Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum
Daily Meditations
Daniel:
Lureen: "I thought you were gonna call"
The Five Stages of the Soul
"The Wise have said that we repair the past and prepare for the future by living in the present. A committed contemplative regimen is what matters now:
cultivate attention and mindfulness; give up what has to be given up; prune what has to be pruned; strive without embarassment or apology to be virtuous; be discerning - choose wisely; struggle; and eventually you will surely find the means you need to live each day in the way you were meant to live it, and to become the person you were meant to be. Herein lies the ultimate struggle of mind and heart."
Beauty: The Invisible Embrace
"Sound can create a world as real as that of the clock, the field, or the street."
"Though beauty is autonomous, there seem to be occasions when human presence can become congruent with her will."
"Time becomes restless in us. The human heart is full of quickening.
"For Aquinas, beauty also included the notion of integrity (integritas)."
The plaintive tone (or human whine) can deal damage with merciless strokes of voice. To speak in such a tone is to create disharmony.
Whatever this disharmony, whether productive or not, it does require a temporal dissatisfaction. To be out of harmony is to be dislodged from the beauty and power of the present moment. Our consciousness is brought painfully to the past or the future, whether that tone laments the past or bemoans the future.
To escape that sound and its false or painful reality, we must instead seek beautiful sounds and human experiences, and perhaps most importantly of all seek out our own integrity and personal power.
Daniel:
Terry Pratchett Good Omens
"God does not play dice with the universe. He plays an ineffable game of His own devising which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players (i.e. everybody), to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch dark room with blank cards for infinite stakes with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules and who smiles all the time."
gattaca:
--- Quote from: Daniel on June 27, 2006, 01:17:21 pm ---"There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can't fix it, you've gotta stand it." (from the short story)
--- End quote ---
I ponder this one line constantly, and find myself mourning what it implies.
Daniel:
Sometimes, despite great differences, friends can find a way to love one another.
Daniel:
"Ennis, his chest heaving, does not turn away from Alma, but can still smell Jack -- the intensely familiar odor of cigarettes, musky sweat, and a faint sweetness like grass, and with it the rushing cold of the mountain." (from the short story)
Enchanted Love: The Mystical Power of Intimate Relationships
"An enchanted love is holy ground where the meanness and the assaults of the world are not escaped so much as transformed by the power of love and forgiveness."
Beauty: The Invisible Embrace
"Frequently, the imagination can bring completely new eyes to a situation."
"Nothing is said directly in a creative work; it is obliquely suggested."
"Faith is attraction to the divine."
"How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
"Those who believe in God but who do so without anguish, uncertainty, or doubt, actually believe only in the idea of God, not in God Himself."
"Meanness and the assaults of the world..." Can there be any better description for the death scene that Ennis imagines? Ennis has grown up with cruelty and learned to hide his emotions deep within himself. Now that a loved one has died, his memories of cruelty resurface and his imagination paints a scene of cruelty onto a situation already too painful to bear.
But what should he do now? His world has been shaken but no specific thought has risen to the top. As is often the case when a person is left confused and despairing after a tragic event, Ennis seeks aid from the divine - simply to know it, and share with it his grief, and perhaps for a short while understand the higher reasons for the tragic event.
The divine, however, may be experienced in many ways. Ennis seeks out both a source and target for divine compassion. Children often learn the most about God from their parents and associate the nature of the divine with their parents' nature. Ennis has lost his parents, but instead seeks out Jack's. This is an act of Faith, and one of the few that Ennis actively engages himself in.
While at the Twist ranch, he discovers the nestled shirts and in a dance of memory and revery loses himself. He struggles to smell the familiar scents and remember forever a presence passed on. In the end, however, he attempts to make amends with Jack's eternal spirit. If Faith in God is difficult, faith in one person as a spiritual, eternal being may be downright impossible. The struggle itself reveals faith and devotion, love and sincerity, hope and repentance.
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