23 posts tagged “betrayal”

Shakespeare Retold

Yesterday and tonight’s movies were contemporary retellings of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and Macbeth. These are BBC productions that create modern scenarios for 400 year old stories and I have to say, they did an EXCELLENT job with them. The recreation of Macbeth focuses on a chef named Jo Macbeth who slaves away for years to acquire a top rating for the restaurant he works for. As soon as the restaurant receives news that it will be receiving one of England’s most prestigious awards however, the owner declares that the restaurant will be given to his son, a lower level “potato peeler” in the kitchen basically. This in spite of assurances and intimations over the years that Jo Macbeth would get the restaurant someday. The rest is … well … Macbeth slightly modified. For example, the three weird sisters are, in this movie, three garbage collectors who open the movie out in a garbage dump outside London eating sandwiches they have made from stuff they have picked up in dump runs.

This version of Much Ado About Nothing centers its plot line on two newscasters who play the roles of Benedict and Beatrice and I have to say, they pull it off perfectly. Shakespeare would have loved it I think. It amazes me that this guy’s plots are just so easy to transpose into multiple cultures and historical settings. The interesting thing is that watching these retellings left me seeing connections to my own life that I had not seen just watching the play. The Macbeth retelling particularly had me saying “I hadn’t quite seen the play like that” and “Of course that is what its about”. These two have me looking forward to my next Netflicks installment of them, Taming of the Shrew Retold and Midsummer’s Night’s Dream Retold.

One caveat here. Because the basic Shakspearean play, Macbeth is somewhat gruesome at times, so is this rendition of it (When Macbeth has his hallucinations). It might not be a kid friendly way to see Macbeth but I am not sure there is one.

Question for Comment: In this version of Shakespeare's Macbeth,  Joe Macbeth works long tireless hours for a boss who, when it is time for rewards, pats him on the back and stiffs him of previous assurances that he will one day get the restaraunt. Have you ever had this happen to you? I mean where someone acts like you will receive long term benefits for your work and then hands them off to someone else?

Macbeth (Arden Shakespeare: Second Series)

William Shakespeare

What does one say about a play that people have been talking and writing about for several hundred years? And yet, I somehow feel compelled.

The play opens with reports of MacBeth and Banquo risking their very lives to fight for the cause of the old king Duncan.

For brave Macbeth--well he deserves that name--
Disdaining fortune, with his brandish'd steel,
Which smoked with bloody execution,
Like valour's minion carved out his passage
Till he faced the slave;
Which ne'er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him,
Till he unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps,
And fix'd his head upon our battlements.

So, here is a guy who "disdain's fortune" we are told. By that, we are to assume that in the service of his king, MacBeth is a man who cares not what happens to himsel. And yet, later that day, we see that this same man is full of kingly ambitions. Even his own wife will testify to this about MacBeth. He is a man who wishes to be king and she knows it. MacBeth will, of necessity, ASSERT that he has no interests but the king's interest of course. "The service and the loyalty I owe in doing it, pays itself." he says to Duncan after the fight. Your highness' part Is to receive our duties; and our duties are to your throne and state children and servants." But in the very next statement, Duncan tests this outward show of loyalty by telling MacBeth that the next king has already been chosen and that it will be Duncan's son Malcolm and NOT MacBeth. Immediately, we see MacBeth begin to split his public and private selves, as he whispers (to the audience):

"That is a step On which I must fall down, or else o'erleap,
For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires;
Let not light see my black and deep desires:

I think it is fair to say that the risks that MacBeth had taken earlier that day were not entirely selfless and altruistic. This was a man fighting for an aged king, campaigning for advantage in the next round of monarchy selection. Lady MacBeth will later compare Duncan to her aged father, indicating to us that his days were already numbered at the onset of this play's events. It is this moment that Duncan publically determines to advantage his own son above the risk taking warriors MacBeth and Banquo that forces MacBeth to chose between his public and private selves - between MacBeth the chivalrous loyal suck-up and MacBeth the monarch wannabe. It is fish or cut bait. Kill the King or serve his son the rest of his life.

