At the movies

For $13 we can take our entire family of 8 and Grandma to the movies on the base. This weekend’s fare was The Princess and the Frog, and since we had infected our grandpa with a stomach bug, we gave him some peace and quiet by going to the show.

I’m not a real connoisseur of animation, but I appreciated that this was not the 3-D computer animation that has become de rigueur over the past few years. On the other hand, it was pretty standard Disney fare of “wish hard enough and your dreams will come true.” Initially, the main character, Tiana, sings about the idea that hard work was the route to making her dream of owning a restaurant come true, but she still needed to wish on a star for a lucky break and a prince to make her restaurant a reality.

And maybe in a sense, that’s the way things are: you really do need a lucky break, or a friend in the know, to achieve the fantastic. I don’t mean this in a cynical way – that lucky break is really providence at work. And I really don’t expect Disney to make a movie about the mystery of God’s hand in our lives. But it means that I have to give my daughter, who said something about wishing hard enough on Sunday, a spiel about how we should pray instead of wish for the things we want, and not to expect to marry princes, even though I did.


I think I enjoyed the movie a little more after our visit to New Orleans, although the movie stereotypes the bayou folk and glorifies the city. And the villain thoroughly frightened my kids away from voodoo fortune tellers, even ones like the potbellied guy in a t-shirt and jeans who had set up his card table in front of St. Louis with the other gauze and velvet draped fortune tellers. They had preprinted signs advertising tarot and palm readings; he had torn cardboard on which was written with sharpie marker: “Fortunes. Professional. All true.”

On Reading Say You're One of Them

I feel like a wrung out dish cloth. Just finished reading Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them, short stories about children caught in the middle of religious and ethnic violence. Reading it is harrowing, but I couldn’t put it down. Each story recounts a horror some child tries to escape: there is the on-the-edge of starvation Jigana, who lives on glue in a box with his family of 7. He rejects a chance to go to school because his sister leaves home to become a prostitute. Jigana is wounded more by her departure than by her choice of work. Then there are the two siblings Kotchikpa and Yewa, who are going to be sold into slavery by their uncle. Their innocence and trust prevents them from understanding what is happening to them until their uncle has a change of heart and tries to save them, only to be beaten to death himself. Kotchikpa recognizes the desperateness of their situation before Yewa, who is deceived by her need for affection and food. In her gluttony she doesn’t recognize the deceptiveness of the adults who feed her and give her attention.

The little girl in “What Language Is That?” does not suffer so much that we see, but she must give up her beloved Best Friend because one is Christian and one is Muslim. Her parents offer her a new remote as they pack up to leave, the little girl still somewhat unaware of her pending loss. One wonders if her last communication with her friend will sustain an attitude of conciliation with people of different faith, but that surmise is lessened throughout “Luxurious Hearses” in which a young Muslim teenager, Jubril, attempts to flee his Muslim friends and relations in the northern part of Khamfi to get to the southern part because he has become a target of violence. Sharia has been enacted, and he is being hunted down because his father was a Christian who had him baptized as an infant. Trapped on the bus with Christian and pagan people trying to get to their southern families, Jubril attempts to pass as a Christian and begins to question his Islamic practice because of his contact with these people of different faith. Small arguments break out as the bus riders wait for petrol and the bus driver, but each ends relatively peacefully. But as the bus riders watch the violence on the TVs, both in the north and the south, they start to forget their undeclared truces with each other. And when they finally discover that Jubril is really a Muslim, because he lost his hand for stealing, they forget that they had supported him in an earlier tiff on the bus, and act out with the same violence they saw on TV.

The final story, “My Parents’ Bedroom” is about Monique and her brother Jean, who have the advantage of parents who have been to college and who love each other and their families, even though one is Hutu and the other is Tsutsi. But when their community goes insane with ethnic violence, Monique’s mother sacrifices herself to save some of her doomed people who are hiding in her ceiling. It is hard to imagine that Monique can recover from what she sees, but her life is spared for the time being.

