The Beviad–musings, mutterings and myths

I admit that I sometimes find myself fixated on the appearance of someone in a movie. I’m the one, after all, who couldn’t enjoy “The New World” because I couldn’t get over the fact that Colin Ferral’s shaggy eyebrows seemed to be taking over his entire face. I was amazed that no one else found this strange or even seemed to notice it.

So, what is it about me that makes me fixate on such superficial aspects of a film? What could make me miss the point of a film and focus on things that don’t really matter?Does it have anything to do with getting old?  Or have I watched too many makeover shows, read too many fashion mags, and in general immersed myself in the culture of beauty to such an extent that I can no longer deal with the blemishes, wrinkles, and other physical imperfections of the human body when I see them on screen? If so, how can I get over  this flaw? It must be similar to the strange way of seeing things that keeps anorexics from realizing how terribly thin they are; they look in a mirror and see someone who is overweight. Obviously my ‘affliction’ isn’t as serious as that, but it seems to be as pervasive. So, what do I do? Any suggestions?

 

The first thing that struck me was how long Harry’s neck is. Yes, I hate to say this, but this must be part of the gawky aspect of a seventeen year old boy: he has a neck like a giraffe. And he isn’t dressed in a turtle neck anywhere in the film, either, to help ameliorate the problem. Instead, he wears t-shirts that seem to accentuate his neck. This gives him a very strange look, to me at least.

Next, and related to the first impression, was how tall and grown up he has become—unfortunately so, I think. He was so cute when he was younger. However, Ron is much worse. He seems to be all bags under the eyes and gawkiness, even more than Harry. In fact, only Hermione seems to be aging nicely, but even she seemed drawn and skinny. Ron’s twin brothers seem so old as to be out of place in the film. I wondered why they are still at Hogwarts; surely they must be old enough to have graduated by now and gone to university. I also think that the director—whoever he is—has filmed them all rather badly. Often, the camera seems to be filming from the ground up, which accentuates their height. 

Also, there are too many shadows in this film, especially blue shadows. It could have been filmed in blue and white colors only, and no one would have noticed the difference, really. This made everyone look much too gaunt and sickly. Weren’t some of the earlier films a bit brownish and cosy? I can’t recall. In any case, quaintness has gone from this film. It no longer has a kind of Dickensian quaintitude about it, but instead seems very cold and unpleasant. 

Of course, the plot deals with awful, serious and scary things. I wondered, from time to time, what the kids around me in the audience were thinking. The ones who are the age of Harry might accept it, but the kids under thirteen would be too scared, I think. And as these kids get older, they more and more are witches and wizards rather than apprentices. The scene where Harry and his friends mount brooms and soar over London was all too much like a witches’ Sabbat. I begin to see how the Christian Right’s objections to their being witches and therefore devil worshippers could come from: now that they are adults, they all too well resemble the witches and wizards we have heard negative things about for centuries. 

Not that they are devil worshippers, of course. There is never any devil—or god, for that matter— behind this world of wizards, which is odd. It is, in fact, a purely secular world, unless one counts Voldemort as the devil. Christmas is celebrated as a day of gifts, but that’s all. You’d think that if there could be all these weird creatures and demons, there might be angels, but no. 

Not that I want a Christian world, with all that  implies. I might not even go to see the films in that case. But this movie is so cold and dark, so scary (not to me, but potentially to kids watching it) that I found myself hankering for some force of goodness to cling to. Hagrid is there, of course, undeniably good, and the rest of the staff at Hogwarts, but even they are suspect, especially since Dumbledore deliberately is ignoring Harry this time round, and the tall, skinny teacher played by Alan Rickman seems even more evil than usual, although he’s supposed to be on the side of the good. But we don’t see enough of such teachers as the one -played by Maggie Smith–or rather, what we see of her is too dark and shadowy; we need some shots of her face looking kindly, if only to balance out Ralf Fiennes’ noseless face as Voldemort. Instead, the camera lingers on the face of the Imelda Staunton as the pink-clad villain of this piece, as she comes to rule Hogwarts, complete with her neverending grimace of a smile; she is pretty well the only non-blue thing in the film. 

Moments filled with the  kind of exuberance found in the earlier films are in short order here. The scenes in the woods, where Hagrid presents new and weird creatures of  myth, are usually filled with wonder, but  this time it’s all so dark that one can hardly see what the creature of the hour looks like for the dark shadows of the wood, and I couldn’t hear its name, either. The same goes for the giant we are presented with, who is also blue-grey with shadows and hard to see. 

