Fear

(A chapter in YOU HAVE UPSET THE BALANCE OF THE UNIVERSE BY BEING BORN: Advice on How to Live by Dr Robert MacLean, PhD: http://robertmaclean.blogspot.com/p/you-have-upset-balance-of-universe-by.html. A new chapter every so often.)
    
    You are a swashbuckler.  You live beyond your means, both financially and psychologically.  You live dangerously, which is to say naked and unashamed.  Play and danger are what you need.  There is no security anyway and heaven loves those who dare.
    Fear is a bore (see BOREDOM).
    And what is guilt but fear of punishment?  Also boring.  Surrender to the air and ride on it.  If there is a cosmic bureaucrat monitoring your behavior (see GOD), give him a good show.  Sell it, baby!  Be selfish.  Be a monster.  Sin, as Martin Luther said, bravely.  You have an obligation to indulge yourself.  Once you start going for safety it never stops, it's like money.  Never enough.  Go without assurance.  Safety is vulgar.
    Taking this attitude towards fear--an attitude of disdain--gives the right relation.  Fear is ignoble.  You are noble.
    You are more than noble.  You are divine.  Fear is forgetting that one is divine.  What can possibly happen to you?
    But here is the paradox: anything can happen to you, because divinity is vulnerability.  Insofar as you are divine, that far are you vulnerable.
    Which leads to a seduction: if you make yourself tall enough you'll fly, fine, but do you want to fly?  To get high, to experience joy always can only be desirable (see JOY), and yet you find yourself yearning for a vision with a little blood in it, even if it's your own.
    The analogy is to religion.  On each of the several continents the vast majority of sentient adults are apparently bores committed to some form of religious practice or metaphysical speculation; whereas if they really believed in their eternal natures as you do it might occur to them that eternity is adequate for the contemplation of the eternal.  We have made a privileged intrusion into time.  It is the moment for things of the earth.  If they're not to your taste you'll just have to wait for the bus back.
    So it is with your fear.  You cling to it not perhaps because you are afraid but because you find it cozy, like gray weather (see WEATHER).  You suspect that it may be the price of sensitivity (see MANNERS).  Uncertainty and ambiguity are the stuff of life.  How can they be relished without fear?  Your very sensuality requires that you feel fear.  There can be no shiver of anticipation without it.
    Make yourself tall enough and you'll fly, yes, but make yourself small enough and you'll get by.  Humility is comelier than pride.  If you are of a higher race it is the condition of your moment here that you forget that.
    Fear, that is, is luxury.  An indulgence.  If it makes you feel better, go ahead.
    (See also MORALITY).

The Fallen Angela: A Demonic Comedy

The Devil is coming to Rome, and he's traveling in style.  

First stop, the Monte Carlo Casino, where Cardinal D'Antonio, a compulsive gambler in mufti, loses a fortune in Church funds to him.  

Then he drives his red Cadillac convertible to Tuscany, where he stops to visit his old friend Alfredo, and his beautiful, ah, so beautiful wife Angela. "This is Del.  He's—what are you in, Del?"  "Futures," smiles Del.

The servants struggle to get Del's impossibly heavy trunk up to his room, and when he's not there her kids unlock it and peek inside.

Del, invisible to her husband, makes love to her while they chat in bed about family matters and she tries to keep her voice calm—what's going on?  In the morning he takes her away.

Is this what she wants?  It must be.  "No one does anything they don't want to do."  He drives her to Rome, installs her in a hotel with his trunk—then flies to the Vatican.  The air force pick him up, "It's some guy hang-gliding," and then lose him.

When he alights his wings fold and disappear, and as he walks into the Vatican Palace his simple black clothes transform into gold-trimmed purple and a crimson cape, magnificent horns sprout on his head, and a mustache and goatee point his features demonically.  Nuns and priests cross themselves.

In this guise he joins the Pope, who is at lunch with D'Antonio and three other cardinals.  They are shocked—they have no doubt who he is—then respectful, and the waiters serve him lunch while Del presents them with D'Antonio's check from the casino, which shocks them further.  "Have you come to collect your debt?"  "Not yet."  

"We are wondering, Your Excellency, why you are with us today."  "I am always with you."  "Of course, of course.  Is there any special reason why you have taken visible form to visit us?"  "I've come to tempt you."  "Naturally."  "I have brought you the most beautiful woman in the world."  The Pope is relieved: is that all?  "Your Excellency, at my age—"  But Del smiles and eats, and the Pope is worried.

