What Will Be Will Be – Or So “Hamlet” Said, #SoCS

I’ll admit,

I was beyond fooled when Linda said this,

but there will be no break in:

April’s first day was April Fools’ Day, the entire month is devoted to something known as The A to Z Challenge, but for me, around here, things are happening as they always have.

So many bloggers are writing all month long, except Sundays, following the letters of the alphabet, but I may be trying something different, as I’ve just been given a writing assignment to write a story, twenty-six sentences long, each starting with the letters of the alphabet.

That’s me, how I prefer to do things, my own way, as much as the pressure to go along with the crowd is there, as it is for everyone else and always has been.

So, I guess, too, with Stream of Consciousness Saturday for April, I will be taking part in A to Z, even a little bit, once a week and with whatever the letter for that day happens to be, as I can understand Linda wanting to set her SoCS word to work for those taking part in the April blogging challenge.

Well, I meant, with usual good intentions, to get this post out there on Saturday, but sometimes my tiredness shows up at the most inconvenient moments.

That got me thinking, even though I was already thinking…because I’m always “thinking”…

About “Be” and Hamlet…”To Be Or Not To Be”…

and then…

“Whatever Will Be Will Be” and here I am.

So, then I remembered that classic Simpsons episode where Springfield thinks it’s going to be hit and wiped out by a comet that Bart discovered. So, they all end up in Ned Flanders’ bomb shelter, all except the owner of the shelter himself, who must make the sacrifice and goes up and out and, like the religious man that he is, stands alone up on a hilltop and begins to sing:

Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be) – Doris Day

Sounds like something my own mother might have told me.

Okay, so I’m getting Hamlet all mixed up in that. I really do know what speech was his:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_be,_or_not_to_be

I did read it, once at least.

How much of life is what we do vs what is going to happen anyway, if we just wait, let things happen in their own time?

How much in life, love, art will just happen to me? I mean, really? How much do I have to take action on, if I want to see results?

If I put all my intentions and hard work into becoming a gifted travel writer, will I become one any quicker?

I may want a certain opportunity to happen, but does that mean I am ready for it? Am I letting the “what will be will be” idea take over because I need to convince myself that I’m not ready for something?

Just because an opportunity presents, at this exact moment, does not mean I am at the place in my life where I feel I am set to seize it.

I try to know my limits. Like, how I can’t write a song…oh wait…I did, but of course I couldn’t possibly write more than one.

Right. Sure. Whatever Kerry.

🙂

So, just because there are areas of the world, in literary circles, where those writing from a perspective of disability aren’t visible enough that does not mean I should be the one to fill the position. Do I even want that anyway?

If I am still learning, not how to be a writer with a disability, but just how to be a writer, who writes, maybe I need more years of writing to build on my skill before I am truly ready for certain things.

Whatever is going to be may be, or it may not. I don’t know, from day to day, how much of an active role I play in that whole process.

Of course, I can’t just sit back and let whatever will be happen. That’s not the way to learn how to play the violin, for example. I tried that, for years, and it didn’t work.

😉

I guess we just feel comforted by the “whatever will be will be” concept, as it sounds good in the song. It’s like a faith thing, a religious based belief, that takes the pressure off of us, removing the toughness of life’s decisions from our hands for a little while.

I hate making decisions personally. So much fear of making a bad one, the wrong one, one that we will regret later on.

This is impossible to escape. I can’t sit back and let the whole thing be taken care of, through religion, or someone else making all my decisions for me. I wouldn’t like that way of doing things either, to be perfectly honest.

So, this isn’t making any of the decisions in my future, or a few I’m trying to decide on at the moment, it hasn’t made anything any clearer like I’d hoped.

Thanks a lot Shakespeare. Thanks for nothing!

RIP, Alan Rickman – Always!

What a week!

It’s the sort of week that only a Harry Potter movie can sooth.

First it was David Bowie, then Alan Rickman, and finally it was the death of Celine Dion’s long-time manager and husband Rene Angelil. This cancer is a real jerk.

I am a fan of some Bowie songs and I am glad Dion was discovered, but it was the news of Alan Rickman’s death, on Thursday morning that threw me for a loop. All these men were no longer young, but still it was the dreaded cancer that took them from their families and from fans around the world too soon.

