Friday, November 28, 2008

Claude Levi-Strauss at 100

L'humeur vagabonde (11/24)

"I would have wished that this birthday go unnoticed, because for the 90th birthday there is something a little hypocritical in way, because we think that for the 100th we will no longer be able to celebrate. And also because, I feel that birthdays at this age don't really have a place because there is no reason to celebrate one more step down toward physical and intellectual degeneration. At birthdays I always remember what I think Anatole France said: he regretted that life didn't take place in the other direction and that we would begin our life as an old person and finish bursting with youth. So, if I have a regret to express today it is certainly that" - Clause Levy Strauss in 1998.

"As for my don quichotisme, which dominated me since childhood, it is very different from what you normally think.  I see in Don Quihote an obstinate effort to discover the past behind the present."

"Humanity is not  entirely different from weevils who develop inside a sack of flour and begin to poison themselves from their own toxins long before they lack food and physical space."

"I'm watching the destruction of all that is dear to me, nature, diversity of species, diversitiy of cultures..."

With these quotations, his oeuvre starts to sound triste, but I'm putting Mythologies on my wish list.

As Catherine Clément explains: "he takes a myth and then takes a variant, then a variant of a variant and from variant to variant, at the end of 800 myths from North and South America, he arrives at a global tissu of American myths. That's why we have to understand that this analysis of myths resembles a musical score, and specifically Wagner."

I didn't follow that, and Kathleen Evin (host) decided it was time for a break and put on Caetano Veloso singing Paloma, from the dream sequence in Talk to Her, which seemed appropriate.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Julie Wolkenstein

L'humeur vagabonde (11/13)

"I should have realized from the beginning: the first time I saw her, the evening she landed on the island with my mother and appeared in the French window blinded by jet lag and the sunset, everything matched up, everything coincided. We were already unknowingly repeating the first scene in that old book by James that, like all American students, I had read in college a few years earlier. At the time I didn't get it. But now I'm sure of it: her personality, her life, her travels, her friends, the men that loved her, the man she married, her children, her sorrows, it was all written, imagined a century ago. I am not superstitious. I'm not crazy. I don't believe in destiny. But hers repeats to the letter that of a character in a novel that she had never even read. And which ends with my death - I mean the death of my model, Ralph. As for her, the heroine, we don't know what becomes of her. But I may be able to foil this sort of misfortune. I don't have much time, I know what I have to do."

On L'humeur vagabonde, Kathleen Evin calls L'Excuse a "literary, love and linguistic thriller. The narrator, Lise, returns at the end of her life to a beautiful house on Martha's Vineyard where as a young woman she'd had a secret passion for her cousin Nick who had an incurable disease. There she finds a posthumous manuscript in which he has told their story, in parallel with the one written by Henry James in The Portrait of a Lady."

James said that the best scene in his book consisted of Isabel sitting motionless in a chair. This is why the movie fell so short of telling the story. It will be interesting to see how Wolkenstein reproduces James' action

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Jean-François Vézina

Et si on parlait d'amour (11/2) 

Vézina, who is a psychologist at Maison de Psychologie Salaberry in Québec, 
explains his cartography of love as mapped out in his book, L'aventure amoureuse, which sounds something like the instructions to a board game.

"I wanted the voyage to take place from East to West, the metaphor being that, going into love today is sort of the equivalent of rediscovering the new world. For me it's really the equivalent of creating a new world in order to arrive at the destination: Durable Love."

It all begins with a vast "Ocean of Meeting",  the heart of the Lover's Adventure, and the goal is to arrive on the solid ground of Nascent Love.  In this ocean we have the desire to discover a new universe and on the map it is represented by rivers flowing with dopamine. It's a little like Club Med, all services included, it's all marvelous.  Then we arrive at the next stage which is the Valley of Everyday and that is usually where we get lost, we lose imagination, dopamine is less abundant and we are calmer. Beyond this is the Desert of Ennui, which provides a necessary pause, but those who need intensity at any cost will move on to the Island of Independence. Within this region there is also the Abyss of Impossible Loves. Especially given the vast Ocean of Meeting that exists today, the possibility of meeting people who are far away is much greater and this creates this abyss.  As Jan Bauer said in his book
Les amours impossibles: "those who have never been there have not lived, but those who stay [in the Abyss] don't get it."

The moral is to have self awareness and not to want to carry the baggage of the other, and then to learn how to play.  The way to arrive at Durable Love is the Path of Play where there is space, because when the body gets stiff it needs to go to an open place and play. When we don't play together , we end up in the Jungle of Power Play where 75% of couples run aground as their relationships become polluted by blame. 

The trick is to regain the Land of Recognition where we rediscover the partner, who is not all the same person we started out with.