At the hotel he tells Angela he wants her to seduce the Pope and she refuses.  He takes her flying over the city and threatens to drop her unless she agrees, but she defies him and she falls a long long way.  Then he catches her.  "That was fun," she says, "let's do it again!"  She knows he loves her, and agrees to do what he asks, to torture him with jealousy.

But the Pope, awakened from obscene dreams, refuses her with such vehemence that she, though she hurts for the Pope, is insulted, and let's Del down just when she should be seductive; for which he locks her in a rat-infested dungeon "so deep even Rome has forgotten it," where she sleeps on cold stone and has the illusion growing old and being there forever.

Thieves steal Del's trunk and take it to a tenement where it sinks through the floor and smashes through all the floors beneath to the cellar.  Cops.  Jail.  Del visits them, opens the trunk for them and each of them steps in and falls screaming into an infinite fiery distance.

When they come out again they are dead men who do Del's bidding.  

In the dungeon he whips Angela in anger.  She asks to see the Pope, not to comply with Del's wishes but to confess, and he, sensing a way in, brings the Pope to her.  But she is pregnant with the Devil's child, and the Pope wants her to abort it, which horrifies her.  

Back in the Vatican the Pope studies maps of the ancient sewers and sends the police and the Swiss Guards down there after her.  They bring her back, but the doctors want to kill the monster that is coming quickly to term in her.  

She escapes, chased through the sewers by the police and then, when the river rises to the vaults, by Del's zombies marching relentlessly under water after her, and down the Tiber to Ostia, where she gives birth into the sea to an eight-foot monster that attacks her.

Two police helicopters come down.  The monster swipes at one, and it rises.  She grabs the strut of the other and it rises as two zombies grab her legs, two more grab them, and the monster grabs them and climbs toward her, ripping the lower two away and grabbing her.  She kicks the three of them off and reaches up for the cop's hand but falls...

And we're just getting started.

Proposed cast: Vincent Cassel (Del)

Proposed cast: Monica Bellucci (Angela)

The Fallen Angela is a sequel to Emma Blue, trailers for which can be seen here and here.  It is still being worked on by the producers, but meanwhile has been invited to a dozen such festivals as Shanghai and Strasbourg, won at three of them, including Best Foreign Comedy at the Atlanta Underground, and got a standing ovation at the Cannes Independent.

Pretentious Pictures presents a demonic comedy.

Marcel Proust:

"All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last."

Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa

Pessoa's 1914 poem "The Keeper of Sheep" is recited in Manoel de Oliveira's film Eccenttricities of a Blond Haired Girl. 

To quote the Times review, "The poem’s narrator, replying to a friend who rails about economic injustice and the indifference of the wealthy to the sufferings of the poor, observes that the flowers and the rivers have no cares other than to bloom and to flow.

"'That is the only mission in the world, to exist clearly, and to know how to do so without thinking about it,' concludes the narrator, who praises God that he is not a good person."

Will You Please Fuck Off?—the movie

The one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.—Salvador Dalí 

Toby travels with a woman who pays. He's got it made, except that her nine-year-old daughter is smarter than he is.  Based on the novella:

Lazy, good-for-nothing, pleasure-loving Toby, in flight from his creditors in America, has tried it as an English-teacher in Paris ("know-your-words sort of thing") and as a tour guide in Italy and Greece ("I've always regarded Europe as more or less of a restaurant."),

and has now relaxed into the good life, traveling with rich bubblehead Marcie,

to Bali, Hydra, Puerto Vallerta, wherever he can avoid cold weather and alarm clocks.  Marcie is the widow of a scientific genius, now dead in some wacko experiment, and her nine-year-old daughter by him, Andrea, thinks in megabytes.

And there's the rub: "Marcie is no smarter than anybody else; the child is smarter than anybody else"—including Toby, who she treats as her yo-yo.  She'd have got rid of him long ago but her mommy loves him, so she keeps him around to, what, play with. 

Proposed cast: John Goodman (Haze)

Marcie’s father-in-law, billionaire Hazelton Turnbull “Hard Turd” Harding IV, loathes Toby, and loathes giving Marcie her allowance to feed him.  But he loves his little granddaughter, and there lies the control.

Now Haze has summoned Marcie and Andrea to London, so they can pose as a family while he pretends to buy and old house, but in fact wants to marry Marcie to Lord Michael, and pass the title on to Andrea.

Proposed cast: Scott Hinds (Lord Michael)

They distract Toby with Dr Lu, a hooker posing as a psychiatrist,

who lures him into compromising situations; one of which involves dropping his dry goods in front of the Queen.  

Proposed cast: Mary Reynolds (HRH) 

And as if he didn't have enough trouble, the house is haunted by a gay ghost who's in love with Toby.  