As for the plot, it may be easier when you’ve already read the book and know it already, but to me it seemed odd. No one believes that Harry really saw Voldemort (in the last film). Why not? Has Harry done anything in the past to make them think he’d lie about such a thing? In this, the film is like the last, where everyone shunned him because they thought he had entered his own name to a contest for those older than himself. These aren’t stupid kids; why would they think this of him? It all seems a too-convenient  plot twist calculated to present him as lonely and isolated.

And when the showdown comes, how is it that Dumbledore is able to hold his own with Voldemort? Isn’t the whole point that Voldemort is the most terrible and excellent of all wizards? Yet he just vanishes to fight another day, presumably. Why? He could kill them all at that point and be done with them. It seems that Rowling is saving him for the last book, where he will face Harry in a final showdown in which one of them will die. (For that matter, I never understood why Voldemort didn’t kill Harry in the Goblet of Fire, at the same time that he kills Cedric.)

Sorry, but I don’t think this is a good film. I still like the first and second ones best. There was an air of wonder and joy in them, even apart from that which the audience felt in beholding new and amazing inventions from Rowling’s mind being presented in cinematic form. Fear was centered on a beast of some sort in each film,  and we believed that Harry could do almost anything at the same time that we could believe in the awfulness of whatever beast he was facing. Hogwarts seemed cosy and yet wondrous, like the most amazing of castles with the most amazing ghosts. (Not surprisingly, my granddaughter Devon, age 5, has said that she’d like to go to school there when she gets older. She’ll be disappointed, I fear, with actual school if she thinks it’s going to be anything like Hogwarts.) 

<P>Harry’s biggest foe in those days was Malfoy, who is almost absent from the current film. Voldemort was someone who had killed H’s parents and given him the scar on his forehead, but he wasn’t someone hanging over the film like a dreadful doom waiting to descend. The theme music for the Harry Potter movies seemed to fit in those days; it suggested something exciting and magical. In this most recent film, it seems out of place–too sparkly and magical in a lovely way, in contrast to the dark, doom-filled aura of the film. Something from “Gotterdammerung’ would be more appropriate for this one.

“Scientists have emplained mathematically why the famous ’silly walk’ of Monty Python’s John Cleese have neaver caught on in the long history of Homo sapiens. The giant, leg-twirling strides of silly walks may enable an individual to leap around swiftly, but too much metabolic energy must be expended compared to conventional locomotion, according to a paper published by Britain’s Royal Society.

“Manoj Srinavasan and Andy Ruina, researchaers in Applied Mechanics at New York’s Cornell  University, drew up a geometrical model of human walking and running. They found that, in essence, each leg is a ‘telescoping actuator’ that can change its length….They then factored in the metabolic cost of three drains on energy. . .the cost of keeping the body’s basic functions ticking over; the cost of swinging the legs; and the cost incurred when a leg is in contact with the ground.

Their equations showed emphatically that walking and running are the most energy-efficient gaits for our species, honed by millions of years of evolution. . . .”

Perhaps the mention of silly walks is the creation of the press, and the scientists never alluded to it. In any case, the study still seems very silly in itself. Surely if there was a better form of locomotion, humans would be doing it, right? In any case, one wonders if it really is so hard to find meaningful research topics that scientists have to research such meaningless ones as this. 

After all, it was the Greeks, specifically Sophocles, I think, who said in Oedipus Tyranus, “Count no man lucky (or was it ‘happy’?) until he has  died.” That doesn’t mean that life is inherently awful and that no one will be happy until death, as some people think it does. It means that no one can tell what might happen tomorrow that might end what one thinks of as a lucky life. For Oedipus, life looked pretty good, after all. He had outwitted the Sphinx that had held the city of Thebes as hostage; as a result he had been made King of Thebes and given the previous king’s wife to be his wife. Yet his past was about to come crashing down upon him. He learned (in what actually is the first mystery work, with Oedipus as a detective of sorts) that the king he had succeeded was actually his own father, whom he had killed as a mean stranger who challenged him to a duel at a place where three roads met (always unlucky, since involving the number 3). Also, the queen who was now his wife was actually his mother, which meant his two daughters by her were bastards. And all this of course fulfilled an omen that had told him, as a boy, that some day he would kill his father and marry his mother. On the basis of that omen, he ran away from home, putting himself as far away as possible from the people he thought were his parents. How was he to know that he was the adopted son of the king and queen of Thebes, adopted by others after his birth parents exposed him outside the city after they were told in an omen that someday this child would be the death of them?

So, I should say that I have so far been lucky in my life, for which I am grateful to the Powers That Be. And I hope that I will continue to have such a thing to be grateful for in my future life. Yet  I may have already ruined things. After all, the last time I said, right here in my blog, that I was lucky to have had my knee surgery and yet wasn’t in much pain, the pain increased almost the next day, followed by infection. So I have to be very careful about hubris.