Of course I did not need this sad occasion, or any occasion at all, to get me to watch a Harry Potter movie marathon. As it is fifteen years since he first played the role of Severus Snape in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, this time I am watching and paying particular attention to the brilliant Alan Rickman’s portrayal of one of the favourite literary characters ever created in my opinion.

This is a beautiful overview of Snape’s story.

Tributes have been pouring in, from fellow actors and fans alike, since the news broke suddenly of Alan Rickman’s passing from cancer, at age sixty-nine, on Thursday, January 14th.

Of course this isn’t really him,

in this fake guest voice spot on Family Guy,

but his voice was always so well-known. I’d like to think he wouldn’t have been offended by it.

I did not think of him as a joke. I saw only dedication in the roles he played. I just needed to smile from something since I heard he’d passed away and the clip from Family Guy came back to me.

The tributes, as I say, have been coming fast since news broke, on Twitter, Facebook, and in the media and online:

From J.K. Rowling, Daniel Radcliffe, and other British stars.

to

Evanna Lynch

and her heartfelt post.

Then there came a statement from The Late Show’s

Stephen Colbert.

Rickman’s close colleague and friend Emma Thompson wrote a moving tribute of her own

Here.

I don’t remember Ricman from the role that made him famous in Die Hard or the next role, where he played the villain in Robin Hood.

I do know he came to embody the character audiences always loved to hate on screen, but who was he, as a man, in his off screen life?

I knew him in such roles, perhaps a little lesser known, such as when he starred alongside Johnny Depp and his Harry Potter co-star Helena Bonham Carter in “Sweeney Todd: The Demon barber of Fleet Street”. He was positively evil in that,

but Rickman and Depp sing beautifully in that together.

It was in Harry Potter that I first heard his voice. I don’t forget a voice like that. It was infused with intensity and control over the words he was saying, whatever they just so happened to be. His slow speech grabbed hold and kept hold of my attention, anytime he spoke lines on screen.

I can honestly say that not everything about the movie versions pleased me, as big of a fan of the books as I’ve been since I first read them, but Rickman’s performance as Snape was never a part of my disappointment. He nailed that character, as one of the best cast parts from the entire story.

He was absolutely, terribly mean and you couldn’t help but hate him, as cruel to Harry and everyone else as he always was, but that’s what made him so great as an actor.

He could go from the world of Harry Potter to Shakespeare and almost everything in between. His start with the British Royal Shakespeare Company must have been something to see.

But whether he was playing a Shakespeare character on stage, the Blue Caterpillar from a tale like Alice in Wonderland, a modern literary villain in Harry Potter, or the bad judge in a musical, he was magnificent in whatever he was doing.

It’s strange how the death of someone you’ve never met can get to you, but from a closer source than I ever thought I would have when I first saw him take on the role of Severus Snape, I heard it confirmed what a warm and amazing person he was in real life, not just a fact made known through the celebrity reports and tributes.

His portrayal of Snape brought something important to life for me, as in he jumped off the screen in an extension of the character I loved to hate in the books.

It was Rowling who came up with the sad tale of a life that Snape lived, but it was Alan Rickman who made it real for me. He made that sadness real and I feel that same sadness now.

Rest in peace Allan Rickman.

It will always be Alan, for me, the man who was meant to play Snape. Always and forever he will be it.

Always!

Wine’s Fine But Whisky’s Quicker, #SoCS

“Closing time – one last call for alcohol so finish your whiskey or beer. Closing time – you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.”

I like this song from the nineties. I thought it fit well, it came to mind, as soon as I finished reading, or should I say listening to an audiobook today and here is my review.

Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari

Ever hear of the saying from my title of this week’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday post?

Okay, so how many nights are bars and clubs full of people, looking for something, but just what are they looking for in those places?

It’s right up my alley. The topic of love, romance, and relationships and it is all from the hilarious comedic mind and heart of the Parks and Recreation star.

I will admit he wasn’t my favourite character on that show. I was more of a Ron Swanson fan, but since the end of the series I have watched some of his comedy specials. He is about my age and he is just trying to figure out the relationship questions facing many people of our age group.

Many of the topics he first covered on stage and in his jokes and humorous observations are what he put into his new NetFlix series, “Master of None”, a semi autobiographical snapshot (which I am in the middle of watching).

