I dislike and distrust RUTHLESSNESS, CRUELTY TO THE YOUNG OR WEAK, COLDNESS to our neighbors and loved ones, INDIFFERENCE to the old, sick or poor, HARD-HEARTEDNESS and INSENSITIVITY.
Give me a person who is of a softer heart and open ear. Nil am fear crua gan croí báúil nó cluaise (not the hard man without a sympathetic heart or ear).
What is sympathy? It is an emotional participation in the feelings of others and let us not forget there is a pleasure to be found and a appeal as a result of those feelings.
Compassion is the opposite of cruelty which rejoices in the suffering and humiliation of others and egoism which is indifferent to the suffering and humiliation of others. Hasta los pobres tiene derecho al honor y dignidad as the Spanish say; even the poor have the right to honor and dignity.
I believe men and women who do not know mercy miss much of the joy and happiness to be found in life.
There is sadness in pity -commiseration- but there is happiness mingled together with compassion whose example generates generosity and love from others.
Sadness devoid of hatred for anything but injustice and unhappiness and suffering is a good thing, a humane thing.
Really, men are equal in two ways only: before the judgment-seat of God (who, remember, doesn’t assign them all to the same place), and in the eyes of the law. But human beings are not equal otherwise; and because they are unequal, they are not entitled to identical things. Every man is entitled to what is his own; but he has no right to take away from another who has more by his talents or inheritance.
For the slothful man is not equal to the diligent man. The brute is not equal to the saint. The fool is not equal to the sage. The traitor is not equal to the loyal man. The selfish is not equal to the loving. The coward is not equal to the hero. The rogue is not equal to the just judge. And nothing could be more unjust than to treat all these, under the lunatic pretext of natural equality, as if they ought to live one life and enjoy the same rewards.
—Russell Kirk, CONFESSIONS OF A BOHEMIAN TORY, 1963, pg. 280.
My father and me at our wedding on St. Columba’s Day June 9, 1982. I am wearing Auld Pop’s Munro tartan tie. I still have it and the tie my father was wearing that day. The ladies to my father’s left are my mother, Ruth L. Munro and in the back Juanita Donado Perez my beloved mother in law. A grand lady and like my grandmother lost her husband when very young (at age 26). My wife was like my mother “the widow’s curly haired daughter who was the loveliest of the throng.”
I know what it is to love a father and to lose a father.
“Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.” is an old Irish saying.
NE OBLIVISCARIS..DO NOT FORGET.
People you love never die entirely. They live in your mind in, the way…
The next Shakespeare@Stratford film to hit YouTube is the Festival’s 2018 production of The Tempest, premiering on Thursday, May 14 and running for three weeks. Here’s my review from when my wife and I saw the play live in October of that year.
This is the third production of The Tempest we’ve seen at Stratford, Ontario; since we started attending in 2004, the Festival has usually marketed the play as a chance to catch an actor of high skill and reputation (and often getting on in years) in the role of Prospero. 2005’s Tempest served as a grand farewell for William Hutt, the most accomplished classical actor in Canada’s theatrical history; the 2010 production was built on Christopher Plummer returning to the scene of his earliest triumphs. This time around, the hook was seeing Martha Henry (since Hutt’s passing, the current Greatest Living Canadian Actor) playing the exiled magician — part of a season with multiple productions (a gender-swapped Julius Caesar and a gender-fluid Comedy of Errors, along with the drag-rock musical The Rocky Horror Show) trendily exploring postmodern conceptions of freedom.
