Hooray for the African Queen!

Along with Thirty-two Short Films About Glenn Gould, which I only put into our Netflix queue to see if my husband really loved me, The African Queen has been languishing in the “saved” category for over a year, waiting until the movie should be released on DVD.

We finally got to see it last week, and it was such a treat – all the more so now that I have 12 years of marriage under my belt, and can see that this is a movie about more than leeches after all (but still:  brrrrrrr).

I am  a little frustrated by condescending reviewers who sigh that the dramatic shift in the relationship between Miss Rose and Mr. Allnut strains their credulity.  Here’s something I would expect movie reviewers to understand:  The African Queen is a movie.  As such, it tells things in a movieish way– that is, it moves at its own discrete pace and choses scenes selectively, so that the viewer can understand what has happened without anyone actually running a camera over every breath the characters take.  It’s not that I can wink at what is obviously a phony but entertaining story; it’s that it’s a true kind of story being told, but at adventure pace.

The precipitousness of their newfound love is really the point of the movie:  here are two people who have so far only half-lived their lives.  If they fall together quickly, it’s because they’ve been waiting so long.  At the opening scenes, we see that Miss Rose has taken herself out of the stream of life, and Mr. Allnut travels up and down the river, but only to deliver other people’s mail.  It’s time for both of them to go somewhere, and the river is waiting.  What an artful and deceptively simple portrait of a marriage the movie is, from start to finish — and it’s all done in gestures.  Every time Katharine Hepburn touches her hair, it means something; and every time Humphry Bogart scratches his chin, you know what he’s thinking, and whether or not he’s relishing that thought.

The characters fall together because, like most well-matched couples, they need each other.  First they discover each other’s strengths (she turns out to be brave and passionate; he turns out to be clever and strong); and then, through the other, they discover their own, previously unchallenged weaknesses (she’s selfish, making him sleep in the rain; he’s not a coward, exactly, but his solution is to sit in a backwater and wait out the war).

Then they show their vulnerable points to each other (she panics and is useless when the flies swarm; he, over and over again, is much too ready to give up), and readily forgive each other for them.  Then they are angry at each other for those weakness (he thinks she just can’t understand how foolish their plan is; she thinks he is craven and all talk).  Then they accept their weakness, their own, and each other’s.  He really, really doesn’t want to go back into that leechy water, and she really, really doesn’t want to send him there.  But it has to be done.

They relinquish their claim on what they thought they wanted out of the adventure, and of life in general.  She prays for God to be mericful to them both, and they lie down to die.  Then comes a flood, they almost get hanged, and the boat explodes, and they swim away!  Oh man, what a great movie!  In the course of a few days, they go from being strangers to courting, to love, to surrender — right down the river they go.

I love this story because, even though there are irresistable symbols to be found, (like the river that looks so different, once you fight past a certain point, that it changes name, but it’s really the same river . . . ) it’s not a metaphor about a relationship — it’s just a great portrait of one.  It understands exactly what movies are for:  to show us things we already know, but in a new way.  With crocodiles!

 

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This post originally ran in Crisis in April of 2009

What Lies Beneath

I had a fleeting desire to see the movie Watchmen, until I heard that it was yet another in the genre of “let’s peel off the facade of the world and get down to the truthiest truth underneath, which is, of course, stench and corruption.”

This must be an awfully old theme. Older even than The Matrix, I imagine. In that movie, the hero is invited to take a blue pill if he wants to persist in the pleasant and elaborate illusion that is human life — or a red pill if he wants to wipe it away forever. If he chooses the latter, he will be doomed to live henceforth in a brutal and dangerous reality — but it’s the right thing to do, because it’s the Truth, you see.

In any age that prides itself (justly or not) on intellectual rigor and sophistication, this must be one of the chief temptations: to imagine that freshness and innocence are always the illusion, and corruption is always the reality, the core. (This theme is brilliantly dissected in John C. Wright’s journal here.)

But it’s a temptation. Not one perspective on life, not a valid point of view, not an interesting theme to explore. A temptation, also known as a lie.

Ransom, in C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra, battles directly with this lie when the Un-man, pursuing him on shattered limbs through the pitch-black caves of Venus, courts him horribly with the myth of life as a thin crust, an outer rind. The tempter says:
 
Picture the universe as an infinite globe with this very thin crust on the outside . . . . We are born on the surface of it and all our lives we are sinking through it. When we’ve got all the way through then we are what’s called Dead: we’ve got into the dark part inside, the real globe. If your God exists, He’s not in the globe –He’s outside, like a moon. As we pass into the interior we pass out of His ken. He doesn’t follow us in. . .
 