Even Duncan realizes that MacBeth's services are in excess of what Duncan can reward him for. "More is thy due than more than all can pay," he says. Clearly, MacBeth was gambling for the crown in taking the risks he did in the day's battle. The question of the play is ... will he take matters into his own hands to achieve his ambitions? Or will he, committed to fair play, be a good loser and let fate pass him by in spite of all his investment. MacBeth wants to be king. But he wants to be king, if he can, without violating his conscience. As Lady MacBeth puts it,

Glamis thou art (the rank MacBeth had already attained), and Cawdor (the rank that MacBeth had just recently attained); and shalt be
What thou art promised: yet do I fear thy nature;
It is too full o' the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great;
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it: what thou wouldst highly,
That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false,
And yet wouldst wrongly win:

MacBeth wished to win the kingship "holily" that is, by playing the game fairly ... by flattery, and bravery, and merit. But what will he do when these means bring him to a dead end and the only way that he can achieve his ambition involves some serious "unholiness"? He has ambition but does he have the "illness" that so often goes with it? The willingness to let ends justify means? Will he pursue a Machiavellian path?

Ultimately what we discover in the play however is that MacBeth's commitment to holiness is really simply a commitment to appearing holy. Once the Lady MacBeth shows him how he can kill Duncan and have someone else take the blame, the argument is over. This reality led to an engaging homeschool discussion about the meaning of morality and the meaning of the word "guilt" and the fundamental decisions one has to make about living a moral life.

At what points do our ideas about moral behavior diverge when we discover that it is possible to have both a public morality and a private morality? Throughout the play, there are these continued references to the divided self. Of the betrayal of the thane of Cawdor, Duncan says "There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face". MacBeth says "Stars, hide your fires; let not light see my black and deep desires" and later

Away, and mock the time with fairest show:
False face must hide what the false heart doth know.

Lady MacBeth advises her husband

"Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye,
Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower,
But be the serpent under't.

Malcolm later asserts that there "are daggers in men's smiles."

And even the wierd sisters, the witches, pretend to be encouraging MacBeth when they are in fact messing with his head and plotting his demise. Throughout the play, "foul is fair and fair is foul". You can't believe anyone really.

Which is why it is interesting to draw conjectures about King Duncan. He says at the beginning of the play that there is no art to "finding the mind's construction in the face". He has, as it were, given up thinking that he can tell a loyal friend from a competitor to the throne simply by listening to their suck up speaches about loyalty and devotion and duty. But that leaves the question: Are there other ways of testign a person's integrity? Was Duncan putting MacBeth's public proclamations of loyalty to a specific test when he declared that the succession had already been decided in favor of Duncan's own son? In a conspiracy theory of grand proportions, might Duncan have sent the weird sisters to set MacBeth and Banquo up? As a emans of bringing to the surface what he needed to know? Not likely but ... it is fun to speculate. Grin. 

Question for Comment: Have you ever experienced what it is like to have someone "look like the innocent flower" for you while "being the serpent under't"? How do you make your way through life AFTER an experience like that? Do you allow yourself the freedom to "test" people? Has anyone ever tested your public self against a private trial? Did they find integrity? Why or why not?

My friend, L. says that she wakes up with songs in her head that she can't get rid of. In my favorite episode of Battlerstar Galactica, several Cylon sleeper agents wake up with Bob Dylan's song "All Along the Watchtower" in their heads. And Skyler told me yesterday that he just likes people who can just DO what comes into their heads without thinking. So I fugured I would just post the song that I woke up with in my head and see what connection it has to any one who reads my blog's life. Is there a reason we get songs in our heads?

Some people stay far away from the door
If there's a chance of it opening up
They hear a voice in the hall outside
And hope that it just passes by

Some people live with the fear of a touch
And the anger of having been a fool
They will not listen to anyone
So nobody tells them a lie

Billy Joel - An Innocent Man (live in Russia)

Sorry I haven't written much lately. Its not for lack of learning I assure you. Yesterday the boys and I went for a hike. You could see pictures of said hike at flickr (if you ask) I have a number of favorites so I won't try to pick ones to show you. One of the things I noticed as I was editing them later is that even when I take pictures of my kids, I tend to place them off-center, as though to say "These people are important . . . as is the environment in which they live." I guess someday when the boys look back on their lives, I want them to know that I regarded them as beautiful people and did what I could to make it possible for them to live in a beautiful place.