But any dreams or fears of a transgressive Tempest faded quickly; Henry forthrightly played Prospero as female — duchess of Milan, mother of Miranda, wizard ruler of an uncharted, enchanted island — with a few modest tweaks of the script not even scuffing the verse rhythms, and that was that. (After all, it’s a fairy tale; if you’re worried about the lines of descent for Renaissance Italian nobility being messed up, you’ve come to the wrong play.) Even better, this was an ensemble Tempest, with Henry clearly featured, but also clearly first among equals. Rather than chewing scenery a la Plummer or waxing grandiloquent like Hutt, she drove the plot without swallowing the stage, working to provide for her daughter, bring those who exiled her to book, reward virtue and punish wrong with formidable focus, aplomb and dry humor. And all the while, she genuinely wrestled with conflicting impulses: would she take vengeance on her adversaries, or show them mercy? It’s a tribute to Henry’s and director Antoni Cimolino’s conception that, even if you knew the play, the answer wasn’t telegraphed.
The strong cast also elevated this production, consistently playing off Henry’s indispensable work while fruitfully developing their own characters. Andre Morin’s Ariel did Prospero’s bidding with delight, while holding her to the promise of eventual freedom; Michael Blake’s Caliban chafed convincingly under her authoritarian rule. For once, the shipwrecked mariners were three-dimensional characters, not plot tokens — the King of Naples Alonso (David Collins) ripely autocratic, Prospero’s usurping brother Antonio (Graham Abbey) convincingly sociopathic, counselor Gonzalo (Rod Beattie) more of a sage and less of a fool than usual. Tom McCamus as butler Stephano and Stephen Ouimette as jester Trinculo clowned to perfection, nailing every laugh possible whether on their own, with Caliban or with the ensemble. The young lovers were the most pleasant surprise; Ferdinand and Miranda can feel like weak sauce in the wrong hands, but Sebastien Heins & Mamie Zwettler were spunky, passionate, intelligent, fully cognizant of their developing affections — strong & spot-on.
And yes, the special effects and pageantry (serious creature puppetry by the ensemble of Spirits & Monsters at key moments, Festival stalwarts Chick Reid and Lucy Peacock regally presiding over Act Four’s celebratory wedding masque) were impressive as always. But Stratford productions go deepest when they cut to the heart — and this Tempest showed us, beyond its numerous charms and delights, the depth of Prospero’s sacrifice. To become truly great as well as truly free, the exiled ruler must serve her enemies as well as her friends — forgiving wrongs, securing Naples and Milan’s future through Ferdinand and Miranda’s marriage, releasing the spirits of the island, and abjuring her “rough magic.” Martha Henry’s reading of Shakespeare’s Epilogue – bereft but relieved, slyly humorous in its appeal to the audience for final release through prayer and applause – communicated both the cost of Prospero’s renunciations, and their true worth. It was a lovely end to the best, most bracing production of The Tempest we’ve seen at the Festival.
Watch the premiere of The Tempest on the Stratford Festival’s YouTube channel tomorrow at 7 pm EDT; a pre-show chat with Martha Henry, Mamie Zwettler and Antoni Cimilono starts at 6:30 pm.
“I can skirt the boundary of Italian, but the interior of the language escapes me. I don’t see the secret pathways, the concealed layers. The hidden levels. The subterranean part. At Hadrian’s Villa, in Tivoli, there is a gigantic network of streets, an impressive and imposing system that is entirely underground. This complex of passages was dug to transport goods, servants, slaves. To separate the emperor from the people. To hide the real and unruly life of the villa, just as the skin hides the unsightly but essential functions of the body. At Tivoli I understand the nature of my Italian project. Like visitors to the villa today, like Hadrian almost two millennia ago, I walk on the surface, the accessible part. But I know, as a writer, that a language exists in the bones, in the marrow. That the true life of the language, the substance, is there.”
