THE WELL-DIGGER'S DAUGHTER THE MOVIE

air bellows waterfall in summer

 

It's a wet, overcast day, sometimes rain, sometimes not-rain. Windchimes ting, rhododendron leaves wiggle, squirrels scratch for sunflower seeds on the ground near the birdfeeders. Both birdfeeders have squirrel guards, but the squirrels are able to climb around them. The guards prevent only chipmunks, ground-squirrels in the old way of talking. So many chipmunks in extended families, they'd keep the feeders empty all the time without the guards. I welcome anybody at the food kitchen for my feral neighbors. Whoever is hungry is welcome. Early in the morning, four gray squirrels from the woods across the road dart about, scouring the remains of the day before. Four red squirrels, pine squirrels, live in a white pine near the house and cavort in the playground outside my windows. I enjoy watching the squirrels as much as the birds. I throw as much seeds on the ground as in the feeders daily. The squirrels take turns inside the feeders pigging out. They leave plenty for the birds. In the night a raccoon checks out the feeders for leftovers. Sometimes a little is left, most often none. I can tell when a coon has been through in the night by the birdfeeder roofs on the ground. I tried putting hooks on them, but the coon would unfasten them with its fingers. I don't hook them anymore. Coon is welcome too. Instead of attempting to run off the fluffy-tailed squirrels that are even more fun to watch than birds, I put out enough for them too, and the chipmunks. Rather than chase them away for eating the seeds put out for the birds, and cussing their thieving natures, I say, Welcome. I see a squirrel putting seeds in one of several middens among the pine needles on the ground, glad to note I'm giving them enough they have some to store for less abundant times. I'm paying them better than minimum wage for keeping my windows entertaining.

 

 

 

Last night's movie was French, another story by French writer Marcel Pagnol, starring Daniel Auteuil, who also directed it. It had the cinematic beauty of a Merchant & Ivory film, French countryside in the southern mountains, evidently near the Italian border. I'm guessing that because the architecture of the rock houses with tile roof looks Italian, and the lead character's last name is Italian. I google mapped it. The place was closer to Marseilles than to Italy. It was a long ways from Italy. In Holland you find family names that are Spanish. Europeans have moved around throughout time, and borders have changed over time. Pagnol's stories seem awfully Tolstoyan to me. He uses common people to tell big stories. The story of the well-digger's daughter I imagine a somewhat cutting edge story in popular fiction, the old world, before electricity, the story of a girl pregnant out of wedlock, has baby and shames two families. It's ALL her fault. The situation amounted to something on the borderline of date rape, but she was poor and he was rich, rendering her without a voice. I was anticipating another tragedy, but this story was a happily ever after story that came together in the end with everybody at peace with one another. The story verged on tragedy, but took a turn to comedy. Pagnol's other story, Jean de Florette / Manon of the Spring, verges on comedy throughout and at the end takes a turn to tragedy. Both stories thwarted expectation. It seems like Pagnol's story-telling takes possible turns in the story as they arise and goes down the path of the unexpected. It's like he builds a little bit of expectation, then changes to another direction. As in life, our path is made by decisions and changing circumstances. Again, as in life, we can't really anticipate anything. We might be able to anticipate by principle, but the details will be different in every case of the same principle.

 

nicolas duvauchele, astrid frisbey

 