Here they now are in book form. Normally, I like to read books on my own. Occasionally though, the argument can be made to listen, especially when the book is narrated by the author himself. It brings a level of personality and humour that I wouldn’t get if I read it.

It begins with some catchy, smooth, chilling music as he introduces the book. It fits the romantic feeling he wants to bring across, until he can’t help his comedic style and starts yelling and calling us, the listeners lazy for not bothering to read on our own.

JK aside

🙂

I love this book because he discusses a lot of really interesting parts of modern romance in modern times, but he does it with little bursts of his signature sense of humour.

He tackles such topics as social media, online dating, sexting, what he terms the act of being “monogomish”, cheating, and our generation’s give-up attitude, not sticking things out and the fear that, with all the options of a wide open world, that we’re never happy and always wondering if there’s something better out there.

He uses some of his own life experiences in the dating world, focus groups and ReddIt forums, and studies and expert opinions from psychologists, anthropologists, and journalists who study love and relationships.

He even went into a retirement community and asked people from previous generations about love and marriage from their standpoint. One old guy was only there for the free doughnuts, but the rest did offer valuable insights into how they met their partners, when and why they got married, and how they feel their lives turned out.

The only way we can learn is by studying the past and by asking questions of those who have gone before us, but times do change. Okay, so sometimes the more things do change the more they remain the same.

This is both different and similar, as the years pass, but as the clock of our lives ticks on, what will we look back on at the end and regret that we didn’t do or feel?

Aziz and his team of interviewers and experts speak with people in North America, Europe, and Asia.

There are some interesting insights into how monogamy is handled in France when compared to the US. Either one going to extremes.

Women’s options were fewer and roles were measured in different ways years ago. Respect should be timeless and for everyone.

Can love really last?

Of course it can’t, not in the mad and passionate way spoken of in the book and desired by most of us.

His expert scientists share scans and, he points out there are graphs and charts in the book, but that they can’t be translated in the same way when listening to the audio version.

He talks about what I would think is obvious, but is one of the lesser obvious things from what I’ve seen: that new love is exciting and it lights up the brain just like a drug, but that this feeling can’t possibly last, nor should it. If someone chooses to continuously chase that high all their life, rather than accept life’s inevitable ups and downs, well there’s really nothing to be done to convince them that the benefits of finding one person to have as a partner and a companion could ever be more than enough.

I can’t fault social media and technology. My iPhone and the Internet are invaluable to me. Online dating websites have helped me open up and find people I never would have met otherwise. It’s all a matter of perspective.

Can these things make jealousy and deceit easier? Of course they can. Doesn’t mean these things did not exist before them. Shakespeare is proof of that.

In the book he quotes rapper Pitbull and a line in Spanish, translated to say:

“What the eyes don’t see the heart doesn’t feel.”

This is exactly the level of immaturity that exists out there, when people only care about themselves and have no consideration for anyone else.

I recently wrote about having faith, now that we’ve arrived at the Christmas season, that just because something can’t be seen with two eyes, doesn’t mean it isn’t there, happening, or could potentially hurt or harm other people.

Myself and every other blind person could tell you that many times the heart feels things, without having to see with the eyes. This just shows the many and varied beliefs, opinions, and experiences of love and romance.

This book was not a literary classic, but it was an excellent story and well told. You just can’t get the same affect without Ansari’s voice and his acting.

Has he himself found the kind of love that will flow from mad and passionate into a long term respectful companionship? Hard to say for sure, but if you enjoy audiobooks or books on love and relationships, I would recommend Modern Romance.

So, in closing…with one final piece of advice from the book:

He calls it, “acquired likability through repetition”, instead of nothing more than an “option that lives in your device”.

Okay, well it’s all often in the wording. Of course, he is simply referring to the picky way some people look for love, giving up on someone after one date, if they weren’t ready to see fireworks. Smart phones make it much too easy, he points out, to think of someone on the other end, side of a phone screen as one dimensional words in a little speech bubble, instead of a human being with feelings, hopes, and a heart.

What are your thoughts on these topics? Have you heard of monogomish? Do you think love can last? Is there any situation where cheating is acceptable? Are you an Aziz Ansari fan? Have you heard of the song I quote above?

SoCS

There you go with some music to start, a little book review, and my stream of consciousness ramblings for Linda’s weekly prompt:

http://lindaghill.com/2015/12/11/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-dec-1215/

Only one more left to go before Christmas is here.