Having read Left to Tell a few years ago about Immaculee Ilibagiza’s escape from Rwanda and her subsequent forgiveness of her enemies, I could believe in the eventual rebuilding of these children's lives, even though the inhumanity of the violence is almost unbelievable. There is something redemptive in the telling of these stories: These children, even in their innocence, learn to recognize injustice, but they also see the humanity of their enemies. In Monique’s case she must watch her beloved father betray his family, under great duress. Although the violence is unfathomable, it is committed by human beings who have been given a face through these stories.  And while at first I wondered how a priest (Akpan wrote some of these stories while in the seminary) could write stories with such gut-wrenching violence, soon I was won over by the empathy with which he presents these weak human beings, both the adults and the children.  He writes with no sentimentality, no pretty resolutions, no sensationalism, but a clear-eyed, unsanitized view of the mysteries of violence and survival. 

A song by Angelique Kidjo inspired by the book is available here.

Southern Styles

In college, my husband studied architecture in a prestigious classical program. He passed on some of his knowledge to me, so now I know a little of the vocabulary of architecture. On one of my running routes, I pass a number of new construction projects. Here is what they say to me:

"Welcome to my Marriott."

"Welcome to Southern Living."

"Welcome to the Brady Bunch."

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Okay, this isn't new construction. This is what we rented. Its modern lines spoke to us of easy clean-up and the right price. So we sacrificed on looks.

Visiting New Orleans

I’d like to say we did something Monday to celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King. And in a way, perhaps we did: we visited New Orleans for the first time, site of a once flourishing slave trade, but also of prosperous free people of color - gens de couleur libres they said in Louisiana. We actually didn’t visit any relevant sites, but we did see the baptistery where slave and free were all baptized since the mid 1700’s at the old Basilica of St. Louis. I wonder if babies baptized in such an old font have a special connection to the communion of saints?

We went as a day trip, a short drive under 2 hours, but we felt like we were stepping onto another continent as we drove down the streets of the French Quarter before pulling into a cramped parking garage that seemed identical to one where we parked in Spain two years ago. A stark contrast to the drive through the desert of urban blight on the eastern outskirts of the city. Remnants of Katrina’s destruction still linger.


I suppose everyone who has been to the city has been transported in a similar way. The narrow streets, the tiles on the walls, the wrought iron balconies and columns on the buildings all make you feel you’ve crossed the Atlantic. We peeked into an old hotel that had once been a convent, the doorman telling us to check out the ballroom. The kids tramped up the curving staircase in their jeans and tennis shoes, but surely weren’t we all in our finest under the crystal chandeliers? Peeking out the shuttered balcony, we could see across the street evidence that this wasn’t all maintained as a tourist destination. Someone actually lived in those garrets…not Sara Crewe, but someone with raggedy curtains and a window air conditioner. Had to be hot, even malarial, in the summer.

Gearing up for Mardi Gras

After consuming beignets and café au lait, we spent the morning walking up and down the streets. Watched the fortune tellers set up in front of the basilica, peeked in shops, hunted out the little building that now houses Faulkner House Books, which about hundred years ago, once housed William Faulkner and a friend while Faulkner wrote his first book, Soldiers’ Pay. It’s a narrow little building, and you can only enter the front room and part of a hallway, which are now lined floor to ceiling with book cases. The hallway houses faded first editions of Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy, Robert Penn Warren. Look but don’t touch. Even though the space was tiny, hours could easily have been whiled away browsing.

Faulkner House Books

            With the fortune tellers in front of St. Louis

Same thing with the many antique stores. We stopped to stare in one that had elephant leg stools, and noticed a beautiful wooden pieta, paint flecking off, on a pedestal surrounded by other statuary. I went inside to peek at the tag to see how old and how much: 1550s, $95,000.