I like that Marcel Pagnol recognizes our paths are continually changing, that they interweave with other people's changing paths composing the great ever-changing tapestry of life on earth, woven together by billions of threads that lock into place and compose the past, write history. The cutting edge of the weaving is the living moment. Once every thread is locked into place, history begins, a record of what happened along the cutting edge in its moment. Down through time, the record of events past tells a story. Cycles repeat in the story. Some people read the cycles, learn from the stories and make intelligent decisions in their present moment. Some people don't see any of it, believe the people that see the cycles are loose in the head seeing things. While the people that understand the cycles lament the ones beating their heads against a block wall unable to read the cycles. It is understood in the East that everybody eventually gets it. We are a mix of all levels of innate understanding and learned understanding, stirred in together like fruit cocktail in Jell-O. All the scriptures that have ever been say getting along with our neighbors is where you find inner peace. It's not that inner peace is something we get when we die, but it's what we get when we function with compassion in our attitudes toward life. Without meaning to, I've stumbled upon Pagnol's vision. In the story of the well-digger's daughter, the early part of the story is characterized by people judging one another and themselves without compassion. The way he ties up the loose ends, compassion is the key. People who had hated each other before, fall into love and forgiveness. They come into compassion by way of understanding. In the tragedy, the man had disabled his own compassion; it came back in an overwhelming wave and swept him out of his body.    

 

daniel auteuil, astrid frisbey

 

I felt like these films of stories by Marcel Pagnol are illustrations of his story-telling as much as a Merchant & Ivory illustration of an EM Forster story. The Well-Digger's Daughter was made from a film by same title Pagnol wrote and directed, 1940. I felt like the nature of the script was a peep into his writing style. It was simple language and spare talking. They were country people, the people of the world Pagnol grew up in. He was writing of his own people as Faulkner wrote of his own people, regarding them with the respect only an insider could know they were due. It is this aspect of Pagnol's stories that satisfies me the most, that he reveals the rural hillbilly people of the French mountains in their humanity, their venality, their hate, jealousy, understanding, compassion, feeling, with respect. Running through his stories is an abundance of love, of looking for what constitutes real love instead of make-believe love. He doesn't look down on the country people. He looks up to them. It brings to mind my friend Jr Maxwell talking at his table over our drams, when he said he looks up to everybody. At the moment, I was thinking he said it because it sounds good. That was before I knew Jr well enough to know he didn't do that. As I knew him better, years going by, I saw he really did look up to everybody. His humility was that deep. Marcel Pagnol had a sense for, and an understanding of the intelligence of the country people seen from inside their own culture. Daniel Auteuil, who played the lead role, also directed this film, had a supporting actor role in the others, Florette and Manon, for which I believe he won the award at Cannes, 1986. With Well-digger's Daughter, 2011, he is that much older. My respect for Auteuil as an artist has skyrocketed. So has my respect for French writer Marcel Pagnol.

 

daniel auteuil

 

 

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MEN AND OPINIONS

ellsworth Kelly

I woke this morning entertaining the question of how many centuries it will take for men to heal from several millennia of the male role being about war, killing and being killed. I've always disliked the song Onward Christian Soldiers. Marching as to war does not define the spiritual path for me. Yesterday I saw in some brief video an image of soldiers marching in a parade. Such images disturb me deeply. It tells a belief system I don't believe, can't believe, won't believe, and really don't like being subject to. I especially don't like our time now when our corporate government attacks poverty stricken, defenseless countries for the profits of oil corporations, jet fuel, ship fuel, automobile fuel, keeping the stock market going, then loses the war against people with no allies, using weapons taken from dead American soldiers. It's shameless, but it's how police state functions. The prophesy for our time has been fulfilled like a checklist up to the big war that will make survivors round the globe set the determination to be done with war. That's the day I have waited for all my life. I dread the war that gets us there, but like it's said, All's well that ends well. Maybe. I'm not so sure about that, but it sounds good. Its like saying the end justifies the means. Not necessarily. I take them both for self-serving self-justification. All these old bullshit beliefs about the glory of killing and the glory of being killed will fade into history with nationalism and patriarchy. I celebrate it because it's not far away. It doesn't mean the solution to all problems, but it's a solution to a major problem that creates millions of other problems in its wake.