All the things you like to dwell on are outsides. A planet like our own . . . Or a beautiful human body. All the colours and pleasant shapes are merely where it ends, where it ceases to be. Inside, what do you get? Darkness, worms, heat, pressure, salt, suffocation, stink.
 
It took me many years to realize that I believed this myth, emotionally if not intellectually, and had done so since I was little. I am sure that many young people do. Happily, in my late 20s, I gradually got an easy reprieve: God saw fit to shower me with so many hints and breaths of eternal happiness that only a willful, intentional twisting away from the light would confuse me for long.
 
But there have been some times of confusion. Recently I suffered a spell of crushing misery. Things that I never even questioned had turned out to be shaky. Where I turned for consolation, there was perversion and malice. It didn’t even feel like a trial, because I didn’t know that the verdict was yet to come: It felt like the end had come, and there I was in the dark cave, and that was it. I had found the truth at last.But (O Lord, thou pluckest me) I came out. The darkness was answered with a spell of otherworldly happiness. The world was shining all the time. Angels leaped and rejoiced from every surface, basking and frolicking like otters in the glory of God-in-the-world. You will have to take my word for it, if this has never happened to you. I’d never seen anything like it, before or since. It lasted about three weeks.
 
The super-rational joy, the passionate interest I felt in the world didn’t last, but it was too real to forget or deny. One day, I was driving home from adoration. Now, I’m a typical crummy catholic who unwillingly drags herself there twice a month, so this day was unusual in that I had truly enjoyed my hour. I felt God’s presence in the chapel as substantially as I feel my husband’s presence when he walks in the door in the evening. We were there together, Christ and I, and it was fun.
 
So after my hour was over, I was headed home, hauling the car around the roundabout, idly watching out for clueless pedestrians. Tired snowbanks, blackened with exhaust, leaned into the road, and no birds sang. “Echhh,” I thought. “Well, that was very nice for an hour . . . but now back to the real world.”Then I thought, “Just a damn minute.” (At this point I think I actually put one finger up into the air like a stern lecturer.)
 
“That was the real world. Back in there, in the chapel. The gold. The almost audible affection and consolation. The unmistakable Presence. That was the real world. And I hereby repudiate that stupid other idea!” And, thanks be to God, the stupid idea slunk away.
 
Let’s just say it: Goodness, Truth, and Beauty are real. Everything else is not.Now, driving home and feeling better that particular afternoon is one thing. But repudiating this stupid idea every day in every way — rejecting utterly, without reservation, the temptation of the Matrix sensibility — is a matter of life and death.Why? Because we are still waiting for the truth to take up arms and vanquish the enemy once and for all. Yes, we know and believe that it will happen at the Second Coming — that then there will be no temptation, no mistake. Whichever pill we take, Christ the Warrior will be standing in front of us: good, beautiful, victorious, and unmistakably true.But right now?
 
The Beautiful is an anencephalic baby who somehow lives for three weeks and longer. The Good is a Host desecrated on You Tube. The True is the voice of a chubby DRE who preaches chastity to a handful of hardened, sarcastic teenagers.
 
In other words, for some reason, God is vulnerable. He has made Himself vulnerable in this world. I don’t know why.
 
The one thing we can do about it is to remember that this weakness, this darkness, this tired, dried up, worn out world — this is the illusion. This is the temporary state; this is the crust. Underneath it all is not darkness, heat, and stench.
 
Underneath it all, deep down, is the living water.
 
We must drink of it again and again, and we must offer it to each other, and remind each other that it is there. It will keep our heads clear until there can be no more confusion, once and for all.

A New Idolatry: Foreskin Restoration

PIC man worshiping obelisk

[I’m not really here! I’m stealing WiFi at Dunkin’ Donuts to post this on our way to beach. This seemed like the perfect post for a day when I’m not really here.]

Today, a horrible new planet swam into my ken: foreskin reconstruction.

It’s a thing. It’s a thing among a small number of men who suffer from rare disorder called “phimoses,” where the foreskin won’t retract fully, and it’s a thing among a small number of men who had botched circumcisions, and experience pain and bleeding.

But it’s also a thing among men who have allowed themselves to be persuaded that their lives are significantly impoverished because of a missing flap of skin. They believe that they cannot be happy or fulfilled until they go through a lengthy process of skin grafts or, less risky but somehow more appalling, a years-long regimen of “tugging,” with tapes, weights, and elastic straps. They believe that they can be “restored” to something valuable, dignified, and worthwhile by devoting hours out of every day, perhaps for years, to measuring how much skin covers the end of their penises.

