The Anxiety of the New

A short entry. I don't hate technology. It just makes me feel very stupid. I bought a new piece of equipment. Between the flurry of e mails thanking me, warranting me and offering me technical support I could not activate the product. I got just so far but not to the finish line. I spent hours. Why? Because I could not accept that as a college and law school graduate this stuff makes me feel like an aged parent. And I become enraged. And I wonder whether when other people call support they stutter with inexperience. And feel the tech on the other side of the line is pitying me. Even laughing. But I strive and as of this moment I shall not give up,  I shall visit the Geek Squad tomorrow.

Peter O'Toole: Farewell from a Fan

My cousin, also a great follower of the brooding Irishman with a booming voice that was Peter O'Toole, called his the look of "broken glass."  It was as if his inner life was cracking out of him, coming piece by piece from the depth of his soul.

I saw that look for the first time when I was about 8 years old when he was Lawrence of Arabia. He was Lawrence, for he inhabited the role. I was far too young to see such a film about such a complicated historical figure with such a complicated emotional life, but I could not take my eyes off that face nor could I fail to grasp the talent.

 

He was wild in his youth and well beyond, threatening his health and no doubt shortening his old age by several years. But never did he lose his great capacity to act. To watch The Lion in Winter is to be enthralled--he and his great friend Katherine Hepburn, Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitane tearing each other apart verbally and strategically. To watch him as the broke drunken actor in "My Favorite Year" watching the daughter who does not know him from afar, regret expressed in a slight but telling movement of head, and eye, was to feel something endemic to his real life being.

His crazed creative director in "The Stunt Man" is magical. He could be alternately comedic and gravely dramatic. He could do it in the same movie.

I had the good fortune to see him twice in my life. The first time was in 1987 after I had moved to California, but was back in New York for a visit. He was Professor Higgins in a Broadway production of Pygmalion, along with Sir John Mills and Amanda Plummer, alas the latter a miscast that affected the effectiveness of the production. I had been the recipient of house seats by a friend who knew of my life long admiration of Mr. O'Toole. I could see Mills and O'Toole staged banter spoken with a little spit, gleaming eyes and slight smiles, clearly friends working together. I watched outside the stage door as he signed autographs, looking deeply and unsettlingly into the eyes of the recipient of his largesse. The look of broken glass. Of a passionate, unsettled seeming man. He was at the time in some kind of suit over the custody of his only son, Lorcan, I think. The boy was with him. I sent my second fan letter to the theatre (my first was to James Stewart) a silly expectation that he'd ever get it, or have any interest in it.

It would be more than twenty years, in 2011, before I'd see him again, on this coast. It was after the 2006 film "Venus" in which he played an old actor on his literally last legs having a kind of innocently lasciviously fling with a young woman who had no idea of the man he had been. Turner Classic Movies was having its first film Festival, and O'Toole was going to be at one or two of the films, including Lawrence, that featured him, but more importantly, he was going to be interviewed before a live audience at the Henry Fonda theatre, for broadcast at a later time on the channel. If I saw nothing else at that festival, it was going to be this interview with Robert Osborne.

He was presented to the audience, accompanied at each arm. He was still tall, but frighteningly frail. He walked haltingly. He looked every bit his 79 years or so, and well more.

As Osborne explained to us our roles, he sat quietly, occasionally wiping his mouth, with great discretion, with a handerchief. I wasn't sure he was up to this interview. He was very nearly vacant. A woman to my right complained that she couldn't see him. Couldn't they position him in a manner that would give her a better view?  Osborne explained that he had to be in the view of the camera, so no. 

And then the show began, the camera was on.  Action. And O'Toole reanimated, an easy raconteur about his early life, his acting life, and his life as a happy European in Ireland.




At one point, he turned his head to look in the direction of the woman who had interposed her desire to have him face her. He commented that he wanted to be sure that he was seen on that side of the theatre.

He had been observing us all.  I couldn't tell you how delighted I was to be there, and how I wished my companion at the festival had joined me, two once children of Mount Vernon and the Bronx, transplanted to the Hollywood wonderland.

TCM did not show the piece unstil 2012. And it seems that around then, O'Toole announced his retirement from acting.

At the end of "My Favorite Year", the young writer who has been herding the unruly, emotionally wounded, actor watches him being applauded by the audience of the fifties television show. The actor, Alan Swan, dressed as a swashbuckler from one of his old movies, is smiling in acknowledgment and waving his sword. The young writer says, "This is how I'll remember him." 

This is how I'll remember Peter O'Toole.  I was 8 years old. He was 29, and beautiful.

The Martyrdoms of Each Day

In 1936 four nuns in Spain were killed for upholding their Catholic faith. Martyrdom in the classic sense. These four women, Mother Aurelia, Sister Aurora, Sister Daria and Sister Agustina were beatified in the country of their death, in October 2013. 

Today, I was one among many at St. Basil Church as the local convent of the Sister Servants of Mary, Ministers to the Sick (of whom you know I am fond from earlier entries) celebrating this last stage prior to sainthood.

One of the nuns had written that martyrdom by literally dying is not what is generally required of the average disciple, people like me.  In every day, we experience small martyrdoms. I suppose this is a corrollary of what Terese of Lisieux called the Little Way. We take the moments of our lives, good, and bad, and we who believe in our Catholicity, offer those things in union with the sacrifice on the Cross, the condition precedent to the Resurrection that restored the relationship of man and God.

It was cold in Los Angeles today. Don't laugh oh rest of the country. We are having a rare snap, which means that it gets into the forties, sometimes the thirties at night.  The church that hosted the celebration is made mostly of stone, a big cavernous place on Wilshire Boulevard. Drafty on a warm day, the cool seeped into your bones through your clothes--not unlike a New York winter's day. It wasn't just me. People were shivering and wrapping their coats around themselves and not finding relief. It was hard to pay attention. Then in the back the sounds of loud voices as the Archbishop was speaking his homily. I went back there when it became intolerable. I wasn't the first. As I opened the inner doors to see the outer doors were wide open, encouraging the cold air to swoop in, I wasn't sure I wouldn't be sharp with those on the other side.

Apparently there was to be a wedding after the celebration of the Beatas, and the bride was having pictures taken. There she was, stock still at the open door in her sleeveless wedding dress, with a photographer, whose voice was likely what had been heard, instructing her.

How could I be sharp with this group. And yet, how thoughtless it seemed they were, disregarding the occasion of another and the reverence due to the Mass.  So, I put my hand on the photographer's shoulder and said, "I know that this is a wedding, but there is a Mass inside, if you could lower your voices," or something like that.

I hadn't been the only one to come out.

I realized as I returned to my pew that not only was I distracted, but I was feeling nothing about being there. I wasn't just cold bodily but I was cold as ice emotionally, and if any emotion were to break through it would be irritation and anger. "I feel inconsolable," I thought.  Mother Theresa was inconsolable for fifty years. Media pundits concluded that this meant she did not believe in the faith she claimed to have. Those of us practicing our faith, and I emphasize the word "practice", which includes lots of falling and failing, knew that faith is an act of will not a matter of the vagaries of feeling.

I experienced it today, more than intellectually. I had to force myself to pray. And I realized that my absence of feeling was not an absence of belief, although there was a tendency to merge the two.

This was a small martyrdom. Tiny, indeed, but still something to bear with a recognition that I was not abandoned, even when it felt to be so. I have never been hugely attracted to those saints who seek martyrdom. But I think that I ought to be attracted to those who have it thrust upon them, and accept it with equanimity. May I never face that, but then it seems it should be a piece of cake to accept a little cold, a little noise, and a lack of feeling consoled.