Sim White Rocks Valley

But when I look at the pictures that they took of me, something ... well, unfortunate happens. I tend to see myself as a scar on the picture's beauty. An unfortunate presence in an otherwise pleasant scene. It is not a healthy perception but never-the-less one that has been somewhat branded into my psyche by my life experiences. I am reminded of a poem I wrote during one of these experiences of self-loathing not too long ago.

Such thoughts ought not surprise me I suppose. Its simply a matter of "experience minus contradiction" ultimately. People believe what they are told most often. You spend enough of your life looking into that funhouse mirror of rejection and eventually the wobbly oversized revulsion your partners see when they look at you begins to feel like it’s the truth, and honestly, is it not the truth? And anyway for many years, I simply cared far more about my mind and heart than this earth-suit I find myself howling my woes out of here.

Surrogate mother

Yesterday I went out and got myself someone that I figured I could depend on to adore me. (Thats her on the right). She was cute enough for all intents and purposes and relatively cheap. But already she has decided to leave

She writes:

Dearest

The day I have spent with you has been one of the most wonderful and exhilarating days of my life. You truly are  a precious and generous human being and I will always remember the times we spent together with you clinging to and slobbering all over the tassels of my ratty towel. Knowing as I do the pain that I will cause you in leaving and knowing as I do the history of abandonment you have experienced, I can only say that I do not take this action lightly. Be assured that the gifts that you have brought to the relationship will always be treasured and never forgotten. Never-the-less, I fear that the time has come to go our separate ways. Despite all that you offer, I fear that I find myself in need of a … how shall I say this … a less wiry counterpart. In short, dearest, I need a man with fabric on his bones. A man who’s big round eyes don’t blink quite so often. A double amputee much like myself.

Please know that I will always cherish the memories of your devotion and affection for me.

Regretfully,

Your surrogate mother zombie monkey

What is so very interesting about the experiments that have been done with primate attachment bonds is that an infant monkey who has to chose between dying of starvation and dying of physical neglect will usually opt for starvation. It will prefer its soft mother without milk to its wire mother with milk. One wonders if this experiment has ever been tried with human adults?

Fire

A case in point. The other night I watched Deepa Mehta's movie Fire. If any of you read my review of Mehtah's movie Water a few weeks ago, you will know that she is a director who creates movies about Hindu fundamentalists that make them storm theaters and break windows. Her principle themes in these movies involve the ways that fundamentalist religion (Hindu primarily but applicable to ANY fundamentalist religion) literally destroys people's psychic lives with rules that run counter to human need. If there is a place where religious people are treating the Sabbath as more important than people, Deepah Mehta will be there I suspect.

Anyway, in the movie Fire, a Hindu woman finds herself barren. Unable to have children, her husband determines to make the "best of the situation" and determines to reduce his desire for her to nothing, as an act of spiritual devotion to the Hindu notion that one who reduces desires betters themselves with respect to future reincarnations. He does, however, insist on sleeping with her in a non-sexual way from time to time to "test" his heightened powers of resistance to temptation.

This existance of "you may lie next to me but I shall not touch you for the sake of my needs" is exactly what she graciously (externally) and resentfully (internally) extends to him for the duration of 13 years. The movie is about what happens when this, lets call a spade a spade, psychological torture in the guise of religion, begins to literally break her into psychological pieces. Incidentally, Ghandi used to practice this same regimen with his wife.

I quote:

"Gandhiji took the vow of brahmacharya (celibacy) in 1906 at the age of thirty six years, after full discussion and deliberation. He had not shared his thoughts with his wife until then, but only consulted her at the time of taking the vow. She had no objection, but he had great difficulty in making the final resolve. He had not the necessary strength. How was he to control his passions? The elimination of carnal relationship with one's wife seemed then a strange thing. But he launched forth with faith in the sustaining power of God. It is like walking on the sword's edge and he saw in every moment the necessity for eternal vigilance.

What is brahmacharya? It is the way of life which leads us to Brahma. It includes full control over the process of reproduction. The control must be in thought, word, and deed. If the thought is not under control, the other two have no value. For one whose thought is under control, the other is mere child's play.