There’s a word for this: “Idolatry.” Elizabeth Scalia nailed it. We imagine idol worship is a thing of the past, just because we haven’t seen wanton wenches polishing a golden calf with their hair, lately. But idol-making has been the constant business of humanity for thousands of years. The idols themselves change, but the impulse is the same: replace God with something smaller and easier to manage — and devote your life to serving that, instead.

This isn’t about whether circumcision is right or wrong, healthy or unhealthy. It’s about who’s in charge: you, or what you think you lack?

Some people speak of the devil tempting us with pleasures and delights, which turn to ashes when we die. More and more, he tempts modern men and women with the idea that we are miserable. He tells us there is no way we can’t be miserable, under our current intolerable circumstances. He teaches us to examine every experience and tease out how unsatisfying it is, compared to some ideal which we’ve never experienced, but which we firmly believe we deserve. He trains us to focus on what we do not have. He constantly reminds us that we’ve been violated in some way, that life itself has robbed us of  . . .  something.

And the more squalid the locus of our desires, the better.  Exorcists often report an overpowering fecal stench in the homes of the possessed. The frantic masturbation scene in The Exorcist was not a fantasy. This is what the devil offers us: everything wretched and small, because he wants us to know in our hearts that we are wretched and small, that we stink, that we’re nothing more than a few square inches of skin.

He doesn’t just want us to lose God. He wants us to degrade ourselves as much as possible in the process. A fall is not good enough: it must be a ridiculous fall.

Foreskin restoration? I don’t care who you are, I can promise you this: there is only one kind of restoration that really means anything, and that is the kind that comes from letting go of that wretched little idol you’ve been clutching. Let Christ take everything from you, and then we’ll see how you can be restored.

At the Register: We Who Are About to Camp Salute You

As I write, I may have nothing packed, nothing purchased, and nothing planned, but I do have a very tidy and detailed list of the things I am sure will go wrong on our trip. They are as follows:

  • We will run out of food and we will starve, because obviously we won’t be able to get into the car and drive to a store and buy more food. This is camping, and we are going to have to make do with sand tea and acorn kabobs.
  • Sharks. Okay, there are not going to be any sharks, but I’m afraid my kids, who somehow wore us down and got to watch Jaws, are going to be so afraid of sharks that their little brains will actually explode with anxiety. And do you know who is attracted by brain matter in the water? SHARKS.
  • We will be surrounded by such awful, noisy, inconsiderate people that we won’t be able to enjoy our awful, noisy, inconsiderate family.

Read the rest at The Register.

Right Brain Summer Drawing Club – don’t forget!

This week, we’re reading through chapter three and doing the exercise in chapter four of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I’ll put up a picture share link on Monday (not Tuesday, because we’ll be away on our camping trip). I’ll leave the link-up open indefinitely this time, because people are working at different paces.

I really enjoyed looking through the pre-instruction drawings in picture share #1! Thanks for going to the trouble of uploading your pics and linking up. If you don’t have a blog but want to join in, you can start a Tumblr or Flickr or Photobucket (oretc.) account and use that link — or just upload your drawings to the comment section. And of course your’e welcome to work along with us without sharing your pictures! The more, the merrier.

At the Register: SCOTUS: Pro-Lifers Are Citizens, Too

In effect, the law [which was just ruled unconstitutional] created a First and Fourteenth Amendment-Free Zone for a certain class of people. It made it a crime for some citizens to be on a public sidewalk, or to say things in public. Today’s decision reasserts that all citizens have equal protection under the law, and should enjoy freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. In short: you can be places and say things and not go to jail for it, even if you’re a pro-lifer.

Read the rest at The Register.

For All the Saints (That I Don’t Really Like)

Today is the feast day of Josemaria Escriva. He is not one of my favorite saints, in the same way that Vegemite is not one of my favorite ways of delighting my mouth. Yes, I have tasted it — yes, more than once. And I stand firm in my statement that it is not one of my favorite ways of delighting my mouth.

 

 

PIC Vegemite

I’m not saying that nobody should like Vegemite. I’ve heard it’s very nourishing, if you don’t have to fight past the gag reflex. It’s just that I don’t like it, I don’t need it for my own kind of balanced diet, and I’d just as soon put my hands in my pockets, turn my head, and whistle a happy tune in hopes that the person who offers it to me will go away quickly.

What I’m trying to say is, happy feast day, St. Josemaria. Thanks for being the kind of saint who is so good to so many people who aren’t like me; and thanks for being a reminder that God is good, because He gives us so many different kind of saints.

