Oh Joy

I have discovered that yet another fascinating Emmanuel Church person is writing a blog. You will find it over there on the right in my blog list- "The Crooked Line." Look through it, it is very worth reading!

Reckless

This afternoon I went to see the SpeakEasy Stage production of "Reckless." The Emmanuel Center had it's "talk back" at this Sunday's matinee. These are very worth attending and I give a link to the Emmanuel Center web site and suggest that you participate. The production was very good and very imaginative. I am all amaze at what they can do in that small theatre; the quality of the sets and the performances; but I am not a theater critic and so won't attempt a review. What I want to do is to share some thoughts on the themes of the play. Actually I'm "Talking Back" to the "Talk Back" with benefit of time and access to the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

The O.E.D. becomes a factor here because one of the things I started to puzzle about was the word that forms the title. This is one of those very interesting words that is used very generally and frequently, the meaning of which is fairly well understood, we assume, but whose meaning is really understood when examined with a kind of peripheral vision. When we look directly at it it starts to get sort of fuzzy. What does it really mean. And why is there no "W?"

Clearly the "Less" is a suffix, lets remove it, we have "reck." Reck; wreck; wreak; I deal only with verbs here, and my mind starts playing all sorts of games of association. She wreaked a wreck-full recklessness. That's what happens in the play, by the way. Wreck comes from the latin wrecare and means "to cast on shore": "a1440 Sir Eglam. 894 He say that lady whyte as flowre, Was wrekyd on the sonde."

Wreak: to drive, press, force to move, from Old English, also to banish or expel, as the characters tried to do to the past, whether their passive or their active past. I said that I was dealing only with the verbs, but the noun wreak is so interesting I can't pass it by "1. Pain or punishment inflicted in return for an injury, wrong, offence, etc.; hurt or harm done from vindictive motives; vengeance, revenge.

In frequent use from c 1540 to c 1620." By the way wreckful means, not full of wrecks but full of vengeance!

But it is "Reckless" that is the main concern here, less the less: what is Reck?

I make an aside to tell you, in case you aren't aware, that you can access the OED online with your Boston Public Library card. Log into your account, go to electronic resources and select the oxford English Dictionary Online. you will need to put your library card number in the log-in box, which is easy if you copied it onto your clip board when you logged in to the BPL, you now simply paste it. I assume many libraries and academic institutions offer this access.

The etymology of "Reck" is very long and interesting, at least to me. The meaning, in each variant is short and clear, but they are preceded with this:

From its earliest appearance in English, the verb is almost exclusively employed in negative or interrogative clauses. In the former the simple negative may be replaced by nought, nothing, little, not much, etc.; in the latter, the pronoun what is most usual. Now chiefly arch. and literary.

1.a To take care or thought for or notice of something, along with inclination, desire, or favour towards it, interest in it, etc.; to think (much, etc.) of.

b. To take notice of or be concerned about something, so as to be alarmed or troubled by it, or so as to modify one's behaviour or purposes on account of it.

Now add back the "Less," and we have "without the concern about something, so as to be alarmed or troubled by it, or so as to modify one's behavior or purposes on account of it," exactly what has been driving, wreaking, the action in the play.

But there is one more thing to say- that this lack of "recking"- oddly reconing is a different root so won't do here- this driving on reckless is one thing when it is Lloyd, who was the perpetrator of the actions that wreak him and make his past a nightmare that he wakes up too; whereas Rachel was a victim and what appears to be the equivalent to Lloyds, or Pooty's, impulse is actually a very stark and quite accurate representation of a very severe post traumatic stress disorder.

The children were mentioned in the "Talk Back" session- they are a troubling factor- why did she run from them, why were they abandoned? I think that the comic aspects of the show, and in particular the comic portrayal of Rachel's character, tended to trivialize the enormity of the emotional shock she experienced. It is one thing to be left unexpectedly by one's mate, it is another thing to have a ones murder attempted, but the mate being the murderer is a thing so devastating that we can't credit it, we take it as absurd and trivialize it and proceed to equate Rachel's running away with Lloyd's abandonment of his family. This distinction was inadequately made in the play and the result was a real confusion of reality and dream.

It can come sometimes that reality and dream can be confused, but the confusion is a first person confusion. When was Rachel dreaming? Ever? Never? The incident with Lloyd and Pooty, or Lloyd's drinking and death? Or was her brake down a dream, or her recovery and final meeting with her son? Was the doctor really the bus driver- "The bus driver" or just a bus driver?

Life can be like that, I'm here to tell you. "A Serious Man" is like that. But Job isn't. Job wasn't dreaming, he knew and he persevered. He retained his integrity. We, the audience, the third person, are observers, and while there is some benefit to experiencing the confusion of the protagonist it is also inevitable that we will make judgments. If we are not allowed to see beyond the dream then we become like Job's comforters, who lack understanding and whose opinions are worthless. I don't like being put in that position.

At The Opera

Gerry Springer The Opera.