Gandhiji said, 'It appears to me that even the true aspirant does not need the above-mentioned restraints. Brahmacharya is not a virtue that can be cultivated by outward restraints. He who runs away from a necessary contact with a woman does not understand the full meaning of brahmacharya. However attractive a woman may be, her attraction will produce no effect on the man without the urge. . . . '

Gandhiji said, 'Brahmacharya is such only if it persists under all conditions and in the face of every possible temptation. If a beautiful woman approaches the marble statue of a man, it will not be affected in the least. A brahmachari is one who reacts in a similar situation in the same way as marble does.'(2)

I want to test, enlarge and revise the current definition of brahmacharya, in the light of my observation, study and experience. Therefore, whenever an opportunity presents itself I do not evade it or run away from it. On the contrary, I deem it my duty, dharma, to meet it squarely in the face and find out where it leads to and where I stand.'

. . . Gandhiji experimented with different techniques which help in observing celibacy.(3) He allowed women inmates of his ashram to sleep with him on the same bed and under the same cover, just to test whether it aroused any passion in him or in the woman. . . . The woman inmates of his ashram used to hold Gandhiji tightly clasped to their bodies (5) in cold weather or whenever his blood circulation became poor because of his old age, in order to give him the warmth of their youthful bodies. This practice is known as 'gorocomy'."

http://www.yogamag.net/archives/1983/joct83/gany2.shtml

Sounds like he was not happy with his abstract Hindu wire monkey to me.

Question for Comment: Is it possible to switch off one's psychological or physiological needs for the sake of some higher personal, spiritual, or communal good? In Deepa Mehta's movie, it is relatively easy to see that EVEN with his wife's external compliance, this man really is really engaged in a form of psychological abuse in the name of religion. Are there ways in which we in this culture do the same (and we need not focus exclusively on the issue of withholding of affection or neglect in thinking about the question).

The Feast of Love: A Novel

Charles Baxter

Today's movie was Feast of Love, a movie based on a book I read a few years ago. I'll be honest. Despite the fact that it didn't receive terribly encouraging reviews at Rotten Tomatoes, it made me cry. It does a good job of portraying just exactly how shallow and irresponsible and dishonest some lovers can be. It does a good job of portraying heartbreak. But the heartbreaks in the movie are too easily healed to be the sort that I have met in my life. One gets the idea that these accidents of love that we get ourselves into can bend and twist the frames of our core selves but ... no one in this movie gets totaled and those characters who are deep enough to get totaled are conveniently left out of the field of vision when they are.

There is a line from the book that did not make its way into the movie that should have:

"When you break the heart of a philosopher,you must apply great force and cunning strategy but when the deed is completed the heart lies in great stony ruin at your feet. If you succeed in breaking it, the job is done once and for all.  It will not be repaired."

Anyway, there were a few other lines from the book that might be worth recording for posterity for those who only see the movie:

"What is agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to someone, that solitude is a mistake.  The inner voice doesn't care about who you find.  It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you -- if you happen to be me -- with homecoming queens first, then girls next door, and finally anybody who might be pleased to see you now and then at the dinner table and in bed on occasion.  You look up from reading the newspaper and realized that no one loves you, and no one burns for you.  The workings of nature are mysterious, but they do account for a certain amount of despair among single persons, the irrelevance you sometimes feel." p. 87

About the author of the above quote,, Dianna, the woman that marries him in a spasm of "I think I will play grown up for a while" says:

"As the weeks went on and I grew to know him better, I thought of all these default mode negatives; He was not ignoble, not ill spoken, not a bully, not inconsiderate, not obnoxious, not a boor, not violent ,not distressing, not disdainful, not a bad dresser, not unmindful not dirty, or smelly, and not particularly ironic. He was not unhandsome.  He was not unattractive. In other words, he was husband material simple as that.

 I didn't need a husband, I've said that.  But I hadn't had one, not yet,though there had been halfhearted offers, and I was ready to have the experience, retro as it may have been, of being married, to say nothing of the fact that it seemed about time for one of them, one of these unattached default mode fellows to wander into my life and choose me. . . . f I loved anything about him, it was his plainness, his lack of mask, this failure of costume. . . . e was uninteresting and genuine sweet tempered and dependable, the sort of man who will stabilize your pulse rather than make it race. He proposed.  And I accepted."