 

 

alex katz

 

I project that men will heal from a culture of obedience training for men. I ask myself what is the problem with men up in years. It seems like their brains atrophy and they go nuts. But I don't think that's it. From childhood, a boy's mind is atrophied. Little man gotta grow up and be a big man, carry a gun, shoot people, get drunk on power over women and children, define any sensitivity to others feminine, thus unworthy of consideration. In the masculine mind as it has evolved unto today, the feminine is outside consideration, not a concern, stupid because women don't know nothin. Art comes under the feminine. It means paying attention to something besides the crosshairs. Shutting off the feminine ultimately shuts down feeling in oneself. In the soul, we have both, or neither, depending on how you want to look at it. To shut down the validity of half of one's self is ignorant to start with, dumb as hell to carry on and just plain stupid to live with. A man gets up toward 70 and a lifetime of believing in obedience over conscience makes an ideologue of the negative mind; hence, Faux News. I've had to tell a few of my friends over time, Rush Limbaugh is not information. Growing up in a world of boys becoming men, I learned at a certain point, late teens, that it is important to have opinions. I tried it. I've finally come to see that opinions are the same as nothing. Someone who used to be a friend made me so tired of his own opinions being fact and everyone else's opinions nonsense, that I called him one day on his superior attitude, which I'd learned many years before was a defensive mask. He turned, walked away and has had nothing to do with me since. I mentally pumped a fist in the air and said, Yes! It's been over two years and I've not missed him a minute of that time.

 

robert indiana

 

We were both of anti-war mind. I went to the 1968 march on Washington over Viet Nam, like it mattered. The next day I learned it did not matter. That event was the beginning and end of my involvement in anything political. He went to U of Tennessee and was involved in demonstrations there, his moment of glory placing a flower in a National Guardman's rifle barrel. I remembered seeing on the front page of the newspaper in that time a photo of a guy at U Tenn with the same color hair putting a flower in a rifle barrel during a demonstration. I've often wondered if that had been him ten years before I knew him. My figuring is it was the hip, cool thing to do and hundreds of flowers were put in rifle barrels. Hippies thought flowers were so cool. They are, but not used politically. His self definition is, "I'm a revolutionary." It was another moment in life of controlling my face so laughing my ass off inside doesn't show. Our "friendship" was much like the friendship between van Gogh and Gauguin. Watching the film, Lust For Life, with Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn, directed by Vincent Minnelli, 1956, I found van Gogh's issues with Gauguin's arrogance very much the same as mine with friend. His two songs are: Anything you can do I can do better, and Whatever it is I'm against it. I laughed seeing the relationship between van Gogh and Gauguin so familiar it was like a reenactment our story. His opinions of himself are quite out of line with what the people around him observe. As one who never learned to trust opinions, my experience knowing him so many years has trained me to give no value to any opinion. It doesn't mean I don't have opinions aplenty. It means I don't value them. I write opinions here, and I speak opinions talking with friends, but I don't believe them, don't hold them dear as Mine.

 

rufino tamayo

 

Isn't it curious: Mine as possessive, ownership, connected to self, and mine, a deep dark shaft with tunnels under the ground. I'm wondering if the cold dark mine makes an image to define the possessive mine. Among the first things we teach babies is "mine" and the next thing is "share." Does this mean I need a miner's lantern to go into what I mean when I say mine. I see a cd case for Santana I call mine, because I paid for it and I possess it. Is it that the idea of ownership mine could be a root system into my own psychic interior made of dark tunnels? I'm thinking that since they are the same word, there must be some connection. It's awfully easy to make a connection, which makes me suspect I'm bullshitting myself. However, I look at possessive mine the way a baby uses it, holding the blanket close to her heart, "Mine." Those roots go straight to the heart, encase it like a net. Then we grow up into the world of everybody having opinions, and the opinions I hold dear to my heart I call mine. A network of root-like shafts around my heart like a net around a glass ball. Much of our language comes from pre-logical times. whoever called a deep hole in the ground a mine might have seen inside self a deep dark place where memories of experience lurk. Yet, in other languages the words are not the same. For me, that settles it. I'll take it for two different approaches to the word as two separate words for reasons to be found in the evolution of language. Somebody can answer that question easily, like somebody can answer where the lightning comes from. Just a passing curiosity around the nature of the ego, which looks awfully much like a net around the heart.  