Proposed cast: Mat Baynton (Oliphant)

  Will You Please Fuck Off? is part of the Toby series:

 Pretentious Pictures presents a London comedy. 

CHOCOLATE AND CHAMPAGNE, A Comedy with a Dark Center

A Beverly Hills woman wakes up middle-aged and finds her life with a younger man undignified.

The stage version was performed in New York at the Creative Place Theatre.  Think of...

...only this is her movie, and she gets the younger guy.

Diana, a woman of a certain age, deals with a birthday by throwing out her younger live-in Jim.

They're right for each other, and she regrets it immediately, but she can't take him back: her daughter Jackie, who idolizes and competes with her, tells her Jim has seduced her, and Diana believes it.

So she makes do with the respectable but empty new life she'd thought she needed—with older lawyer Griff.

Jim gives a driving lesson to frantic neurotic Betsy, who almost shoots them off a cliff.  He calms her down and she takes him home. But he can't forget Diana.


Proposed cast: Sigourney Weaver (Diana)

DIANA, the Hamlet at the heart of this comedy, is a clothes designer with a boutique on Rodeo Drive, a house in Beverly Hills, and a younger lover, Jim, her kept man for two years now. There’s nothing she can’t handle—except getting older.


Proposed cast: Ethan Hawke (Jim)

JIM is happy with a champagne-and-sports-car life, but he’s also a talented script-writer who’s postponing seriousness into a future that never comes.  Together they’re fast company.  They must have been brilliant at her birthday party last night.

This morning, though, even while he’s making love to her, she’s spooked.  She tells him he has to go.  She wants something more presentable, more—respectable—before it’s too late.

Which shocks him.  He takes life as it comes, but this is a bit violent.


Proposed cast: Kathy Bates (Betsy) 

BETSY, the suicidal widow of a husband she drove to suicide, is too scattered to pass a driving test, takes a lesson with Jim, spins the car onto a Mulholland Drive cliff and is ready to gun it and take him with her.


Proposed cast: John Goodman (Griff) 

Diana's lawyer GRIFF, more her age and on her success level, has been in love with her for years.  Now’s his chance.  When Jackie tells Diana the lie that Jim has seduced her Diana gives up on Jim and tries to make a go of it with Griff.


Proposed cast: Adelaide Clemens (Jackie) 

JACKIE, Diana’s daughter, idolizes her and so misses no chance to pick at and defy her.  Inwardly shaky, she is outwardly impish and sexy.  She thinks she’s in love with Jim; in fact what she needs is a father.


Proposed cast: Jack Roth (Dylan) 

Betsy's son DYLAN—eccentric hair, psychotic eyes, twitches constantly and rhythmically as if keeping time to music he doesn’t much enjoy—is in the same class at UCLA with Jackie, over whom he moans uncontrollably.  He disgusts her.


Proposed cast: Rosie Perez (Maria) 

MARIA, Diana's housekeeper, is the deadpan foil to Diana's Hamlet, secret ally to Jim, and the one person Diana doesn't dare defy.

Proposed cast: Stockard Channing (Gwen)

GWEN is Diana's mischievous best friend and alter-ego.  She'll take Jim if Diana doesn't want him!  Just kidding.  In an attempt to bring them back together she throws a party and invites both of them, but it turns into a confrontation....

And the final character is Beverly Hills— 

—the tone, the climate, the village size and ambiance that make it inevitable for these people to collide.

The stage version of Chocolate and Champagne was produced by Love Creek  at the Creative Place Theatre in New York.

Pretentious Pictures presents a comedy with a dark center.

Catholic Converts

(A footnote to Greece versus the Puritans)

They say Bach was a closet Catholic; indeed his son converted.  But I hear austerities in Bach that I associate, perhaps wrongly, with Luther.  I feel about Bach's music the way I do about India: I can love it but I can't like it.

Anthony Burgess thought everybody was a closet Catholic.  There are such people.

His hero Graham Greene thought Henry James was a closet Catholic, which I think unlikely.  Greene himself, the twentieth century's idea of the Catholic novelist, was in fact a convert with a Protestant upbringing.  "The power and the glory" is not a part of the Catholic Lord's Prayer.

His hero (Greene's, not the Lord's) Evelyn Waugh, also a candidate for the Catholic novelist, was also a convert with a Protestant background, which, when one finds it out, somehow seems it should have been obvious all along.  Waugh strained to be what he didn't feel himself to be, Catholic and upper-class. 

His hero, T. S. Eliot—"I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics"—also started out as a Protestant, and for that matter as an American. 

And the third candidate for the Catholic novelist, Muriel Spark, was, yes, also a convert.

What's with these people?

