Tug Tug Tug

I was numb after seeing Notes on a Scandal last night with Larry. It hit too many sensitive places; too many lightning-bolt-flashes of recognition in our face.

Cate Blanchett: a beautiful ethereal artist and art teacher in a challenging high school, married to an older man, mother to two challenging children, one of whom has a disability . She has a passionate clandestine affair with a 15 year old, and is manipulated and blackmailed by an older associate played by Dame Judi Densch.

Loneliness. Desire. Betrayal. Bitterness. Desperation. Destruction. Redemption. Replay.

I was shaken up. There were parts of the script that I could have written, parts which I could have played; some which exist as distant memories, others - stories in the making.

How many of us have built our lives upon taking care of others, forgetting our own needs and desires until they are either lost to fantasy or acted upon, often with disastrous consequences…some living in chambers that echo of loneliness and emptiness, making them bitter, empty shells of what they once were or hoped to be. I see it too often in my life - tears of wasted lives, and unhappy people…

It was not an uplifting movie. It hits nerves way below the surface and made me twitch. Worth seeing, but be prepared.

Tonight’s photo is another of Charles Rosen’s paintings. It is one of his later works, painted in the 30’s, of a tugboat on the Rondout Creek, which is at the end of the D and H canal, and which feeds into the Hudson. Today you can still see them roaming the Hudson., pushing and pulling the laden barges that make their way up and down the river.

For Rosen as well as so many others, it is in art and writing that we find peace and sublimation. It is into the arms of the muse and divine inspiration that we fall and entrust our souls. There we find truth and answers, and in divine creativity see love and light, and are saved.

in creativity and the arts, patti