I assure you, had this not been an event of the Emmanuel Center I would never even have considered attending. I went out of loyalty to the organization, and if I had any curiosity it was only to discover what in fact Rev. Werntz and Rabbi Berman could possibly do with this in their "Talk Back" session afterwards. We hadn't left "Blackbird" with a very high opinion, Dr. Funk decided to sit this one out, and I left home out of a sense of duty.

I was surprised to find the house packed, and even more to find myself in constant hysterics from the first number to the end of the show. The music is brilliant and the staging is brilliant and the actors are brilliant, and there would have been a long standing ovation except that the audience was so exhausted by laughing that at the end we could hardly clap.

Gerry, in the first act is in tension with his "inner Valkyrie" (she appears in the upper corner of the set to taunt him in her helmet and shield.) This is appropriate because the music is a very imaginative pastiche of Wagner- along with jazz, Busby Berkeley, Jerome Kern, Sondheim, and I think Papa Haydn was stirring the pot at one point but it gets hard to sort out about midway in the first act. 

Amongst the challenging questions asked by "Gerry Springer, The Opera" are these. Can two jealous women fighting over a man be a valid premise for a soprano duet? Obviously, yes, even if they are redneck sluts fighting over a Ku Klux Klan member- I should have included Leonard Bernstein in the list above. Can a Wagnerian chorus be built on the text "we eat, excrete, and watch TV?" again, yes, but more surprising. Most surprising indeed is that "Gerry Springer The Opera" pulled this sort of thing off with great craftsmanship. 

And then Mozart- Gerry, like Don Juan, takes a trip with Satan to warmer climes- and decides he'd rather stay there "I'm less confused here" and bring a balance of sorts between Satan and Jesus, and the God "it's not easy being me" and the inner valkyrie is reconstituted as St. Michael.- we even have Milton poking around here. The show is a tour de force of "Reducio ad absurdem" and I recommend it heartily.

You can, by the way, bring your pretensions, they will probably survive, not quite intact but perhaps a little better for the workout!

Cheers

Our Ancient Brains

I have been chided by certain concerned friends about falling behind in my posts! Ah me... the pressures of modern life! I actually have a few brilliant and thoughtful posts in the works which, alas are not yet ready, and that is why, was why, all of you dear people haven't been hearing from me. However, in the news this morning I came upon this item from the BBC: "Chimpanzees exchange meat for sex." How can I not put aside my profound exploration of music and liturgy and comment on this.

The thing that strikes me is that we once again come up against the fact that in addition to the overwhelming preponderance of our genes, we share a great many behaviors with our arboreal friends. I say in addition to, I should say as a result of. My mind is deeply confused in trying to decide whether the title of the article is a not to subtle attempt to get attention from the lay reader, or possibly a very wry comment on the structure of human society and marriage. It turns out that the behavior now document is actually what happens in the traditional marriage, hubby goes out hunting and mom rewards him with a sexual adventure, offspring resulting.

Seeming at first to be prostitution, then realized to be marriage, complete with the not too unusual promiscuous interludes, it is a little uncomfortable for our pretensions. The researcher has made the connection:

"This has got me really interested in humans," she said. "I'm thinking of moving on to working with hunter-gatherers."

After we finish our chuckles there is a rather serious matter to think upon. In fact I started to think about this while attending "Dr. Funk's Tour of The Brain" a few weeks ago. She starts her presentation with a very emphatic statement that there is nothing "mental" about Mental Illness. That "it is all physical," meaning that our ideas, our behaviors, wishes, aspirations and most emphatically out transgressions of the norm are a result of the way our brains are formed, through both evolution and individual growth and development. This observation of the chimpanzees is an interesting illustration, in that shows a certain kind of hard wired evolutionary form of what many polite people would call prostitution and which they actively persecute.

There is a discussion whether Darwin and Genesis are compatible. It has come up much lately in both of the discussion groups I attend. I am amazed that in the face of conclusive scientific evidence this controversy can be considered other than an amusing footnote to the story intellectual development, yet it continues to occur with contention and I start now to understand why. I wonder if the discussion of historical verses biblical fact isn't a red herring, and the real threat to regressive religious understanding might not be the idea that in fact our behaviors are not so much within our control, but evidence both of evolutionary predetermination and the state of physical health of the organ we call the brain.

No one would think of putting a person with a heart attack in jail. Perhaps I should use epilepsy as an illustration, because it was once considered a demonic situation and often punished, thankfully now understood to be a serious illness. Likewise we learn that addiction, aggression, most human behaviors, good and bad, are not in the control of some kind of "Free Will," yet we deal with them by invoking demons and severe punishment. We now can add to the list an evolutionary predisposition to prostitution.

This I think is the real source of resistance to Darwin and modern science, that it reveals the moral stance of most religious and civil codes to be impoverished and brutal. When "anti-social" behavior is understood to be the result evolutionary forces, or of faulty wiring or physical damage in the brain, all the moral implications need to be reinterpreted, and the very foundation of the orthodox response is crumbled. There are very few, I am thankful to be able to say not all, but very few religious leaders that are willing to, have the wisdom, intelligence and grace to rise to this challenge.