Amour

A friend lent me a copy of the French film, Amour. I decided to watch it in French, thinking that the words were not most important in understanding the odd combination of gifts and curses that we members of Clan Anthropos face in living. We have inherited all the vulnerabilities of being a living thing among other living creatures, along with the awareness of these self-same vulnerabilities.

Amour centers on a gifted couple Playing in Overtime, I suppose. She begins "to lose it," as we say. Is it a series of strokes or Alzheimer's that has her cascading into oblivion? Maybe the subtitles would have explained that. What becomes so clear is that the world not immediately involved in the day-by-day end of life realities doesn't really, as the kids say, have a clue. Seemingly impossible decisions have to be considered and made. The experts, I imagined, who've preceded them down this road aren't talking ... cannot talk ... have already, as we say, gone to their rest. The thanatologists which the film doesn't introduce ... our scientific experts about death ... they have, indeed, accompanied others on the road ... but they haven't really been there.

And while watching the movie doesn't bring you there and cannot bring you there, either, it may sensitize one? me? us? to consider the trite recommendations offered up by perhaps those living in the Third and Fourth Quarters. I don't know what she said but the rather warm and solicitous daughter of these folk knows that the Old Caretaker is not doing it right for himself or for her Mother.

I often fascinate on how people seem to believe they know the truth. I once presented a talk about words and how they become more specific and, as they do, lose their meaning. Sabbath, Mammon, and Science all became locked into specificity and -- or so I claimed -- lost their original meanings. The fourth word I chose was truth. I was speaking my truth, indeed, when I suggested that its earlier meaning was not some abstract and profound statement about the Universe, but rather the willingness to give witness to the reality that one imagined they perceived ... nothing more.

I do think the people who put together this film were speaking about their truths. I thank them for me.