life is more than a dress rehearsal

It’s frustrating how little occasion there is to be serious.  Life would be unbearably heavy, people think, if we gave real weight to every situation.  But I think it’s unbearably heavy when there’s nothing in it.  When there are no moments of solemn reassurance, no ritual of real experience, no ties that bind.  We’ve struggled so hard in the West to extricate ourselves from the entanglements of other people.  Each individual be praised.  But there comes a certain point when you’re all alone in your little island, and there is a force field of privacy that keeps people at bay.  It’s unseen, unspoken, but oh so very real.

 Perhaps that’s something about the East that is gloriously necessary in the wide and empty fields of grain and purple mountains’ majesty.  There is a short film currently touring the festival circuit that speaks of death–the death that we die and the death that creeps into our silence about that death.  It’s called “Winter’s Frog” and stars Gerard Depardieu and a darling Asian lady whose name I wish I knew but not really because then she’d be a person not an idea that I could chew on incessantly.  The story is about how she saves the old man’s life by giving him symbols and signs, rituals and rites to guide him through his wife’s passage into another realm.  His wife died.  Died when they were all alone, the two of them, in a huge winery and empty vineyard.  The Asian lady arrives at his door for a tasting.  At first, he refuses.  But then, inexplicably, he relents.  And by the time the last frame fades away, you’re left with a charming hope that the significant moments of life will not die silently one by one unnoticed.  There will be eyes to see and ears to hear.  And together, they can pass through the fiery ordeal.

So here’s to the winter’s frog, the sign of eternal life, and the hope that someday the West will learn how to say the words we feel and take hold of the unfathomable meanings by the tail.

Read the intro in this book for more on the importance of words and symbols to carry our collective gaze and although us to approach life's abyss.