I wonder who will buy that. A church? A collector? Someone who just wants something pretty in their house? What cost beauty?

Too often I’m too cheap to buy pretty things. A house with 6 kids is not a place for 500 year old statues, even if I had a spare hundred thousand. But I wonder if I lived somewhere like the French Quarter, a place that begged for décor, if I’d spend more time and money trying to make my home as pretty on the inside as it is on the outside. Interior decorating is not one of my talents, but every once in a while I see something that would look nice in our house. I’m not one to buy something that we don’t need, except books - and ice cream – but I wonder sometimes if I shouldn’t be more generous with beauty. I’m grateful when someone else was, in these churches and parks and buildings of New Orleans.

Basilica of St. Louis

Ambiguity about Ondaatje

Sigh. I just finished Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Spent Saturday recovering from the flu while reading in bed. Didn’t want the dream to end. Beautiful, beautiful, but sad, sad. There’s a part of me that thinks I shouldn’t like this book after the movie, also beautiful, but bitter, left a bad taste in my mouth. In the movie, WWII nurse Hana runs off with Indian bomb defuser Kip on a motorcycle after shooting the burn victim, the apparently English patient, a man whom she loved, full of morphine, so that he’ll die. The book ends differently – should I tell? – after the dropping of the atomic bomb destroys Kip’s belief in what he is doing and breaks up the coterie in the abandoned villa.

Aside from the act of euthanasia at the end of the movie, I wouldn’t recommend the movie because it’s nearly soft-core porn. Yet here I am unable to take my nose out of this book with naked people kissing on the cover because it is so beautifully written. I felt like I had to hide it from my preteens. Can I excuse my love of this book by citing the difference between reading something and seeing it? A visual image imprints itself differently on the brain - it stays with you longer than one you read and affects your emotions more strongly. Based on this, I let my kids read The Lord of the Rings before letting them see it. Similarly, I felt more moved after seeing the devastation here after Katrina – or in Haiti- than after reading about it. So I read about the intimacies described in this book without feeling as voyeuristic as when watching the movie, but the circumspect, poetic way Ondaatje writes also differentiates the book from the openness of the camera.


Is there something redemptive in the meeting of the four damaged persons at the Villa San Girolamo that comes across in the book but not in the film? I like to think the redemption has to do with Mr. Cairns comments in the comments section below about recovering the body. But it seems what these victims of the war are suffering is the opposite of Gnosticism. They have to recover a sense of the body’s connection to the soul, not because the soul is more perfect, but because they’ve lost their souls. Whether they are seeking the identity of the patient, their own identities after being dismembered, or an ability to reconnect with human beings after turning themselves into statues to survive the devastation of the war, it appears they need to connect physically, not just with their minds, but with their hands and bodies, in order to heal: “Here they were shedding skins. They could imitate nothing but what they were. There was no defense but to look for the truth in others.”

Could you say that, even though the story weaves around tales of love and death, adultery and betrayal, the characters treat each other with a certain chastity – Caravaggio never fully reaches out to Hana, Hana barely touches the patient, Kip never really gives himself to Hana, but preserves a distance, never really looking into her eyes? I can’t make up my mind whether the book has a resolution or not. And the beauty of the place stands in such stark contrast to the horrors of the war and the doomed love affairs.

Yesterday we went to New Orleans and visited the World War II museum, and again came face to face with the horrors of war. How did the men who survived Normandy, or the War in the Pacific, come home and rebuild their lives after such devastation? It was a hard museum to visit, especially when you knew that downstairs was an old man, a volunteer helping fill out membership applications, who had lived these stories and now watched people meandering through the exhibits, looking at photos without knowing that dead soldier in the picture.

Whimsy

My three year old has a favorite subject for her photos:

Should I be concerned?