Makes me want to take her and drag her behind my chariot around the walls of Troy. What right do people have to play "dress up" with other people's lives, hearts, families?

Question for Comment: One of the main characters in the movie sees a young couple in love and says ".I was envious . . . . and then I felt sorry for them. There's so much they don't know; heartbreak they can't even imagine." He wonders that God ever created such pain as that which can come in the trail of love. "God is either dead, or he despises us." he says, to which Bradley responds,

"God doesn't hate us, Harry. If he did, he wouldn't have made our hearts so brave."

Do you feel like your heart has been made strong enough to heal from the ways it has been broken? Or are there ways in which it will never be repaired?

The Aeneid

A little more from the Aeneid today. Aeneas meets Dido on his way through hell to see his father:

"Not far from these Phoenician Dido stood,
Fresh from her wound, her bosom bath'd in blood;
Whom when the Trojan hero hardly knew,
Obscure in shades, and with a doubtful view,
(Doubtful as he who sees, thro' dusky night,
Or thinks he sees, the moon's uncertain light,)
With tears he first approach'd the sullen shade;
And, as his love inspir'd him, thus he said:
"Unhappy queen! then is the common breath
Of rumor true, in your reported death,
And I, alas! the cause? By Heav'n, I vow,
And all the pow'rs that rule the realms below,
Unwilling I forsook your friendly state,
Commanded by the gods, and forc'd by fate-
Those gods, that fate, whose unresisted might
Have sent me to these regions void of light,
Thro' the vast empire of eternal night.
Nor dar'd I to presume, that, press'd with grief,
My flight should urge you to this dire relief.
Stay, stay your steps, and listen to my vows:
'Tis the last interview that fate allows!"
In vain he thus attempts her mind to move
With tears, and pray'rs, and late-repenting love.
Disdainfully she look'd; then turning round,
But fix'd her eyes unmov'd upon the ground,
And what he says and swears, regards no more
Than the deaf rocks, when the loud billows roar;
But whirl'd away, to shun his hateful sight,
Hid in the forest and the shades of night;
Then sought Sichaeus thro' the shady grove,
Who answer'd all her cares, and equal'd all her love.
Some pious tears the pitying hero paid,
And follow'd with his eyes the flitting shade,
Then took the forward way, by fate ordain'd,
And, with his guide, the farther fields attain'd,"

The question is of course, should Dido listen to him? Can this man be regarded as sincere? He claims that just as the Gods REQUIRED him, forced him, compelled him to make this trip through hell where he has accidentally come upon her, so was he forced to leave her to travel to Rome and found his city. Well ... what is the actual case? Was Aeneid FORCED to make this trip to hades? Or, to the contrary, had he ASKED to be allowed to come? Indeed, had he not gone out of his way and taken risks IN SPITE OF A CAUTION NOT TO?

My son refers to "free will" as "free won't". I tend to think Dido is right to ignore him. "Better a dead husband in hell that reciprocates something than a lying lover in Carthage" is the moral of that story.

I also enjoyed the part where Juno, seeing that she cannot keep Aeneas from founding Rome determines to make it difficult for him:

"If Jove and Heav'n my just desires deny,
Hell shall the pow'r of Heav'n and Jove supply.
Grant that the Fates have firm'd, by their decree,
The Trojan race to reign in Italy;
At least I can defer the nuptial day,
And with protracted wars the peace delay:"

She plans thus to make Aerneas' marriage to the local king's daughter fraught with complications. She heads off to the underworld to hire a professional sower of discord, Alecta.

"This Fury, fit for her intent, she chose;
One who delights in wars and human woes. . . .
'T is thine to ruin realms, o'erturn a state,
Betwixt the dearest friends to raise debate,
And kindle kindred blood to mutual hate.
Thy hand o'er towns the fun'ral torch displays,
And forms a thousand ills ten thousand ways.
Now shake, out thy fruitful breast, the seeds
Of envy, discord, and of cruel deeds:
Confound the peace establish'd, and prepare
Their souls to hatred, and their hands to war." Smear'd as she was with black Gorgonian blood,
The Fury sprang above the Stygian flood;
And on her wicker wings, sublime thro' night,
She to the Latian palace took her flight:"

She begins to work her "magic on her intended target, the mother of Aeneas' chosen bride:

"Betwixt her linen and her naked limbs;
His baleful breath inspiring, as he glides,
Now like a chain around her neck he rides,
Now like a fillet to her head repairs,
And with his circling volumes folds her hairs.
At first the silent venom slid with ease,
And seiz'd her cooler senses by degrees;
Then, ere th' infected mass was fir'd too far,
In plaintive accents she began the war"

... and so she works up the conflict be various means, beginning with the family and moving on into the community till everyone is killing each other.

