adaptation, which according to reliable sources is quite faithful to that novel?  I have viewed better dystopian depictions of tyranny on screen, but I have sat through much worse, and I am impressed by the earnest professionalism with which the drama unfolds under the direct management of Collins herself.  She took command of the screenplay, assisted by Director Gary Ross and another writer Bill Ray.  I feared it would be gory and exploitative, but it is neither.  It is stark, but not especially distasteful, and Katniss, the main character, is competently and sensitively portrayed by Jennifer Lawrence.

In an undisclosed year far beyond our own, the North American continent has been transformed into one sizable nation called Panem, divided into twelve districts, District Twelve being the former Appalachia region, the lowest in reputation.  Every year a male and a female youth are selected by lottery from each district and shipped by rail to the capital, where they must compete in the ultimate blood sport dubbed The Hunger Games.  The twenty-four contestants (called “tributes”), after being feted in spectacular ceremonies, are turned loose into a huge forest region (somewhat booby trapped) where they must kill each other or be killed, only one survivor to emerge from the melee.  The entire event, lasting many hours, is observed on television by the entire country, each district rooting for its own tributes.  You could say that it is Reality TV carried to monstrous and gruesome proportions.  The teenaged Katniss, an expert with bow and arrow and knives, her expertise honed on many a hunting expedition in her mountain woods, finds herself competing with a young man from her district named Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), whom she hardly knows.

We have all heard, or seen depicted, stories about individuals fattened up in high style before being served up to a gross malevolence ordeal for the amusement of a crowd.  The ancient ritual recited by the Gladiators, trained to fight to the death in the arena, echoes in the mind – “We who are about to die, salute you!”  The initial lottery itself in each district is even called The Reaping, as if the chosen are so many sheaves of wheat for consumption.  Give ear to Panem’s shadowy President Snow (played by Donald Sutherland): “Hope is the only thing stronger than fear,” but it is also “dangerous” and has to be “contained.”  To paraphrase: Give the subjects a big prize to hope for (like something on the order of an Olympic medal and the esteem that goes with it), but incite enough fear to keep them under control.  This has often been the unwritten credo of a family member or somebody in a relationship who alternately gives/withholds affection or rewards/punishes.  It is the most deadly of all control mechanisms, and Collins has envisioned how this would work if a government used it instead of abject cruelty and oppression as the device to enslave.    

There is another by-product of such a system of control.  Those who are thusly manipulated can eventually become just as deadly to each other.  If you choose to screen the film, note how easy so many of the twenty-four young tributes find subverting and killing to be, once they are turned loose in that forest.  Is it unheard of for children in a household dominated by this give/withhold ploy to begin manipulating each other in like manner instead of taking loving refuge together against their common domestic antagonist?  I am sure most of us have seen this kind of dynamic at work, the mistreated mistreating others mistreated.  Collins tries to imagine what such a thing would look like when an entire society functions that way.  To a great extent she succeeds.  But what is missing from the narrative is a full payload of suspense, at least from where I sit, or have I been seeing too many movies for too long.  The outcome of this fight to the death was quite apparent to me well over an hour before the movie ended.  See how you find it, unless you have read the book and already know!  Fortunately the movie’s ending, foreseeable though it may be, is not the ending of the story.  “The Hunger Games” is the first of a published trilogy, all three novels already in print, the second and third movie adaptations now in various stages of preparation.  I guess I will be checking them out when they arrive.

My comments cannot justly be concluded without due consideration to Jennifer Lawrence.  Mostly because of the admirable work she does this is more than just an action/adventure vehicle.  She gets very deftly into the character of Katniss; she knows exactly how to light each scene and each close-up from within herself.  She gives a three dimensional portrayal among a teeming multitude of one or two dimensional ones.  She has great promise as a serious actress.  In the novel Katniss narrates; in the movie she does not.  A wise decision!  Too much would have been known too early about what is driving her.  She is given more leeway to make Katniss mysterious. The film benefits considerably from that bit of mystery.

I do not recommend “The Hunger Games” for the general public.  In fact, I have no particular audience in mind.  Each will have to decide how relevant the material is to her/his life.  How much savage confrontation can you handle?  Just be advised that there is more than one kind of warfare going on in it.

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

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

The Missiles of October (Movie Review)

                                  The Missiles of October

                              (2 hrs & 35 min, color, 1974)

Wars of wits between hostile nations are nothing new on the face of the earth.  They have been in play since Day One of recorded history.  Most of them barely attract the attention of the general populace of those nations.  We the citizenry are not told much of what goes on in the Intelligence field; cloak and dagger maneuverings take place behind closed doors or in the streets of remote cities or in the board rooms of the Pentagon and the CIA.  Trade-offs of one kind or another are employed to resolve tensions and keep the world safe from imbalances of power.  Only in rare instances do these shadow games trigger open and armed combat.  Relatively few people know how close the civilized world ever comes to such a tipping point. 

But in October of 1962 just about everybody on the planet knew that a zero hour on a grand scale was imminent and that the stakes were astronomically high – too high for the ordinary swap deals of diplomacy.  The United States and the Soviet Union engaged in more than a backyard tussle; they came eyeball to eyeball over nuclear arms on the world stage. 