 

 

tony smith

 

 

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OBSERVING THE FACETS OF SELF

rufino tamayo

I can't get these French films I saw the other day out of my mind, Jean de Florette / Manon of the Spring. The French for spring is source. Source is more the word, but spring is just as right and requires no explanation in English. Turns out the telling of the story used the form of Greek tragedy. The Yves Montand character set the story in motion with a whim, his tragic flaw, automatic dislike for an outsider, someone not self. This a common characteristic among country people. These were French hill people, the people of the mountains of southern France, isolated and unto themselves. What happens on the mountain stays on the mountain sort of place. They are not different from American mountain people. Suspicion of outsiders is a common characteristic in a small community. He sets out to destroy a man who had what he wanted, a spring on his land, and did destroy him all the way unto him dying. He then took what he wanted and lived happily ever after. Until one day an old woman in the village who was blind asked him about a letter he'd received when he was in the Army. He didn't remember the letter. Later, at home, he found the old letter he had never opened. Turned out the man who moved in next door, the man he tormented unto death, was his own son, and the people in the village knew it, but weren't saying. He was struggling against not-self and it turned out to be self. He realized what he'd done and shut down his life by force of will. A sentence I'll carry the rest of my life as so poignant, telling its meaning directly, "I'm so ashamed, I don't want even the trees to see me." It threw me over the edge when he said that.

 

rufino Tamayo

 

The story was told so well I believed him when he said he didn't want the trees to see him. I have to give it to Marcel Pagnol, who wrote the stories, for making a true Greek tragedy among humble working people. The stories were written about the same time Arthur Miller was writing Death of a Salesman. There was talk among the intellectuals of the time searching for ways to make a true tragedy in the context of the common man instead of royalty. I felt Miller's Death of a Salesman was a bit forced, holding it to the outline of a definition of tragedy. Pagnol's tragedy seemed to unfold naturally, like the story came before the explication instead of the story being made to fit the explication. In Pagnol's story, I didn't see any of it coming. I wondered a few times why certain karmic returns had been passed over, didn't happen, when the deeds were such that indeed get some kind of return, especially the deeds done by design, with intent. The return came gradually at first, then all at once a tsunami of grief overwhelmed him such that it shut down his heart and mind, couldn't live with it. He wrote his will and told the story to the priest in confession. Sitting here staring at the end credits, I was hoping there was nothing in my past I'd set in motion without knowing it that would bring me to the same fate. I sat there thinking I don't ever want this experience. I really, really don't. The very same as I don't want the experience of the man who lived through the story, Twelve Years a Slave. There is a lot I don't want to be, like a political prisoner. Pagnol's story knocked me for a roll across the floor.  

 

rufino tamayo

 

I didn't want to write about it, because I'm hesitant to recommend movies anymore. I'm also reading DCP a positive thinking, highly conscientious collection of people, and I don't know many of those kinds of people. Yes I do, I know a lot. I identify with the people of positive thinking consciousness and I identify with people who are sarcastic and have a rude sense of humor, who laugh at positive thinking. I'm pointing to these people outside myself, particular individuals a given facet of myself is drawn to. It's that odd feeling meeting somebody who is a friend of a friend of mine. This person is entirely different from me, yet meets a facet of our friend, and I meet another facet. I look around at the people I know and they each represent a facet of myself. By facet, I mean like facets on a gemstone, a ruby, for example. It is the sparkle of the different facets, each reflecting the light different from any of the others that gives a diamond its bling. The various facets of ourselves give us our living bling too. Each of our facets have someone outside ourselves it is drawn to. I heard once of a project I've never took the time to do, but have always thought I might some day. That day never came. Anyway, I think I get it. The project is to sit on the floor with a little space around. Have twelve rocks, or ten or however many, and place one on the floor with the name of someone you're close with. Put the rocks in a circle around self, each with the name of someone in your life. Then get to know those aspects of self as seen in the other who has an aspect that accords with given aspect of self. Wondering about friends drifting apart or breaking up in one way or another, does the aspect in self change first and then does not reflect that individual any more? I've noticed that when I go through a change within, some of the people around me change. Some drift away and some new ones come in. Facets change because the light changes, the light within.