I have my unlucky aspects of course. I have arthritis, after all, asthma and high blood pressure.  However, the way I look at it, I am lucky to live at a time when all these afflictions can be ameliorated. My asthma, with the help of new medication, is symptom-free at present. My arthritis is being pretty well taken care of by anti-inflammatories. I take a pill for my blood pressure which keeps it perfectly normal. Even my bad knee has been able to be replaced by an artificial knee. And although I got infection when I had my knee done, I was able to get a bed immediately upon its being discovered, when apparently only a week before  the hospital had no rooms free at all.

Other things I am lucky about are things I mentioned in my last two blog entries. As well, although I have only won something twice in my life, I consider myself lucky nonetheless. Some people never win anything, after all. I won a poetry  book when I was about twelve that became a source of my love of poetry. It had all the classics in it, including “The Highwayman”, “Someone Came Knocking”, “The Elf and the Toadstool”, and many others. It was also illustrated nicely. The second time I won something was when Pasley was at the Priory School. I bought several tickets for a draw they had on Sports Day, and won two ticket for anywhere Air Canada flew. We had been on strike, so we didn’t have much money, and had thought we wouldn’t be able to go to Vancouver that summer as we did at that time; we used the tickets for that.

But there have been other instances of luck that weren’t involved in the drawing of tickets. Times when people have been kind and generous to me, and have helped me when they didn’t need to. In England, when Paze was 15 and we were renting two dilfferent English country cottages for a few weeks in two different places in southern England, Devon and Dartmoor, and discovered that ‘good location for touring’ meant ‘if you have a car’, we were returning once from a trip to Plymouth and arrived at the train station nearest us only to find that the last bus had already gone. A taxi driver said he’d come back for us once he drove another fare to where they were going. Night fell around us, and I was thinking to myself that we might just have to walk into the nearest town and stay at the hotel whose sign I could see—when, there he was, almost an hour later, as he’d said he’d be.  Was that because I was lucky? Because I was a woman with a teenage daughter? Because he was a gallant or old fashioned Brit who lived up to his word on matters? Or just because we represented another fare for the driver? I’ll never know.  Paze and I found similar helpfulness in New York when we went down there for a weekend. In a city we had heard was cold, people gave us directions left and right. 

Pasley and I were lucky in France, too, about twelve years ago.  We traveled outside Paris to see Monet’s place in Giverny, the famous gardens he painted so often. Not until we got there did we realize that we’d each been given a one way ticket instead of the round trip ticket we thought we’d purchased. And at the same time I learned that my debit card wasn’t working in the ATM machine at Giverny. That meant we didn’t have any money to buy tickets at the station for the return trip to Paris. We had enough pocket change to take a bus to the station. When we got on the train to Paris, I decided that we’d throw ourselves on the mercy of the conductor when he came around to collect our tickets. I also remembered that, on our trip  to Giverney, no one had come around to collect our tickets. Well, Pasley immediately fell asleep, but I sat there, worrying, all the way to Paris, but, luckily enough, no one came to get a ticket. I’m surprised anyone buys tickets for the train if this is what happens frequently. (And by the way, when we got to Paris, I luckily discovered that my card worked fine in the ATMs there.)

Before my knee surgery, I went to see my GP to ask him if there was anything  I could do to boost my stamina. I was wondering if I’d be able to take knee surgery, since I seemed to be so weak and unenergetic. He assured me that I would be okay, then asked me if I was a lucky person or not. I said I was, and he said that in that case, I’d probably have a good outcome. I guess he meant that if I was the kind of person who considers myself lucky, I was probably the type who would  find something lucky about my outcome—as I have proven above that I did, despite my infection. That’s probably what lucky is, the emphasizing of the positive. I have to say that I trained myself to be positive, a real Pollyanna type, when I was suffering from depression in my twenties. I had read somewhere that if you tried to find the positive side to things, you would banish depression. Well, I have been doing this ever since, albeit with the help of anti-depressants, which aren’t enough in themselves to work, I find. I have pretty well passed this tendency on to Paze, who has passed it on to Devon. The other day, when Devon came over as we were mopping up the water in our stairwell, she said, “Well, at least this means that your stairs got really clean,” showing that she has learned her lesson well.

For all this, I am grateful.