Question for Comment: Have you ever been part of a  conflict that seemed to come from outside the circle of the people who were fighting it?

Lets just say Satan came to you and asked you to be the archetect of a brand new Hell. Lets say that Satan is a fan of great works of literature and asks you to give the place nine levels, in honor of Dante's great work The Inferno. Who would you put in each level? Dante puts great men who were not Christians in his first level and people guilty of lust in the second. From there, he works his way down to the ninth. Who does he put in his ninth layer? Its not violent people. They are in the seventh, one level below the heretics. Greedy people go in the fourth level. Angry people in the fifth. All sorts of different kinds of liars are in the eigth level and the ninth and last level is thus completely reserved for betrayers: The following summary comes from Spark Notes:

In Caina, the First Ring of the Ninth Circle of Hell, those who betrayed their kin stand frozen up to their necks in the lake’s ice. In Antenora, the Second Ring, those who betrayed their country and party stand frozen up to their heads; here Dante meets Count Ugolino, who spends eternity gnawing on the head of the man who imprisoned him in life. In Ptolomea, the Third Ring, those who betrayed their guests spend eternity lying on their backs in the frozen lake, their tears making blocks of ice over their eyes. Dante next follows Virgil into Judecca, the Fourth Ring of the Ninth Circle of Hell and the lowest depth. Here, those who betrayed their benefactors spend eternity in complete icy submersion.

 

Rodger Jackson references this moral estimation of betrayal in his engaging 2000 Humanitas article,

The Sense and Sensibility of Betrayal:Discovering the Meaning of Treachery through Jane Austen

"An act of betrayal makes us appreciate Dante’s reserving the innermost ring of the Inferno for the betrayers. We can even say there is a characteristic “feel” to betrayal. The betrayed experience powerful sensations of violation; they feel used and damaged. Betrayal, however, elicits more than strong feelings. Psychologists offer clinical evidence attesting to the devastating effects of betrayal.1 Betrayal acts as an assault on the integrity of individuals, affecting the capacity to trust, undermining confidence in judgment, and contracting the possibilities of the world by increasing distrust and scepticism.2 Betrayal changes not only our sense of the world, but our sensibility toward the world.

 

There is yet another significance to the distinction between betrayal and abandonment. Most of us do not see ourselves as betrayers, and in this assessment we are probably correct. For good or bad, it is not everyone who can cultivate the trust of another while plotting to break that trust, or to recognize that someone has our justified, acknowledged trust and then turn that relationship into an instrument. Willoughby certainly did not have this type of deliberate, calculating character.

 

But notice that this allows him to indulge in a familiar form ofdenial. He casts himself more as the victim of unfortunate circumstances than as someone who has committed a great wrong: he sees the way he treats Marianne as necessary, unavoidable.

 

What Austen does so well with Willoughby and Marianne is to present a frighteningly common situation wherein an individual voluntarily enters a relationship of trust and then abandons that relationship, not from some carefully constructed plot to harm the truster, but from a neglect born of self-interest, disinterest, or carelessness. Willoughby illustrates that with abandonment we may find innumerable ways of passing off responsibility for our actions; with betrayal we are at least deliberate and self-aware. But Marianne must remind us that the results of abandonment can be as cruel as the most meticulously plotted act of betrayal.

 

The Sense and Sensibility of Betrayal:Discovering the Meaning of Treachery through Jane Austen by Rodger L. Jackson. Humanitas, Vol. 13, 2000.

 In summary, he draws a distinction with the use of Jane Austen's novel, between someone who knows they are going to betray you WHILE they elicit your trust and those who do not know.

Question for Comment: My question would be "which is worse?" Which of these two villains would you put in the lowest level of the lowest level of your inferno?

