AWAY FROM HER: THE UNDYING CHALICE--A Movie

[RonPrice]

From time to time my wife is away all day involved as she is in local arts society work, in family matters in relation to her 3 children and, now, 4 grandchildren; in relation to her many friendships and their associated obligations; and in relation to her activities in the Baha’i community, a growing world organization with, it seems to me, a vital role to play in the unity and coherence of affairs on this planet. We are both retired and on pensions in Australia.

I don’t mind being by myself after a teaching career of 35 years behind me and more evening and weekend meetings than I care to count. This evening, in the first week of autumn in Tasmania, my wife got home at about 10 p.m. After giving her a cup of tea and settling her in front of the TV, to ‘veg-out’ as we say, she and I settled down to watching the end of a late-night movie.

The movie was entitled Away From Her(2006),1 which won many awards, awards which I leave to readers to look-up. The film was about a man coping with the institutionalization of his wife because of Alzheimer's disease. He faces an epiphany when she transfers her affections from their 45 year marriage to another man. The other man is a wheel chair-bound mute who also is a patient at the nursing home.2--Ron Price with thanks to 1SBSONE TV, 10:05 p.m.-12:00, 30 March 2011; and 2IMDb: The Internet Movie Database, 3 April 2011.

It had been more than 40 years
since I saw any of Brant County,1
but tonight there it was on TV in
a movie which really moved me.
A bit of drama and romance and a
problem becoming big-time for the
baby-boomers around the world of
ours: senile dementia & Alzheimer’s.

This movie made one reflect on one’s
own life, one’s own marriage, one’s own
infidelities, if any; for unfaithfulness has
more to do with life than just the external
forms of sex, of sex outside marriage. And
going the distance tests the metal of most:
the bond that unites most perfectly is loyalty
and, in my 44 years of marriage, that loyalty
was tested to the hilt. And did I pass the test
when, perhaps, only deeds of stainless purity
are accepted at the throne of the most high?
I will not know until I get to those pearly-gates,
assuming there are pearly-gates opening on the
placeless and that stand wide, that the undying
chalice far beyond the perishable cups, the tinsel
and base metal,2 contains for me pure wine and
delicate draughts from those……Heavenly Cups.2

[edited for length- MODERATOR]

---Ron Price 3 April 2011

[ATDrake]

This was an awesome movie; Sarah Polley's directorial debut and who'd have thought someone who used to be on an Anne of Green Gables spinoff and a zombie remake movie could have done so well on her first try?

Anyway, if you want to rewatch it, try finding one of the DVD versions which comes with the commentary. Lead actress Julie Christie had pretty interesting things to say about the difference between how UK and Canadian society treated their seniors and such, if I recall correctly.

[nohmi2]

Originally Posted by RonPrice

From time to time my wife is away all day involved as she is in local arts society work, in family matters in relation to her 3 children and, now, 4 grandchildren; in relation to her many friendships and their associated obligations; and in relation to her activities in the Baha’i community, a growing world organization with, it seems to me, a vital role to play in the unity and coherence of affairs on this planet. We are both retired and on pensions in Australia.

I don’t mind being by myself after a teaching career of 35 years behind me and more evening and weekend meetings than I care to count. This evening, in the first week of autumn in Tasmania, my wife got home at about 10 p.m. After giving her a cup of tea and settling her in front of the TV, to ‘veg-out’ as we say, she and I settled down to watching the end of a late-night movie.

The movie was entitled Away From Her(2006),1 which won many awards, awards which I leave to readers to look-up. The film was about a man coping with the institutionalization of his wife because of Alzheimer's disease. He faces an epiphany when she transfers her affections from their 45 year marriage to another man. The other man is a wheel chair-bound mute who also is a patient at the nursing home.2--Ron Price with thanks to 1SBSONE TV, 10:05 p.m.-12:00, 30 March 2011; and 2IMDb: The Internet Movie Database, 3 April 2011.

It had been more than 40 years
since I saw any of Brant County,1
but tonight there it was on TV in
a movie which really moved me.
A bit of drama and romance and a
problem becoming big-time for the
baby-boomers around the world of
ours: senile dementia & Alzheimer’s.