Phasmophobia

Welcome to October.

Now that we are in the month leading up to Halloween (historically not always my favourite holiday) I have decided I would take my past issues with it and try and loosen up a little.

Every Fiction Friday leading up to the 31st I plan to write a creepy, spooky, or scary tale.

I have been thinking about this for a while, but this week a blog post from one of, what has quickly become, one of my most looked-forward-to bloggers, landed in my in-box:

5 fears and what they say about us.

This insightful young, twenty-something blogger has given me the five Halloween-themed short story prompts I have been looking for.

***

1. Ghosts. We breathe easy knowing we’re in the safety of our own home. Confined within walls, behind a deadbolt,, with 9-1-1 on speed dial. Ghosts take that security and leave us helpless. to be in the in the presence of a ghost is the all too familiar feeling of being trapped within ourselves, with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. The mere idea of being powerless is enough to break us down.

***

As you enter the house you close the heavy side door behind you with a thud. From somewhere within the house you hear a shattering noise, as if a picture has just fallen off the wall in some room on the other side.

This makes no sense. How could closing this door, barely slamming it at all, how could this cause that?

The room is silent and still, the darkness closing in and that can’t all be coincidence. Something lingers in the room, even as you leave it. It might follow or patiently await your return.

As the television seems to flicker on and off a time or two, your apprehension is growing. All these creeks and alike used to be disguised, perhaps by the simple fact that you were not alone so much. Did the distractions that have ceased only served to remind you that sanity is loosely maintained? After you are alone with only your thoughts to keep you occupied, you start to second guess your grip on your present and the reality or lack there of.

It’s silly to believe in any supernatural beings. What evidence have you really seen of such foolishness? None, that’s what. others’ abnormal little anecdotes aren’t nearly enough to convince you that your usual rational reasoning is faulty in any way.

Suddenly you think of that famous Shakespeare line:

Me thinks thou doth protest too much.

The air feels stifling in the room as you awake suddenly and with a start, a strange shiver running down your spine. That ghostly sound that you sometimes hear when you close the basement stairs behind you, going down to check the laundry and the dryer, is perhaps the thing that has disturbed your sleep tonight. Your ears seem to recognize the faint ghastliness of that reverberation.

You suddenly sense a presence close to you in the dark and a soft coolness seems to slide through your fingers, as if you hold the hand of an invisible bedmate you did not recall lying down with.

The next sign that you aren’t alone is a gentle sweep, as if a finger has reached out, without being spotted, a trick of the mind like when your brother used to tap you on the shoulder on one side, slyly while he sat on the other. Gotcha!

You jerk your hand away at first because there is no explanation that seems to satisfy you. you swipe your own cheek with the back of your own hand. Such a gentle gesture of human contact, but maybe just a dream, seeping through your seconds old consciousness.

If you could bolt from this room at this hour you would, but there is nothing else outside your window, other than more darkness. You could start, heading for somewhere where these things would lose their oddity, but you fear then you might never stop or find your way home again, doomed to wander somewhere out there, forevermore.

If there is a disturbance in the space around you you don’t know how to classify what it is, but your soul seems to freeze in mid sensation. All the synapses are firing and something makes you pull the covers up tight to your chin, as if pulling your limbs to your sides under the blankets will protect you from these unrelenting forces. Why they nag at you more and ore you can’t say.

What is this presence existing side by side with you in the house that you have all to yourself, or you used to think so anyway. Now you can’t get rid of it, whatever you want to call it. You are never alone, but doomed to always be alone all at once.

***

Thank you

Young and Twenty,

for your thought-provoking blog and I will be back next Friday, to tackle those creepy crawly critters that make so many of us jump back in fear.

What about you? Do you believe in ghosts? Have you experienced strange and unexplained incidences at any point?

Day in the Museum: Part One, Four Senses

I spent this past Sunday afternoon surrounded by a lot of old things and one incredibly old book. This week I will break up my afternoon at the Stratford Perth Museum into three separate blog posts: today, Wednesday, and Friday.

The Stratford Perth Museum sits on seven acres, its present location, in a big old brick house. It is out of the town of Stratford a ways now, for the first time, when it moved away from the Stratford Festival and the flurry of excitement, to a more peaceful spot. In 2008 they felt they needed more space and made the move and the transition.