Higglety Pigglety Pop, Or, There Must Be More to Life

is a little chapter book by Maurice Sendak that I started reading to the three year old but finished on my own. I was sitting in traffic court with all the other lawbreakers trying to get out of paying their fines when I started reading it in a whisper to the little miss, but I quit when I got frustrated with Sendak’s story of a dog who runs away, even though she has everything, “because there must be something more.” Little miss wasn’t following the story anyway, but watching people make explanations of why they were driving without a license or insurance, so I finished the tale to myself.



The dog, Jennie, eats the flower that tries to convince her to stay. Her journey is entirely led by her appetite: first to a theatre, then a milk truck, then a castle, where she becomes a nurse to a bad baby who won’t eat. She herself is almost eaten by the baby’s lion, until a couple characters she had met before show up to tell her she has enough experience to join the theater. Whereupon she becomes the leading lady, writes a letter of explanation to her prior owner, and lives happily ever after.

Sendak is good at making outlandish events seem ordinary, the text is clever, and the chiaroscuro black and white illustrations add to the dreamlike quality, but this story of romantic escapism seemed to come right out of the lecture notes a friend sent me for his “last lecture,” in which he critiques the romantic belief that happiness is found out there somewhere. I keep seeing this theme everywhere, most prevalently in my own daydreams. Is Sendak feeding a belief that an ordinary life is dull and meaningless, but if you follow your appetites, you might find an exciting life out there somewhere? Whereas naughty Max in Where the Wild Things Are returns home to find his hot dinner, Jennie completely rejects domestic life. (A counterpoint we also read: The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats where Peter finds wonderful snow adventures right outside his window.)

My friend made the point that while everyone longs for happiness and wholeness, for intense emotions, the Romantic believes he must escape his current condition to find them, leave behind the fetters of ordinariness, while the Christian believes they will only be found in union with God. So desiring to escape for the Christian should be a desire for freedom from his condition of selfishness, not from domesticity. The journey is more interior, and intimations of this union are found in the beauty of the ordinary things all around him.

But it is all too easy to imagine “if only” situations, even in the desire to make New Year’s resolutions: If only I do these things, my life will be happier. After the highs of holiday travels, I spent a few doldrum days daydreaming about what our life would’ve been like if, six years ago, my husband had taken a job with one of his architecture professors who is designing beautiful churches, instead of staying in the military. We wouldn’t be making 12 hour trips for Christmas visits. My own romantic fantasy: we’d live in one spot, in a cute little bungalow with a cottage garden, or in a house with enough acreage for goats and chickens (hmm, this is really an alternative domestic fantasy). We might travel to construction sites or take research trips to Europe, but I wouldn’t have to keep starting over, making new friends, sorting through pictures to hang, finding a new parish, a new place to fit in. My husband wouldn’t be leaving for a war zone or earning frequent flier miles on trips to international meetings.


But he wouldn’t be as happy, either, I think, drafting someone else’s designs. Or maybe he would’ve been just as happy doing that, but he is also happy doing what he’s doing now with the Seabees. (Which isn't just warfare construction: he just sent a detachment to Haiti.) And I probably would find plenty wrong with that little bungalow, would want to escape the community I was in, would still complain about messes and having no time. My small discontentments would find other sources.


The January Magnificat editorial by Peter John Cameron, OP, addresses this:

“One of the biggest temptations of daily life is to think that our circumstances are against us. We presume that the reason why we are not happy is because we have been saddled with circumstances that make happiness impossible – circumstances that conspire against us. But then how can Saint Paul say, “I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor 12:10)?”

Fr. Cameron answers this with this quote from Father Jean-Pierre de Caussade, SJ,

“What God arranges for us to experience at each moment is the best and holiest thing that could happen to us. . . . You are seeking for secret ways of belonging to God, but there is only one: Making use of whatever he offers you. Everything leads you to this union with him.”

So I guess I should have resolved to look for God’s presence where I am, to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, to surrender to circumstances and let go of impossible,delusional daydreams, and instead admire what we have and make use of it to find God where we are.