The question implies that one does more harm perhaps. That one inflicts more "betrayal trauma" to use a psychological term. You might think that it is the person who KNOWS they are going to decieve you that is worse but I am not entirely sure. In those cases, the betrayer is after something that they probably do not single you out for any intrinsic reason in you. They are like a theif standing on a corner waiting for someone with a pocketbook. It is nothing personal. The one who abandons you AFTER eliciting your trust consciously trades in the relationship that they ACTUALLY had with you for some other bauble that catches their fancy. 

There is no hiding from the pain when that happens. The only smart thing to do when that happens to you is to build a pyre of the betrayers things, make an effigy on top, light it on fire so that the betrayer can see it from his (or her) distant and fleeing ship, and impale yourself on the betrayer sword with a Dido-like prayer to the gods that your decendents might forever hunt down theirs. 

Thats what Dido (The Aeneid) does anyway. She was smart enough to know that this is really the only escape for pain of this sort. But maybe others think otherwise.

The Aeneid

Vergil

"Nullius in Verba" (Latin: "On the words of no one" ) i.e. "don't believe anyone

I have been listening to the Aeneid in my travels today and it has me in a fowl mood. Aeneid has me so angry at him I could burn down Troy myself if the Greeks hadn't done it already. Aeneid whines about the treachery of the Greeks and their underhanded ploy to insert a horse full of warriors into the heart of hiscity. He rages about the way the Greeks talked Troy into accepting the "gift" that eventually barfed its destruction out into the heart of his loved ones. "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts" he laments. I say "beware of Aeneas bearing gifts." The wretch. What do the Greeks do to Troy that Aeneas doesn't do to to Dido? Makes me wish I could go back in time and help Carthage's Hannibal salt the plains of the Tiber. Rome deserved to Fall, if for nothing less than for Aeneas' two faced weasel-assed capriciousness.

Oh but wasn't it a blessing to those ancient Trojans and Greeks to be able to blame their fickleness in love on the Gods!

"He longed to flee away and leave the sweet land, amazed at such a stern warning and command from the gods. Alas, what was he to do? With what words now might he dare to win over the furious queen? What should he take as his place to begin? He cast his mind rapidly now this way now that; he snatched at one idea after another, and turned everything over. As he hesitated , this decision seemed the better: he summoned Mnestheus and Sergestus and brave Serestus. They were to make the fleet ready silently . .. "

All of the elements of a classic breakup follow.

Dido accuses him of treachery and starts to call him names ("you savage). Then she cries and asks for pity ("I beg you, by these tears, and by your right hand - since I have left myself with nothing else"). Then she begins to list the sacrifices she has made  ("It is because of you that the nations of Africa and the Numidian rulers hate me, and my own people are hostile; It is because of you again that my honour and my former reputation - my only route to heaven - have been destroyed.") Then she bargains for more time ("At least if I could have conceived a child for you before your desertion, if I had a baby Aeneas to play in the palace, whose expression could remind me of you, I should not seem so utterly lost and abandoned.”)

So then Aeneas responds, hoping to inject the novicane of flattery into her pain long enough to get out of Dodge: ("I shall never, my queen, deny that you did with kindness all the many things you were able to list, nor shall I be ashamed to remember Dido, as long as my memory lasts, while there is breath in my body." Then he does a little denial move ("I shall speak briefly and to the point. I did not intend to hide my escape with secrecy - don't imagine I did") Of course, that is EXACTLY what he was up to! Then he claims that there never really was an official commitment (". . . and I never held out the wedding-torch or entered into this contract. ") Then he starts asserting his own powerlessness ("If the fates allowed me to lead my life according to my own choice and to settle my worries to my own liking ..."). Then he starts blaming her for being selfish and demanding that he go without something that she isn't willing to go without ("If it is the citadels of Carthage and the sight of an African city that captivate you, a Phoenician, what is your objection, tell me, to Trojans settling in an Italian land?") Then he makes the leap to the conclusion that dumping her is a moral NECESSITY and an honorable and virtuous thing indeed ("It is right for us to to seek kingdoms abroad.") Then he insinuates that Dido's wish for him to stay amounts to elder abuse and husband abuse and child abuse ("Whenever night hides the earth with its damp shadows, whenever the fiery stars come out, the troubled ghost of my father Anchises rebukes me in my dreams and terrifies me; so to does my boy Ascanius, and the wrong I do to one so dear, whom I am robbing of the kingship of Italy and the lands ordained by destiny.") Then he goes all spiritual ("Now indeed the messenger of the gods sent by Jupiter himself - I swear on both our lives - has brought orders through the racing winds . . . ") Then it is back to pleading powerlessness. How can he be held accountable for some decision that he is not making ("Stop inflaming us both with your complaints; I do not seek Italy of my free will.")