I’m also grateful for the beautiful music I’ve been listening to on the radio this morning. John always says I never buy cds and play them, but he forgets how often I am sitting right here, next to the radio, listening to classical music on either NPR or CBC. It’s much more interesting that way, since each piece is a surprise, and the variety is always surprising. Plus, I get to hear the interesting background information that the radio hosts provide. This morning I heard the Pier Gynt suite in its entirety, which was very nice. Right now I’m listening to something I’ve never heard before, very moody but melodic, like background music for a movie. It was the Second Violin Concerto by someone named Tom Myron, quite recently written, I’ve just been told.

I am also grateful for mystery novels. I belong to the Mystery Guild, which just sent me three new books. Secret Service, is a novel about a girl inheriting an unpublished book by Ian Fleming of James Bond fame. It is, however, a true account of his own experiences, starting with the Duke of Wales turning down the crown for the sake of Wallis Simpson, and involving, among other things, a plot to kill Diana in a Parisian tunnel. It’s well written and full of interesting stuff with famous people scattered across its pages. Just the kind of stuff I enjoy.

I am grateful as well for the fact that I got to wake Devon up this morning. She actually slept in, since she went to bed rather late last night. As John pulled back her curtains, I sat down at her bed and gently touched her. She woke up immediately, looked at me, and smiled. She is always cheerful in the morning. She said she was still sleepy, but she was still smiling angelically. ”And how did you sleep last night?” she asked me sweetly and sincerely, as if this were a daily ritual she practiced often. She was very nice about my knee, telling me that she knew that the reason we weren’t renting a cottage at the lake this summer was my sore knee. “But it’s not your fault, Amah,” she said kindly. “The most important thing is that you get better.”

Last night, after watching ‘The Bridge to Terebithia’, when she went to bed, I told her my retelling of ‘Mother Holly’. I swear I have a printed version around here somewhere, but I couldn’t find it with a quick sweep of the computer room, so I told it to her. When I got to the point where Mother Holly asks Katie to come in and have something to eat and drink, Devon smiled with great satisfaction and said, “I like this story.”  At the part when Katie’s visit to Mother Holly is over, and she’s going home, Devon glared at me. “It’s not a good story if she just goes home, Amah,” she chided me. But she was happy when she saw there was more to the story, that it was really only half finished. At its end, she was very pleased, and told me it was a good story. Today I am correcting and printing it out so that I can hand it to her next time she comes over. So my fifth thing to be grateful about is this: I’m glad I have Devon as an audience for my stories.

When I got home after running some errands—luckily coming home in the eye of a rainstorm that had dumped buckets on the streets in just a few moments–I heard an ominous dripping sound from upstairs. Sure enough, as I started to climb the stairs, I saw that the skylight above the stairway was leaking. Water had run down the walls John just painted last summer, and was splashing on the stairs, then starting to run downstairs. 

It isn’t as bad as it was years ago when the same thing happened. At that time, water poured like a waterfall, with the stairwell helping the draining of the water down into the lower hall. This is more of a dripping, for now, at least. Should it start to rain again, it will no doubt get worse.

John is at the dentist’s. I called him to ask if there was anything I could do other than scatter towels, but he said that’s about it. I certainly can’t get down enough to mop the stairs. All I can do now is hope that the rain is over. And be grateful for that if it indeed is.

Today I am, above all, grateful that I have John for a husband. He has always been a great friend and partner, a tender and thoughtful lover, and a witty conversationalist. He has, lately, been even more supportive and caring, doing all the day to day work around the house and cooking most of our meals. I am fortunate to have him to grow old with. 

Secondly, I am grateful to have such a wonderful daughter. She has always been a delight to us both, but I have been especially fortunate in having her as someone who phones daily and is concerned about me. She and I have always been quite close, which is nice, since she is such a vibrant, interesting person, who seems to have inherited the best of John and me. 

Thirdly, I am grateful that my daughter found someone like Jeff for a husband. He seems to be very much like John as a husband, supportive, interesting, with a good sense of humor. Plus, he has a nice sense of normalcy about him, being very steady and reasonable and patient—traits very necessary in a partner, I’ve found. And on top of all that, he’s marvelously handsome. Do they come any better than that?

Fourthly—and you can probably see this coming—I am grateful for having a grand-daughter like Devon. She is the perfect little girl, charming, funny, amazingly but not scarily intelligent yet down to earth, with her dad’s even keel and her mom’s imagination. 

And for my fifth item? There are many things. I am grateful for having been born: in the twentieth century; a Canadian rather than someone in the Third World, or even in America; a woman (especially in this marvelous age in which women in Canada and the rest of the West have such freedom); white (it’s unfortunately easier than being otherwise); with a reasonably good brain (enough to get a good education and be able to have a good career); with some good qualities, such as determination, optimism (usually), an imagination, a sense of humor; with reasonably good looks (at least without any deformities) so that I was able to enjoy a normal life with boyfriends and then a husband; healthy (no terrible afflictions or illnesses all through most of my life); middle class (with the values and opportunities that suggests); with kind parents who brought me up well; with grandparents who loved me and took care of me when my parents couldn’t; with a loving aunt who did whatever my parents or grandparents didn’t have the time or energy to do for me  (mainly take me out for junk food and keep me company when I was blue.)

