Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum
Daily Meditations
Daniel:
Sorry people, I'll continue the daily meditations tomorrow. Going through a tough time tonight, emotionally, anyway.
*hugs*
Daniel:
Ennis: Bet you could fix this place up real nice if you wanted to.
Beauty, the Invisible Embrace:
"Habitatuation sets in when we not longer hear what people are saying to us. It happens when we become blunted to the subtle beauties surrounding us."
"The voice is the sound of human consciousness breathed out into the spaces."
"The longing to love and to be loved are the stirring of God within."
"The inner voice makes any complicity uneasy."
"The gracious eye can find the corners where growth and healing are at work even when we feel weak and limited."
Personal limitation and habituation: Ennis's inside world is described as a cage, a prison, and even a coffin. Nevertheless, he is still loathe to change his situation as he does not imagine it can be much better.
As the years go by, we recognize the few things that do inspire Ennis to reach above and beyond his limitations: Jack and his two daughters. Even his marriage to Alma seems more a result of what he feels he has to do rather than what he wants to do. His responses become automatic.
Here he seems to grasp hold of his mediocre life and say, "I can change this. I can improve this, without losing too much of what I got now."
Daniel:
Ennis: "Me, I don't know."
Beauty, the Invisible Embrace:
"The seeds of goodness lie in all people, and anyone with a willing heart can be saved."
"Wisdom is knowing which embraces are the truest feeling of the heart and the most profound seeing of the mind."
"Nowhere is the sense of the beauty of wisdom and the shelter of providence more tested than in suffering. True beauty must be able to engage the dark desolations of pain; perhaps it is on this frontier that its finest light appears?"
"To observe an appropriate silence regarding our interiority means our talk will never be weak."
To hide the self or quietly pronounce his pain? Which is this statement? By Jack's response we might assume it is a declaration of pain.
"That Brokeback got us good."
Translated: The experience on the Mountain affected us in ways which we never thought possible and triggered some highly volatile emotionality.
This is a questing of the pain and suffering that Ennis foresees as an inevitable result of their communion; as well as of his current painful and meaningless life: a daily struggle for existence which deserves no romantic composure until some base is held and maintained.
Daniel:
Ennis: "You girls need a push?"
The Five Stages of the Soul:
"The doorway to the mysteries is there - everyone's room is filled with doors."
Beauty, the Invisible Embrace:
"While we can participate in beauty, we can never possess it."
"To learn to recognize, accept, and integrate the shadow is to transfigure much of the bruised areas of the heart which dwell in fear and unease and rob us of joy and creativity."
"The difficulty in being human is that one can never be merely human."
"The work of art inevitably has some vulnerability in its form."
"The imagination has an eye for the invisible."
This scene, and perhaps in truth, this very statement is the exact center of the film and may contain the secrets to many mysteries presented throughout it. Ennis attempts to involve himself in a world in which he feels quite alien. He wants to aid his children, these extensions of himself, even as another extension has already walked away angrily. Ennis wants to help move them forward even as he himself hangs back. They refuse. They can do it on their own. Ennis is forced to reconcile with his independence, his loneliness, and perhaps worst of all, his own shadow.
He encounters this shadow again, at the end of the film, when he opens several doors - doors to mysteries he hopes to understand. He encounters the same feelings here. But instead of a future in which there is no need for his presence, Ennis looks upon a past where his presence was needed but not freely given. It is revealed that mere human effort was not enough and that he should have participated more in the temporal flow: foreseen and remembered - created and repented; enacted in all possible ways the divine presence of superhuman effort.
What is time to one who is actively present?
What is space to the eye of imagination and memory?
Past, present, future flow and swing in the universe - requiring no push or creative elements, merely flowing as their nature dictates.
"What my God's form may be, yourself
you should perceive,
who views himself in God gazes at
God indeed."
- Angelus Silesius.
Daniel:
I missed yesterday, gonna post 2 today, lol.
Cassie: "Tryin' to get a footrub, dummy."
The Five Stages of the Soul:
"The educated people, the people of repute and discernment who leave their marriages and their jobs, sacrifice their families and fortunes to follow a master they believe will lead them to enlightenment. We have also seen how years later many of these same people come slinking back humiliated and in despair."
Beauty, the Invisible Embrace:
"One can hear the contours of the landscape shape the tonality and spirit of the music."
"Integrity is achieved when there is a complete realization of whatever a thing is supposed to be."
"Despite its best brightness, your mind can never illminate what your life is doing."
"Each heart holds a different world and often its net of desires is entangled and confused."
"Where is fancy bread, in the heart or in the head?"
Cassie's reluctance to be direct is a realization on her part that such discourses will not be persuasive. Some part of her recognizes this - even responding to Ennis's shock or surprise by adding a teasing tone - manipulative in its subtlety.
An emotional landscape can shape music as much as a real one can, and Cassie's continual desire to dance and move about - particularly with emphasis on her (and Ennis's) feetindicates that her specific landscape is unstable. Listen to the songs she plays: "Mama Says a Pistol is the Devil's Right Hand", "It's So Easy To Fall In Love", some song where there is falling off a mountain, as well as "D-I-V-O-R-C-E":
Instability, violence, shaky ground, incompletion, falling apart.
Does her mind realize what her life is doing? Probably not. She lacks both integrity and self knowledge as she flails about in streams of emotional consciousness. She grasps, clingingly to what she believes she wants, not yet wondering if it is truly what she wants. Perhaps that is why she calls Ennis a "dummy", because she does not know what she is doing (on some subtle level), or more importantly why.
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