And Virgil, that bastard TAKES HIS SIDE in the matter!

"In just the same way the hero was pounded with continual appeals from this side and that, and felt the full force of her troubles in his mighty heart; His mind held fast, the tears poured down in vain."

Hero? Hero? The slime! I wish Hannibal had nuked the miserable wretch's Italian ancestors' whole capital city. Aeneas himself had lost his wife in the sack of Troy. He had gone searching for her in the dark streets, weeping at his loss and had seen her wraith (ghost) and had felt the agony of separation himself.

"So saying, she left me. I was in tears, and still had much I wanted to say. But she faded from my sight, and vanished into the air. Three times I tried to put my arms round her: three times as I unsuccessfully tried to hold her did her substance slip through my fingers, just like a soft breeze or an evanescent dream."

Human attachment bonds were such a mistake. There is nothing but pain to be had from them. Nothing but pain. The stoics were right to say that the only way to live is to teach yourself not to care. As Epictetus puts it,

"If you love an earthen vessel, say it is an earthen vessel which you love; for when it has been broken, you will not be disturbed. If you are kissing your child or wife, say that it is a human being whom you are kissing, for when the wife or child dies, you will not be disturbed. . . . Never say about anything, I have lost it, but say I have restored it. Is your child dead? It has been restored. Is your wife dead? She has been restored. Has your estate been taken from you? Has not then this also been restored?"

In short, care for no one for they all, like Aeneas, are self centered and will just leave and compensate you for your pain with some excuse that satisfies their own guilt quite nicely.

Question for Comment: Am I right? Or am I right?  

Uturn

Warning. Do not watch this movie if you like movies with happy endings. Don't watch this movie if you want to see people who make wise choices get rewarded because no one in this movie does. The whole movie is a testament to the truism that the wages of dysfunctionality is death ... or worse. As a matter of fact, you should only watch this movie if you like seeing people with few redeeming moral qualities suffer their just deserts in violent and traitorous double crossing murders. Not one, not one single character, in this movie is worthy of emulation, trust, compassion, or remembrance. I can't imagine recommending it to anyone in spite of the hilarity of Billy Bob Thorton's character. Unless you have some attraction to Jennifer Lopez in a red dress.

What is most interesting I suppose is the last line of the movie. The main character, after having been betrayed and counter betrayed and double and triple crossed by every other character in the story several times, dies a horrible death and blames everything that befalls him on the State of Arizona. As though he had not, like Sampson in the temple of Dagon, brought the whole series of disasters down on his OWN head.  "A man with no ethics is a free man," one of the characters with no ethics says. And, like all the other characters with no ethics, he winds up dead in a ravine in the end. I suppose, in the sense that all the lieing scumbags in the movie get their just deserts, its a good movie.

But I don't think I need to see it again ever.

Othello (Folger Shakespeare Library)

William Shakespeare

The boys and I were studying Othello today (Act I) and noting that everyone in the story trusts Iago who is the least trustworthy character in the play ... and how everyone at the beginning suspects Othello of being a savage barbarian warlock when in fact he is about the only character in the play with integrity and moral gravitas. "Why does everyone trust Iago?" was the question of the day. The most interesting case is that of Rodrigo. Iago TELLS hims straight out that he [Iago}  is capable of being a consummate two faced liar and yet Rodrigo never suspects that Iago might be the same two faced liar with HIM. What is interesting is that periodically Iago will turn to the crowd and address THEM and for whatever reason, one suspects that, like Iago, the audience simply believes Iago even though they are watching Iago lie to everyone else.

Iago says of Othello:

"The Moor is of a free and open nature,
That thinks men honest that but seem to be so,
And will as tenderly be led by the nose
As asses are."