The phrase "Anglo-Catholic" bears looking into: Henry VIII, something of a religious scholar, regarded his Church as "Catholic" no matter what the Pope said, since Christ had given power into the hands of all the bishops, not just the Bishop of Rome, including the Archbishop of Canterbury.  Hence its Scottish and American versions are called "Episcopal," the Greek word for bishop.

But civil wars and the pull of history gradually inclined Anglicanism towards Protestantism—you won't find any images in an Anglican church—and then the pendulum swung back again and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, people like Newman and Eliot and Auden spoke of themselves as Anglo-Catholic, and the American Episcopalian-raised James Agee simply as "Catholic."

Auden
Discovered God in
The Age of Anxiety
And spent the rest of his life worrying about the legitimacy of Anglican bishopry and notions of sexuo-spiritual propriety. 

Nevertheless, when my Anglican mother became a Catholic to marry my father she felt, and always continued to feel, that she had "changed religions."

But this is nothing beside the number of people whose names we know that were death-bed converts: Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Paul Verlaine, Buffalo Bill, Kit Carson, Gustav Mahler, Dutch Schultz, Bob Hope, John Wayne, Tennessee Williams—and the art historian Kenneth Clark, whose work had always been an argument for Catholic and Mediterranean values.

It all reminds me Roman Polanski at Cannes in '68 when communism was the thing.  I've been there, he said, and I escaped.

The same might have been felt by Mozart and Bunuel, whose abandoned Catholicism remained so important to them.

I'm attracted to the sacramental view of life I grew up with—there's a gorgeousness about it quite apart from the coerciveness—but as a matter of taste rather than conviction; a form of nostalgia.

And what of conviction?  As Socrates said, "The best theory about the gods is no theory at all."

Also by Robert MacLean:  

Mortal Coil: A Comedy of Corpses at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon FR, Amazon DE and Smashwords;

The President's Palm Reader: A Washington Comedy at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon FR, Amazon DE and Smashwords; 

and the Toby books: 

Foreign Matter at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon FR, Amazon DE and Smashwords;

Total Moisture at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon FR, Amazon DE and Smashwords;

The Cad at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon FR, Amazon DE and Smashwords; and 

Will You Please Fuck Off? at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon FR, Amazon DE and Smashwords.

And they're all at Apple, iTunes, Barnes and Noble, Sony, Kobo, Diesel—the whole street.

The magnificent 7

Louis, Cole, Django, Stéphane, Henry, Nino, Miles.

Philosophy after Hume is mood music.

Kiss of Death

A black comedy about a young man with a fatal kiss, and the women who need it:

A boy whose kiss kills doesn't dare have sex—until he starts sleeping with terminal patients who need a way out.  Trouble is, he's in love with someone healthy.

Set in Toronto—

—it begins on a Greek island:

When middle-aged Otto brings his twenty-year-old mistress Anita to Greece, she betrays him in the woods with a mule-driver, while Otto climbs toward a monastery and dies of a heart attack.
 

After dark she finds the body, and he comes briefly back to life and forces her to have sex—or was it a dream?  "Oh, Otto, I hope you didn’t make me pregnant!  What would come out?"

What comes out is Felix.  When he kisses someone, she dies.   That's how it happens when he's a kid.  The islanders think he has the evil eye, and run them out.

At high school in Toronto he doesn't dare kiss Dorothy, the girl he's in love with, which is not something she can accept or understand.

His mother Anita can't understand or accept it either, and urges him to get a girl.  So he gets a girl—

—and she dies in his arms.

He's a bright economics student at U of T, but without Dorothy, without any love life, he's suicidal.  Then he meets a terminal patient who wants out—and helps her out—and has his first sex with another human being.

Now he has found his niche: financial advisor by day, mercy seducer by night.  The police are taking an interest but what can they prove?

We'll have rending and funny performances by older and middle-aged actresses.

Only with Bald Woman does he decline to follow through.

Motorcycle tough, she has made her chemo baldness part of her butch style, and falls for Felix.  He evades her because she’s too full of life to kill, but in pursuit of the kiss of death she finds him and wreaks havoc on his day job—

—not to say on his chaste relationship with Dorothy.  Like Tristan and Isolde, they sleep with a sword between them.

His mother Anita watches in pain while he lives out Otto's curse, agonizes over the career of dangerous judgements he's embarked on, and does what she can to interfere.

When she sees how in love and how frustrated he and Dorothy are, she knows she has to do something.

Otto, like Hamlet’s father, is a vengeful ghost. His son can’t have sex without inflicting death, and Otto sees to it that Anita will pay that price.

Pretentious Pictures presents a black comedy.