PIC thousands of saints

 

 

p.s. I didn’t even brush my hair today. Ha ha!

Please tell your daughter she’s pretty.

Powerful Ad Shows What a Little Girl Hears When You Tell Her She’s Pretty” runs the headline on the Huffington Post, describing a new ad by Verizon.

Before we even watch the video or form an opinion, let’s remember one thing. The real, true, deep down message of this ad is that you, the viewer, should like Verizon. Whatever societal goals it may have, it’s an ad. It is trying to sell something, and so it’s a given that the message it’s sending is calculated to stroke the egos of the viewer. So there’s that.

Now for the actual message. The Huffiington Post sums it up like this:

The video depicts one girl’s development from toddler to teenager. She wanders curiously through nature, examines the plants and animals around her, creates an astronomy project, and builds a rocket with her older brother. But all along the way, she hears many all-too-common refrains from her parents: “Who’s my pretty girl?” “Don’t get your dress dirty,” “You don’t want to mess with that,” and “Be careful with that. Why don’t you hand that to your brother?” These statements are subtle, but the ad suggests that they can ultimately discourage girls from pursuing traditionally male-dominated STEM subjects in school.

Sure. If someone followed me around telling me “Knock it off!” every time I got interested in math or science, I would probably stop pursuing math and science. It’s a bad idea to thwart kids (boys and girls) and to discourage their curiosity and intelligence; and it’s especially absurd to tell girls, overtly or by omission, that their main job is to be pretty. I’m fairly sure Thomas More, Edith Stein, and Gianna Molla already knew that, without any help from Verizon.

But the ad ends this way: “Isn’t it time we told her she’s pretty brilliant, too?”*

Is that what we’re doing when we do say, “You’re so pretty”? When girls hear, “You’re pretty,” does that automatically mean they can’t hear anything else we say? Not that I’ve noticed. Here is what I have noticed:

  • When girls never hear their parents — especially their fathers — say that they are pretty, many of them will go find someone who will say it to them. And sometimes that turns out to be someone who wants to hurt or use them, and uses “pretty” as a hook.
  • When girls get no attention for dressing prettily and looking nice, they find other ways of getting attention with the way they look. A lot of those girls whose entire style is super sexy sexy sex all the time? They’re just trying to be pretty, and no one has taught them to recognize any other form of appeal besides sexiness.
  • If they want to be admired by men, but have been taught that that this desire is a sign of pettiness and lack of character, then many women will become so twisted inside that even marital sex is pure anxiety and guilt.

Why? Because women were made beautiful. They were designed that way. No, not every woman; no, not all the time; and no, not beauty above all other things. But the world is a machine, and one of its driving forces is the attraction between the sexes, where men delight in women and women delight in showing their beauty to men. This is not oppression; this is not sexism; this is not some manipulative societal construct — or at least it doesn’t have to be. It’s a gift from God that girls and women can cultivate and delight in beauty — the beauty around them, and the beauty in themselves. Yes, even their physical beauty. Yes, even from a very young age.

 

 

So no, don’t tell your daughters that they must be pretty because they can’t be anything else. But don’t make them think that beauty is petty, either. Beauty is one of the transcendentals, which means that beauty it is one of the paths to God. Even when that beauty resides in a little girl.

And one more thing: it is good for us, the beholders, to praise beauty when we see it. It is a good thing to see something beautiful and to let ourselves murmur, “Oh, how lovely you are!” We are made to receive it and to enjoy it. We are not made to quash and rein in everything that brings us delight. There is not much beautiful in the world. Why deny yourself what little there is? Parents, let yourself tell your girls they’re beautiful. She needs it, and so do you.

 

 

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*Actually, recent studies show that kids do worse when you praise them for being smart. If you want

Jimmy Akin Wins Everything.

Here is a clip of him calmly and charitably explaining why, according to his understanding of  Catholic theology, he does not believe that that caller on the line is, as she claims to be, a reincarnation of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Give that man a drink and a raise. And another one for his magnificent beard!

At the Register: The Tabernacle Holds the Heart of the Church

PIC tabernacle

I struggle hard to believe the best about people’s intentions, but I cannot find anything good in the impulse to put the tabernacle away, to the side, out of sight, hard to find, easy to overlook or even forget. Why would you do that? Why would you make it hard to do the thing you’re there to do? How would a body function if the living, beating heart were shifted off somewhere else, to a left foot or an elbow, maybe stashed off site in your coat pocket? What kind of body would that be, and how would it function? And why?

Read the rest at The Register.