This movie made one reflect on one’s
own life, one’s own marriage, one’s own
infidelities, if any; for unfaithfulness has
more to do with life than just the external
forms of sex, of sex outside marriage. And
going the distance tests the metal of most:
the bond that unites most perfectly is loyalty
and, in my 44 years of marriage, that loyalty
was tested to the hilt. And did I pass the test
when, perhaps, only deeds of stainless purity
are accepted at the throne of the most high?
I will not know until I get to those pearly-gates,
assuming there are pearly-gates opening on the
placeless and that stand wide, that the undying
chalice far beyond the perishable cups, the tinsel
and base metal,2 contains for me pure wine and
delicate draughts from those……Heavenly Cups.2

1 The movie was set in Brant County. I worked in Brantford Ontario, a city surrounded by Brant County, in the summer of 1967. I had a job with the Motor Vehicle License Branch of the Department of Transport in Ontario. I had just graduated from teachers’ college in June and was about to get married in August and go to live and teach primary school among the Inuit on Baffin Island. Alexander Graham Bell conducted the first distant telephone call from Brantford to Paris, Ontario in 1876.
2 Baha’u’llah, The Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys, Baha’i Pub. Trust, Wilmette, 1971(1945), pp. 39-59. I particularly enjoyed the insertion at the end of the film of Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young’s song Helpless about a town in north Ontario. The song was most famously recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young on their 1970 album Déjà Vu, an album I have owned for 40 years. In 1970 I had, indeed, just returned from the north of Canada and the nostalgia evoked for me was palpable.

---Ron Price 3 April 2011

Thank you very much for a very interesting read.

I will look to see if I can find the CD or DVD.

I have two friends who happen to belong to the Baha'i community.

As an aside: I have also seen the Baha'i Temple in Haifa, Israel.

Cheers.

[RonPrice]

Your responses were appreciated, folks. I post the following prose-poem as a way of indicating how I spend my time as I head into the late evening of my own life.-Ron Price, Australia
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DOROTHY PORTER

Unlike the Australian performance poet par excellence Dorothy Porter who died at the age of 54 this week, as the year 2008 was heading into oblivion, in 1999 I headed for a bunker, head down at the age of 55 after decades of performing. Yes, I put my head down, but put my periscopes up into cyberspace. Like Porter, I enjoy reading my own poetry and I revise it frequently with the feeling, as W.B. Yeats once put it, that each time I revise a poem I create a new one. Unlike Porter, though, I often write at night, indeed just about any time except when I’m: hungry, thirsty, tired, concupiscibly aroused and occupied with the social responsibilities of family, friends and community life.

I like to think that my poetry is, as dear Dorothy Porter emphasized poetry should be, “lucid.” Lucidity implies: lightness, expansiveness, a shining quality, brightness, clarity, transparency, rationality, sanity, perceptiveness and understanding’s wise inner voice. I am as addicted to writing as was Porter. This addiction I have been feeding more and more as my fifties turned into my sixties in this new millennium and I became free, at last, from the duties and tasks involved in: being jobbed, raising a family, taking part in the demands of a large and active Baha’i community life and life’s socialising that seemed to never end during the years of my middle adulthood: age 40 to 60. By the time I went on an old age pension at the age of 65 I was a word-addict.

I write for the common reader and I write to be understood after years of a more obscure poetic, a poetry that made it difficult for readers--or so I was told. I write with the clear intention of finding and holding an audience, a readership. I know this audience is inevitably a coterie as it is for virtually everyone who writes these days. I like to think that, with Dorothy Porter, my poetic lucidity, has “a tongue of fire.” But I know that is not the case, at least as most readers of my work feel the edges of my literary tongue. I am not, like Dylan Thomas or W.B. Yeats, raging against the night in these years of the evening of my life.

I do have a sense of urgency inspired by and related to what I feel must be said but, at the same time, I am sensitive to a myriad of factors that moderates the expression of this urgency. The dictum of Bahá’u’lláh that: “not everything that a man knoweth can be disclosed; not everything that can be disclosed can be regarded as timely nor should every timely utterance be seen as suited to the ears of the hearer.”-Ron Price with appreciation to the life and poetry of Dorothy Porter written on hearing of her passing in the last week of December 2008.