 

rufino Tamayo

 

I feel a little bit not right for evidently influencing my friend Lee to see it. She was so struck down by it she wrote a poem and a blog entry about the intensity of her grief. She provided me with the phrase, "tsunami of grief." Much as I don't feel comfortable that I put her through that without warning, it tells me this is the apex of art, to leave the observer with a powerful lesson learned from somebody else's story. I don't have a problem with films or novels or poetry that drag bottom in sorrow. Sorrow is one of the facets of human existence. Art is about the whole of the human experience. Chinese writing and film is loaded with really sad stories. I remember one, especially, The Blue Kite. Sorrow upon sorrow and ends in agonizing grief. There was one about the Japanese invasion of Nanking that wrings the heart to the last drop. And from the aftermath of an earthquake that takes the viewer to the extremity of grief. It ends with a woman falling to the floor, limp in her sorrow, saying, "I'm so ashamed." Evidently the Chinese love a good mournful cry. We want to feel good so bad in the West we enhance our brain chemistry with mood enhancers. Some people are asking why Americans haven't revolted yet against the corporate police state we have for government now. We're a no-problem society, stressed to the max, taking prescription pills to calm down into denial. I have a little problem of my own seeing up close what American working class people are having to do to get by, I see people of the middle class engaged in political correctness and positive thinking, I think about the black people who have it much worse than the white working class, and I can't get on board the positive thinking gospel ship. As a facet of human existence, it has its place, I am happy for it and I love it, but it is one of many facets. Art explores all the facets of human emotion. Art taught me to allow.

 

rufino Tamayo

 

 

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REMEMBERING GRANDMOTHER

views east from air bellows

A couple days ago I wrote in the post DOMINION OVER that I had long ago turned the lemon I got in the luck of the draw into lemonade. I just now read it over and thought: How? It came to me in a flash, an image of my home in the woods, and I said: right. This goes all the way back to first memories. It starts with a memory of my great-grandmother's house in Jefferson County, Kansas, near Perry. I don't even know where to start, unless it would be there. I'm looking at the places where I found my comfort in childhood. My memory of great-grandmother is about like a specter. I don't remember her face, though have never forgotten her embrace.  Dora Ann Hale Worthington went to Kansas from Ninemile in Bledsoe County of southeastern Tennessee with her husband John. She died when I was ten, but I don't remember seeing her after age of seven. I've seen the gravestones of her mother and dad in Tennessee, and hers in Kansas. Her first boy, Tom, was my grandpa. The culture of the home he grew up in was hillbilly. They came from the Sequatchie Valley of the Cumberland Plateau. They were still hillbillies. Mountain ranges to east and west. Tom married Tina Marie Dick Worthington and they moved to Kansas City, Kansas, where he became a railroad engineer, drove the big iron horses, and died of pneumonia seven years before I was born. Tina Marie's family moved to Kansas from Pulaski County, Kentucky, in the Cumberland Plateau surrounded by mountains. I knew none of this genealogy before coming to the mountains. All I knew about these grandparents was Perry, Kansas.