Bitterly, C.M. Kornbluth, the second presenter, vehemently disagreed, stating without equivocation that the genre “is not an important medium of social criticism.” Much like Hitler, Kornbluth complained, the adherents of science fiction treat the genre like a religion and lay claim to anything and everything they admire. Yet, for all its pretentions, science fiction rarely if ever actually criticizes anything prevalent in the world, and, when it does, its criticism remains rather tame. Anticipating the social radicals of a decade later, Kornbluth feared that science fiction fails in its power to change the consciousness of a reader, as the novels of the genre do “not turn the reader outward to action but inward to contemplation.” Then, he complained, there’s the horror genre, a supposed subset of science fiction which merely rolls all of our fears “up in one ball of muck” and thrusts “them into the reader’s face.” This is especially true in cinema, he continued, and “if the day ever comes when the shriek movie is a really major type, up there with, say the pretentious Western, the implications for the future of democracy will be bad.” Yet, one should never give any of this too much thought, he concluded, for “science fiction is socially impotent.” Tragically, Kornbluth died a year later, of a heart attack, only age 34.
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2020/05/science-fiction-university-chicago-bradley-birzer.html
This prompts some new thoughts during her bedtime story session, in which she tells her own story, about a mother’s love and “the feelings of the unhappy parents with all of their children flown away.” Peter hates this story, but listens anyway. Wendy’s autobiographical tale features her own mother leaving open the window for her children to fly back into the house and ends with a happy reunion. Peter declares Wendy to be “wrong about mothers,” recounting his own story of finding the window barred upon his return after a long absence, “for my mother had forgotten all about me, and there was another little boy sleeping in my bed.” This tale frightens Wendy’s brothers, who then beg to go home. The Darling children have lost track of time and of their own identities. They must return home immediately. The Lost Boys, having now experienced a mother’s love and care, try all manner of threats and pleas to keep Wendy from leaving.
As they exit the underground lair, the children and Wendy are captured by the pirates. Hook proceeds with the “princely scheme” to force the children to walk the plank and then make Wendy the pirate mother. Offering words of farewell to the boys, she declares: “These are my last words, dear boys . . . . I feel that I have a message to you from your real mothers, and it is this: ‘We hope our sons will die like English gentlemen.’” These final words impress even the pirates, who declare they also will do what their mothers hope. Smee tries to bargain with Wendy. He will save her if she will promise to be his mother. “‘I would almost rather have no children at all,’ she said disdainfully.”
— Read on www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/searching-for-mother-in-peter-pans-neverland/
I have never before heard anything quite like this album. And since I first listened to it at a friend’s urging this past weekend, I find myself returning to it again and again. It resists description, yet compels a response; it’s utterly fresh but feels like it’s been around forever.
Working as a loose creative collective since the mid-1980s, Liverpool’s Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus have consistently pursued what they describe as “echoes of the sacred” in their work, striving to access a sonic space where transcendence can invade a stiflingly measured-out world. On their fourth album Songs of Yearning, they’ve discovered new room for rumors of glory to run, and the result is uniquely powerful, its resonance strikingly amplified by the shadows of doubt that now openly stalk our lives.
RAIJ’s music calls to mind much that I’ve heard and loved over the years — abstract soundscapes by Robert Fripp and Brian Eno; the “holy minimalism” of composers Arvo Pärt and Henryk Górecki; the sparse, charged post-rock Talk Talk found with Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock, to name a few. But comparisons to other artists fall short of describing Songs of Yearning’s rich mix of reticent modesty and bold experiment. Dissecting the music into its component parts — a breathtaking gamut of sound sourced from liturgy, folksong, chamber music, pop & rock of all stripes, ambience, industrial noise, found dialogue and much more — won’t do the trick either. The only way to catch the breadth and depth of what’s here is to dive in:
Short and relatively direct as it is, “Celestine” unfolds the Revs’ approach with inviting clarity. The simple acoustic guitar pattern and the female vocal in French doubled by bells — they’re straightforward enough. But that flute — is it slightly out of tune, or carving out its own tonality? The acoustic bass and harmony vocals — how is it they sound now consonant, now dissonant, flickering in and out of sync by the second? And in the end, each layer goes its own way, ever so gently drifting apart harmonically and rhythmically, but still bound up in an organic, contemplative whole.
Spirit of Cecilia 
You must be logged in to post a comment.