"Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, liked locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Perhaps you will gradually, without ever noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day."
-- Rainer Maria Rilke
Years ago, when I was but a girl-woman in college, I hitchhiked from New Hampshire down to Boston to hear Miles Davis play. It was midsummer, and I slipped into the bar area of the packed club with my friends in a state of rapture that I would get to hear him in person.
Half way through the set, something odd happened. Miles' eyes seemed to pick me out of the crowd, and it wasn't a good look. He stopped playing. This wasn't one of his famed moments of silence that could be so amazing. It was as if he was terribly angry with me. As if I was the Ghost of Christmas Past risen up in July. He walked off the stage, and he never came back.
Two years ago, one of my friends brought Jimmy Cobb to a New Year's Day party that my honey, David, and I threw. Cobb was the drummer on Miles' famous "Kind of Blue" album, one of my favorites. And as he and I got to know each other a little I related the experience, now so long ago. He told me that I look like one of Miles' ex-girl friends. I don't think the affair ended well.
Maybe Cobb was just making a fanciful remark, but for me it was like hearing the proverbial second shoe fall, decades after the first.
And that experience, and Rilke's wonderful quote, has made me think a good deal about patience lately, and my longing to have more at a time when it's so easy to find instant gratification in so many ways.
I've been impatient lately with two films I recently saw -- Tailor, Tinker, Soldier, Spy and Melancholia.
With Tailor Tinker, I felt like I was constantly pulled out of the fantasy world in the first third of the film, because the storyline jumped around a lot without a clear enough definition between the present tense and the past. But many of the other audience members raved about it during a Q&A session afterwards with the director, Tomas Alfredson.
In fact, Alfredson said he had tried not making things obvious, because he wanted to draw people into the mystery the main character was trying to wrestle with.
To me, it just felt like a movie had been made before the script was really ready. There are ways to involve audiences with mysteries emotionally and intellectually without pulling them out of the story.
A few weeks later, I listened to a man behind me snore through Lars von Trier's Melancholia with amused sympathy. Yes, the symbolism and the cinematography were wonderful. The scene pictured above, with Kirsten Dundst, was quite arresting. But I felt the script really needed more work before they started shooting, and some of the actors needed more rehearsal.
In places it seemed like I was watching a high school play, the language was so clumsy. But the next day I read that Melancholia had won not one, but three European Film Awards.
So maybe I should just love the questions, about why others find these two films so delightful. Maybe one day I'll see them again, and they'll sweep me off my feet. But I do find it fascinating how different people can feel about any work of art or craftsmanship.
It's made me think about Rilke, an Austrian poet who had a love affair with the famous seductress Lou von Salome in the late 1800s and early 1900s. She'd already had a passionate relationship with the German philosopher Fredrich Nietzsche.
Later, after Salome abandonned Rilke, he was consumed with her memory, according to Robert Greene's book The Art of Seduction. Greene writes, "In 1926, lying on his deathbed, [Rilke] begged his doctors, 'Ask Lou what is wrong with me. She is the only one who knows.'"
So the question I love to ask right now is, when Rilke wrote that quote about patience, was he thinking of his bewilderment about the loss of his great love? Someday, perhaps at one of my own parties, I'll find the answer to that.
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