If I were a religious person, I guess I’d have to say that I have been blessed. As it is, I can say that I have been very fortunate. I live in a beautiful, graceful home that John and I own outright, filled with treasured but inexpensive  furniture ‘finds’, a lovely garden that has matured nicely over 26 years. I live in the perfect neighborhood, with friendly neighbors who do things like lend me piles of mystery books (Joan) to tide me over during my recovery, give me loaves of great bread from a famous bakery just outside Montreal when they have too many for their freezer (Manny and Chris), or offer luscious heads of Romaine lettuce over the fence from a new and thriving garden (Eric and Clear Light). My neighborhood is a part of Westmount, lower Westmount, where people are not rich, as in the upper regions of the city: it’s a place where the view across the park  to Westmount United Church is like that of some English village, where the streets are well-treed and lined with well-kept, attractive homes and the park is a graceful spot, and where Montreal is only blocks away, yet kept at arm’s length in terms of urban encroachment. Why should I not be happy? And I guess I am. I’m already feeling more cheerful.

Yesterday we borrowed Edith’s car and drove out to St. Anne de Bellevue for lunch at a seafood restaurant, where we nearly froze outside on the terrasse, despite layers of clothes. I found myself wishing that I’d brought a blanket to put over my lap. The view of the canal with the pleasure boats coming up it was the reason I had chosen an outside seat; you couldn’t see anything in the inner room of the restaurant. Later, passing Pte. Claire, we saw that the main road was blocked off for Canada day celebrations, but people were  huddling, cold, as the shops were closed for the holiday. We just got home in time for the rain to come down in buckets, but that was brief. By the time Paze and her family were heading for the West Island to enjoy the celebrations, it had cleared up, I hear. (And John  called me out to see a beautiful rainbow arching over the eastern sky.)

Devon was apparently as good as gold in the church last night, from 8-10, listening to a concert in which her godmother played a cello. She just sat and colored, apparently, waiting  for the fireworks later in the evening. (She can be so good at times. In fact, I hardly ever see her acting bratty, though she must be so sometimes. She was so wonderful all the way from Montreal to Cape Breton Island, at this time last year, coloring away in the backseat of her parents’ car without a single complaint or whine of ‘Are we there yet?” And I’ll always remember her saying, from where she was strapped into her car seat, as we all got out of our cars for a brief picnic lunch along the way, “Are you leaving me behind? ‘Cause it will be much more delightful if I can come, too.”)

Later, after John and I had finished watching Mystery on tv–Foyle’s War, always good–we heard the fireworks start across the city, quite loudly, actually. Sounded like a small war had broken out somewhere near. However small a noise that made, it made me think of what it must have been like during the Blitz in London, with planes flying overhead and the crash of bombs all around, knowing that one could come through your own roof at any moment. 

Still, I feel like we  copped out, somehow, by not going to the Canada Day parade. Poor little parade, paid for by a Hindu immigrant for years because Montreal wouldn’t pay for a parade for such an occasion, even when lots of money was paid out for Jean Batiste Day. We used to go, until last year, just to show the flag, literally. Then, last year, we missed it because  we were in Cape Breton at the time. This year, I knew I couldn’t go and stand anywhere. My leg is just too painful, and the other knee now aches a lot, too. Still, I must keep telling myself that I’m well off compared to my two sisters in law, who are both in the midst of medical crises this year, one facing a second knee surgery after an unsuccessful first one, the other with a melanoma. 

This feels like a dangerous time for all of us. And Paze’s pregnancy doesn’t cheer me up much, since her first pregnancy was quite difficult and ended in her having to have bed rest for the last few months while her blood pressure soared.  Not surprisingly,  John is feeling very anxious, thinking of his colonoscopy next Monday. He has no bad symptoms at present to suggest that they will find anything cancerous then, but keeps pointing out to me that there are often no symptoms. I keep trying to feel positive about things, but my own pain makes that very hard. I can hardly move from chair to chair, and the thought of going for a walk longer than just to the toilet or down to the kitchen makes me shudder. Tomorrow when I see my doctor, I’m going to see if he can give me another prescription for Tylenol with codeine. It didn’t work very well before, but it was a bit better than just plain Extra Strength Tylenol, which I’m taking at present, and which isn’t working at all.