 

 

First thing I noticed when I started knowing people was everybody talked like my grandmother. I had nothing to go by to figure that one out. I settled with this was perhaps the rural American way of talking. I felt her presence in the people around me. It was a love vibration. I recall a time after I'd been in the mountains about six months, riding in the car with Van Pruitt, the old Dodge he called the Goat, it would go anywhere, had a posi-trac rear end. A summer day, approximately a mile from the house, we passed a field so thick with black-eyed Susans you couldn't see the ground through them. I've never seen the field that full of flowers since. I remember another field, another year, this one on the farm, loaded with white daisies, so thick they were like snow on the ground. Never since. The moment Van and I rode past the field of black-eyed Susans, something happened in my heart and I realized this moment was the point of no return. There was no going back. I came here with intent not to return, but allowed for the unforeseen, nonetheless. It was a powerful, overwhelming feeling of the point of no return. I'm not one to commit blindly. It was the feeling that I am now committed to this place I cannot leave that made me shudder for a moment. I wasn't really sure I wanted to stay, either. The adjustment required was radical. I wanted a different culture from the one I had always lived in, average American urban, and I was in a culture very different. I wasn't yet confident I wanted to give over entirely to the new culture. Reading was as alien to this culture as the one I'd left. That was nothing new.

 

 

I had to learn to distinguish between living in the culture and being the culture. No matter what, I could never be the culture. That means being born here, growing up here with ancestry here. Mother's milk. I didn't want to be the culture, because I assessed that the people in the culture were awfully hard on one another and especially hard on themselves. Conformity to culture is absolute. I don't conform all the way to any culture. I remember the day Malissie Pruitt noticed I wasn't wearing a belt, "You better put a belt on! Your pants are gonna fall down!" I could only say, No they're not. In the city, we wore jeans without belts, only rednecks wore belts. I studied the culture closely, from the inside, not reading any Appalachian history books, wanting to learn by my own experience the particular people I lived among. Eventually, I learned every county in the mountains has its own personality. Alleghany County has its own personality. Each township in the county has its own variations on the county's collective personality. For example, the people of Whitehead tend to be stoical, straight-faced lovers of God, and continue to feel themselves a community. A severe hardness runs through mountain culture in all its personalities that I cannot adopt for myself. I learned from experience that beating the shit out of our kids and berating them all the time only makes them angry. We have a culture of angry men, women who live with angry men. Seething anger equals manhood. The degree of anger you bear within is the measure of your masculinity quotient. I came to the mountains to work off my anger. Talk about seething with anger. Phew. It was so bad I couldn't live with it anymore. I wanted to do manual labor farm work old-time hillbilly style.

 

 

In the mountains about twenty-eight years, I asked my mother out of idle curiosity if she knew where grandpa Worthington's family went to Kansas from. She didn't know. She thought it might be Tennessee. I got in touch with a cousin who put me in touch with a family genealogist and LO! Ninemile, Tennessee, is a four and a half hour drive from here. Directly across the highway from great-great grandpa's land is a bluegrass place with parking on the grass, a big area for tents and trailers, a covered stage and covered audience area with folding metal chairs. I visited a couple of brothers, my fourth cousins, and it was like I already knew them. Wendell was a butcher, my age. Went to Vanderbilt and family genealogist, always lived alone. He was distant in the way only a hillbilly can be distant. He was friendly in the way a hillbilly is friendly. He'd never heard of Sparta, wasn't curious. First thing he said to me on sight was, I can see the Worthington in you. His brother Phillip wore bib "overhauls" raised fighting chickens, a hundred or so of them running in the meadow with the cows. He told me he kills a hundred and fifty coons a year keeping them off his chickens. I knew how to talk to him, knew how to listen to him. It wasn't anything like, Oh hi cuz! It was like, If you say so, whatever. I was comfortable with that, would have been very uncomfortable with the other. In line with my hillbilly training, I wouldn't have trusted it. I had found the land and people of my ancestry, and they were hillbillies. In my average American urban years, I'd have hated knowing it, would have held it as deepest, darkest secret only torture could wrench loose. I stood on the land that great-great grandpa worked and looked at the landscape 360 degrees, memorizing it. This was the landscape my ancestors there saw every day of their lives. I understood why I call the mountain I live on the home of my soul. At least half my blood is hillbilly. Let the banjer cluck. Grandmother was my comfort through childhood. The Divine hand picked me up like a mama cat moving a kitten and put me down in the core of the culture that made grandma who she was, and who she is in my heart.

 

 

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