This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of what has come to be called the Cuban Missile Crisis, the nearest the world has ever approached an all-out nuclear war.  My children had not even been born, but all of us who were alive at the time can surely remember at least some of what we were doing when for thirteen frightening days the world held its breath as President John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev traded deathly ultimatums.  Never was there a fortnight in which an American president worked harder to earn his salary.      

If any of you under fifty years of age want to get the lowdown on this chapter in your nation’s history, I could not recommend anything more informative and dramatically absorbing than “The Missiles of October,” a TV movie that aired twelve years after the events it portrays.  And those of you over fifty who do remember it would also do well to watch the film, not only to get refreshed on the blow-by-blow details behind the scenes but to absorb into your consciousness the courage and the wisdom that finally averted the unthinkable, not only on the part of Kennedy and his Cabinet but Khrushchev and his Presidium as well.  (There are no good guys and bad guys portrayed in this scenario.)  And it might increase the value of the stock you take in your mortal existence many times over. 

A quick review of the circumstances:  Aerial photographs by U.S. planes detected the presence of Soviet missile bases being built on Cuban soil despite continued assurances from the Russians that they had no intention of doing any such thing.  Kennedy had to call an emergency meeting of his entire cabinet to determine what to do about this development.  Dean Acheson, Maxwell Taylor, Robert McNamara , Dean Rusk, MacGeorge Bundy, C. Douglas Dillon, George Ball and Bobby Kennedy  the President’s brother, then Attorney General, are names that most of us old timers should quickly recognize.  Some favor immediate bombing of the missile bases, others want to blockade the island, a few prefer diplomacy.  Tempers flare; nerves are rubbed raw again and again.  The deliberations get quite hot.  All kinds of bends and twists occur before a consensus is reached.  The clandestine Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by American mercenaries two years before, one that failed, made the Russians very uneasy.  Khrushchev felt impelled by this fiasco to protect the Cuban people from alleged U.S. aggression and sought to do so by the establishing of these bases. 

Many other political figures eventually become involved in the crisis before it is resolved.  That it was resolved is something everyone knows.  How close the two major powers came to disaster might surprise many who were living in 1962.  Until I saw the film for the first time shortly after its premier, I myself had no real grasp of how NEAR-   TO-   ALL-OUT WAR-    WE-    WERE-    TAKEN.  I still tremble every time I think of it.

Many of the players in this huge all-male cast, all of them monumentally at the top of their form, too numerous to list completely, are dead now, but seeing them in this celluloid time capsule gives me fond memories of much of their other work.  Kennedy is portrayed by William Devane, and his command of the New Englander’s drawling manner of speech is astoundingly accurate, as well as his body language.  It might be hard to believe that he was not a member of the Kennedy family himself.  What extensive coaching and voice training he must have had to go through preparing for this most difficult role!  And Martin Sheen is a lively, appropriately intense and fast talking Bobby.  Howard Da Silva, well known stage and screen personality in many memorable character parts including the psychiatrist in “David and Lisa” and Ben Franklin in “1776,” does not have the voice of Khrushchev but he commands every moment in which the Soviet Premier is seen.  Ralph Bellamy turns in a worthy portrayal of Adlai Stevenson, ambassador to the U.N. and former Presidential nominee.  Nehemiah Persoff fits very nicely into the shoes of Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Foreign Minister who pays Kennedy a visit right during those thirteen days and pretends that nothing is going on in Cuba that the U.S. should be worried about.  Everybody shines; there is not a wooden portrayal anywhere.     

The color processing of the images seems a tad anemic by today’s digital standards and some of the panning of the camera from face to face feels a bit awkward to me.  And we have to put up with periodic pauses for the station identifications and commercials which we mercifully do not have to sit through, just the bothersome hiatus complete with a repeated and needless fanfare.  But the script is not allowed in any way to suffer on account of these factors.  The movie was produced by Herbert Brodkin and Robert Berger and directed by Anthony Page.  It can be rented from Netflix and is available in many public libraries.

What pleases me is the non-partisan treatment the material is given by screenwriter Stanley R. Greenberg.  I picked up no political party sympathy from any of the dialogue.  The president under siege just happened to be a Democrat.  But the drama transcends party politics and all other lines of social or bureaucratic division, and no digressions into anyone’s private life or places of residence or reputation or ideology ever take place.  All the scenes occur in official surroundings, punctuated a half dozen or so times by newsreel footage of atom bomb testings and military deployments.  Jackie Kennedy never puts in an appearance, her name only once mentioned.  Lots of close-ups are used – men staring into each other’s faces behind closed doors, reading each other’s expressions, picking up each other’s dynamics.  The tightly constructed screenplay gets down to the business of the missiles right from the start and stays that way until the last pulse pounding moment.  I promise, whatever your political orientation, you will not be bored or disinterested.  Some of you might want to watch it with your grown children and afterward give them a hug and thank God they were permitted to enter this world.     

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

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