I had never heard of this museum, but I suppose I hadn’t really thought about it. I don’t spend as much time in museums as I wish I did. I think most people think of the town of Stratford for the Festival theatre, but there is a rich culture and history in the area. It felt like one however, on entering, but I tend to have my idiosyncrasies with these institutions.

I enter a world of previously owned or used things. I love the history and the mystery of these items I find myself surrounded by, but I am without the ability to appreciate these collections with my eyes. It is my other four senses (excluding taste because it really doesn’t apply here) that I’m left with.

Immediately I realize I probably won’t be able to touch these precious and often times delicate pieces. I assume, rightly from the start, that this Shakespeare folio will not be the exception. The woman who greets us confirms that for me, no doubt spotting the white cane in my hand.

I want to stress that I love history and to imagine where something has been and who may have owned or handled it in the past. I can’t explain my strange discomfort with old things, starting in my childhood and with my fear of pioneer villages on school trips.

I have been to Europe and I swore I wouldn’t miss out on anything truly memorable while there just because I was afraid of…I don’t know what (an experience for another day’s post.)

I do not see as I walk through the museum and these buildings are like libraries, in that there is a sense of hush on the place. That only leaves one more sense: smell.

Smell is such a strange thing to relay to others through words, but it fills me with so much sense memory.

Smell can be nostalgic and it can be distasteful. It can be a distraction for me, totally taking me out of the moment and away from what history and treasures I find myself surrounded by.

Our special exhibit priced tickets give us access to the entire museum and my sister locates things I could actually get a feel for by touching. I spent my time in the Shakespeare exhibit and, unable to feel anything, (I was left with a museum headache) trying to grasp in my mind and imagination, what others were seeing with their eyes.

Festival Treasures: Creating the Wild Kingdom

“The Stratford Perth Museum, in conjunction with the Stratford Festival, presents a special exhibition called Festival Treasures: Creating the Wild Kingdom, showcasing unique pieces from the festival archives.”

It’s here my sister tries to show me the props and masks for view. I feel the strange materials and plastics and she knows not to place my hand on anything made of fur. I have a reactionary reflex alive and well that takes control of my hand, but I tell myself silently to take it easy and not pull away so fast. I’m sure it still shows in my behaviour.

“This fun-filled safari explores inventive ways of bringing birds and beasts to the stage. It will feature costumes, props, design sketches, audiovisual material, documents and photographs to illustrate the process of creating pieces for festival productions of The Birds, Peter Pan, Alice Through the Looking Glass, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and many others.”

I am curious about how these items have all remained in such good conditions for so many decades, through countless performances and I speak to an Archiveist Assistant:

I work in the festival archives. I’ve worked for a long time in the festival but I only recently went to the archives, I was a stage manager before that. Stratford Festival has the largest theatrical archive in the world, devoted to one theatre.

I ask her about how these things have managed to survive for fifty or so years:

Purpose-built facility…climate-controlled atmosphere. Archival friendly tissue paper and acid-free boxes. It’s kept at the right humidity, that’s why it’s so cold in here.

How does this work with keeping all these items from past performances?

We have the advantage of having props and costumes. Most theatrical archives don’t have the room or the money.

We have all the asses heads from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the strawberry handkerchief from Othello, the casket from Merchant of Venice

We recently celebrated the sixty-second anniversary. Back in fifty-three we’re lucky there were people that were far-sighted enough to keep things, especially because they weren’t sure there was going to be a fifty-four season or a fifty-five season, let alone two-thousand-fourteen.
We started in a tent.

How much is kept?

We take two costumes and the main props from all the productions each year.

I ask her specifically about something from Shakespeare’s time period and how that survives:

Bugs, moisture, heat…those are your biggest problems.

For four hundred years it was okay in somebody’s house. In order for it to last that long…biggest thing is moisture and sunlight…just to keep things from fading. That’s why you keep the lights down. It’s quite extraordinary.

So what is one way costumes and props are preserved over the years, in the festival?

For things like sweat and body odour…the best thing is vodka. You spray the costumes with it.

All the blood, sweat, and tears that go into that…all those performances.

This museum was once someone’s home and is now an old house, storing old things. It now houses so much from a past long gone. In Shakespeare’s case, long long gone.

Next time I will write about the reason I went to the museum in the first place: Shakespeare’s First Folio.