Friday, March 27, 2009

Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect - Part 20 (22)

I remember watching this many, many years ago in April. Now, another in a series, by gasps and wheezes, at sea...

From Astonish Yourself! 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life by Roger-Pol Droit (trans. 2002)

76 Seek out immutable landscapes

Duration: interminable
Props: the Earth
Effect: perennial

It is not exactly nostalgia. A certain tenderness, perhaps, a slightly melancholic form of curiosity. It drives one to seek out landscapes that are the same today as they have been for tens of thousands of years. Are there places that haven't changed at all? That bear no trace of human activity?

What forest has remained the same? What region, landscape, hill can show a wholly unmodified face? What mountain, even? You start looking. You try various approaches. Approximations and hesitations. There's always a nagging doubt: hasn't agriculture changed everything? Erosion? You may imagine that a particular panorama, taken in the round, has remained identical to what a Stone Age man might have seen. But you're never completely certain. Which leads to disappointment.

There is a solution, close at hand. Put out to sea, until you can no longer see the coast. Nothing has changed here. An identical stretched of water is still there. From time immemorial. What you see was seen by pterodactyls. And it still accounts for almost two-thirds of the globe. In other words, the greater part of the Earth has remained unchanged. Alongside the catastrophes, the earthquakes, the changes wrought by man, the greater part of the planet has retained almost exactly the same appearance, wet and blue, as far as the eye can see.

Draw whatever conclusion you like: a matter for amazement, an object of controversy, a reassuring fact, or a bitter disappointment. The foam endures.

Exorcism by Robert Lowell, The Dolphin (1976)

This morning, as if I were home in Boston, snow,
the pure witchery-bitchery of kindergarten winters;
my window whitens like a movie screen,
glaring, specked, excluding rival outlook--
I can throw what I want on this blank screen,
but only the show already chosen shows:
Melodrama with her stiletto heel
dancing bullet wounds in the parquet.
My words are English, but the plot is hexed:
one man, two women, the common novel plot...
what you love you are...
You can't carry your talent with you like a suitcase.
Don't you dare mail us the love your life denies;
do you really know what you have done?


13 comments:

Σφιγξ said...

I should add that The Dolphin was published in 1973, not 1976.

I like the way the sonnet was knackered, without only 14 lines remaining, to fit Lowell's broken conversations. Now, the pantoum can be fractured for a confession by the woman who jumps off the page, exacting...

M.L. Rosenthal's article to The Nation, 19 September 1959, "Poetry as Confession" reviewed Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1958):

"Emily Dickinson once called publication 'the action of the mind.' Robert Lowell seems to regard it more as soul's therapy. The use of poetry for the most naked kind of confession grows apace in our day."

Σφιγξ said...

Petrarch could be, loosely, confessional: one who traffics in intimate, and sometimes unflattering, information about details of the poet's personal life, such as in poems about illness, sexuality, and despondence.

Σφιγξ said...

As a young viewer, I watched Prime Suspect, which reinvigorated her career. I remember reading this, in the chronology, but my opinion often changes of its merits, the dolphin. It was in realizing that I had dolphin anatomy that I read this. A secret to be excavated by a tough woman, but the resemblance of who that might be, i.e. Helen Mirren ends there. She is mocking called Queen Helen because she wants to go on living without the interference of others? Not paying attention to who is watching?

Σφιγξ said...

mockingly*

Σφιγξ said...

Admittedly, I reintroduced this unpleasant topic from the 1603 triple conjunction and Camus, so I will begin again.

You are too perceptive to let me get away with this, but it is not a reversion to type, the triad. I contemplated erasing this because I do not want recollections of what happened, or what has speculated to have happened, then, to weigh so heavily on the today of two and a half years.

Σφιγξ said...

Indeed, rumination may be a key cognitive and affective process in depression, wherein individuals retrieve and repetitively rehearse autobiographical memories about past and current problems. This passive and perseverative process likely disrupts the ability to concentrate, learn and engage in healthy decision-making processes.26, 27

http://www.nature.com/tp/journal/v6/n2/full/tp2015225a.html


I think a by-product of moving here is the inability to walk outside the door to take a regulating walk. I have to remind myself periodically that I require a lot of exercise. I have to remember that I grew up playing sports every season, running cross-country in high school, and then the regimen I undertook (voluntarily, knowing that I would be depressed at MBC) in college.

Walking is sufficient for me, but I notice the trend lately in reduced activity and drive.



Σφιγξ said...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBUTQkaSSTY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMfg_cOah8I

The overlays of Georges Rousse and Felice Varini are for another lesson.

Σφιγξ said...

*Undertaken.

Yes. Exercise.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/a-tale-of-seven-elements-by-eric-scerri/2006399.article

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2016/04/cadmium-telluride-podcast-solar-cell

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2016/05/haldol-haloperidol-schizophrenia-podcast

It is not that I do not want to explore Scerri's 7 Elements, of which four were co/discovered by women. The incitement to undertake a short history of R 1625 (1958) was really for the side interest in drug design, butyrophenone synthesis, from meperidine/Demerol, in making a high-affinity structure for dopamine, which happens to prolong the IV half-life (14 to 26 hours). It is therefore contraindicated for the immediate management of positive symptoms. I have observed this, not from personal experience.

Anyhow, one would need to be very confident to engraft these inquiries together. There are similarities, syntheses at a distance in this chemistry. In mentioning a news item about haloperidol, you won't get my confession, as there is none to give.

I will know the next project, soon. I also think that I need to return to a canonical text. Yes, I was just thinking of Jane Austen, when I gazed upon Northanger Abbey (1817) this afternoon for the decisive nod. This is another text I knew that I would read at some time, purposefully. Glutted with Gothic novels, the protagonist goes poking into guest rooms looking for evidence of another Bluebeard, like me and that noxious blue box from Mulholland Drive in the early millennium; not as a potential murderer/murderee, but I took it to mean that once the fantasy was unlocked, it was void, and so on. I remember being strongly urged to view the film, and for good reason, resisted, until it was too late. The lampshade of this Card was a just reminiscence.

Σφιγξ said...

My brother's hearing for A&B on the neighbor is today. Falsified, and reported to the magistrate x5.

Σφιγξ said...

Ah, yes. Dismissed.

Σφιγξ said...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Empire_of_Light

Σφιγξ said...

One of the reasons I am ruminating now is that I do not know who is poking the edges hear. No name or intent derived. Not you, Anthony.

Σφιγξ said...

https://youtu.be/t11J8aOpXL8?si=6Vlrj16fgCDPAQ50

https://youtu.be/UEwr6IcBgPA?si=YnO9tbHbDCtBiJNa&t=4858