making those connections

Life is sometimes serendipitous in its convoluted way. I came home from my retreat week in Victoria feeling that I'd made progress in my writing, but fell back into my life at home in a strange funk that unfortunately collided with some relationship problems (mostly of my own making) with a friend.

Then one of my holds at the library came up, and so I watched a film this week, one from last year's crop: A Single Man (from a novel I haven't read, blush). It's set in the sixties, about a gay man who is grieving the death of his partner. He is almost completely alone, except for one old friendship with a woman. Her loneliness was also acute, but not so coerced; she didn't need to hide who she was. So it's set at a time where there was little understanding, pretty much still the dark ages. Persecution would have been the norm and being open, 'out of the closet', could lose you your job. (And get you beaten to a pulp, but that still happens, doesn't it?)

It's sure not a happy story, with just a glimmer of hope about the resilience of people. A disturbing and thought-provoking tale. (Can't always be laughing, can we?) But the most salient points from this movie (beyond how difficult life can be) may be that we need relationships with other people as much as we need water and air. And that secrets are deadly. And in an odd way, the movie helped clear my thinking about my own, not-so-profound-but-still-difficult problem.

Anyway, I felt I'd sorted things out by the weekend so that I could think straight and then was lucky enough to see a play (my brother, sweetheart, gave me tickets he couldn't use). August: Osage County is on at the Stanley on Granville, and if you can, go see it.  It's a great big production, a throwback to the days when theatre groups could afford to hire a big cast and build a big set. Three acts, two intermissions, remember those?

The play uses (black) comedy to make its points, and it did it really well. It's a funny but tragic (or tragic but funny?) story about convoluted and fractured family dynamics made worse with pills and alcohol. Yes, I said funny, but achingly sad, too. And oddly, though it's wildly different from A Single Man, the same kind of ideas creep out. How important to us relationships are, and how poisonous they can be, especially when secrets are kept. How easy it is to hurt each other. Lots of laughter in the telling, but a very sad story.

Funny how strongly we relate to fictional characters and made-up stories. They're all illusion, this film and this play, and yet I find myself still thinking about them days later. When stories are effective it's because they resonate, you can feel them humming inside. The truth is there, even though it's just a made up story, a pack of lies really (which is, after all, what fiction is).

Our individual stories are all unique, yet there are certainly common themes we can relate to. In these two cases, it's loneliness (in or outside of big families) and rejecting families (that still often demand our allegiance!). And secrets. Just about everyone has some experience of these, in some way or another. And even if someone comes from a 'normal' family (I think they're out there) then maybe it's just a pleasure to see how different life can be, like visiting another country, and be thankful to be born where you were.

There's no way you can 'help' the characters in these fictions, but maybe they help us by making us think about them; this works when they aren't formula anyway. I mean there are plenty of examples out there of predictably yawnable stories, but not these two.

Anyway, what I'm trying to get to is, relationship, be it friend or family or lover, is the important thing, and how we understand it, make sense of it, is through story.

And so for me, now (because it's always about me, you may have noticed) after my week away to work on my novel, and after my week of emotional something-or-other (mayhem?) I'm reminded that I want to write down this story, some parts of which are down on paper, and some still roiling around in my head. It seems possible that if I actually attend to it, to my novel-to-be, I might get it right, even 'true'. That's what I'll be shooting for, anyway. I guess I'm blessed (?) with just enough narcissism to think I can do that.