Community with those who sense that bhakti yoga is: Strong Spirit, Calm Mind, Love, and the release of what no longer serves you. Landscape photo is from a special town on the coast of Sicily.
When people in the East hear young children speaking of past lives, this is not usual. In other societies where reincarnation is an expectation, it is quite different--and this certainly changes the case. The story at the end of Mary is particularly touching.
The story of the Dalai Lama and Elijah/Tenzin is interesting. Again, the story of Mary/Jenny is terrifying/touching:
I walked out of theFrida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum today thinking Frida Kahlo was beyond what I could conceive of as an amazing woman. I was not the only one who was blown away. Everyone seemed immersed in the life that the artifacts, photographs, and clothing seemed to resurrect before us. Everyone seemed moved and enthralled at this very personal exhibit of Frida Kahlo. People in the crowds were visibly focused on perceiving her life and expression, a task rendered easier thanks to the multimedia exhibit. There were posts reminding the viewer throughout the exhibit that Frida fashioned herself in many ways: for example, through the colors and woven fabrics inspired by the indigenous people of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, who were greatly revered by artists like Diego and Frida, as well as the deep responsibility the artist felt towards the spirit of revolution in her country. This was due to a fierce passion for what Communism represented, at the time, and to Mexico especially.
Take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are a bourbon biscuit.
Being in Brooklyn close to the Statue de la Liberté (as the French who gifted it to the US would say), I found it poignant to see her drawing of the statue, where, in place of the torch are an atomic bomb and money bag, labeled as such in Spanish by Frida’s hand. Nearby, a list of names like Hitler and the Pope, people who she alluded to with the rising fascist use of power by the US following WWII. Education and views on politics united her and Diego and even introduced them.
The most important part of the body is the brain.
Of my face, I like the eyebrows and eyes.
The exhibit also highlighted how she constructed her identity along the gender blur, something quite significant in her time, via the ever-present cigarette (as a liberated woman), her facial hair and face that she said are those of a man, and clothes at times. Her strength, which I heard female spectators around me commenting on, was everywhere demonstrated: in her writing, her education, her painting, her passion, her colors, and her disability. One section of the exhibit was called “Disability and Creativity” and you could see how her boots were altered to accommodate her slightly shorter leg: fashionable, practical, colorful and survivalist. The last room was called “Art and Dress,” featuring her amazing ensembles that she bought from indigenous Mexican vendors. (She never bartered, one vendor said.) For an amazing virtual peek at this exhibit visit this special site on Frida Khalo's work.
Pain, pleasure and death are no more than a process for existence.
The revolutionary struggle in this process is a doorway open to intelligence.
Frida with Granzino, 1939
Photo by Nickolas Muray
Born Magdalena Frida Carmen Kahlo y Calderón in the "Casa Azul" just south of Mexico City, Frida (1907-1954) chose to use the name given to her by her German immigrant father, though she identifies through clothing and in other ways with her mother’s indigenous people (her mother was half-Spanish and half-indigenous Mexican). There were some outstanding qualities to these clothes, one of which was the fact that they hid Frida’s leg that had deteriorated from the polio she contracted as a child, as well as the medical corsets she would wear to help support her deteriorating spine. The femininity seems to exude from her conscious and considered self-fashioning, and she was highly aware when she came to Gringolandia, as she nicknamed the US, that the gringos were dropping their jaws at her Tehuana dress and wanting to paint her.
The first city she came to in the US was San Francisco and she found its Chinatown particularly vibrant. She also loved New York city, especially Harlem. Detroit not so much, but the exhibit mentions that following her time in Detroit, where her husband was painting the industrial panels (there is a beautiful video of her sketching to herself and then by him as he paints the mural), her artistic expression grew remarkably. Later in the exhibit, we see a beautiful drawing of a woman whose fetus is there outside her body…. It represents her miscarriage as tears visibly go all down one of her legs at the same time that a third arm comes out of the tear-stricken Frida--and it is holding a painter’s palette. A mention is made that she suffered a complicated miscarriage in Detroit, and this reinforces the notion of her delving deeper into self-expression through art to help with her suffering---especially when you take a good look at the drawing below. Because her body had been pierced in the bus accident when she was age 19 (and one of the very few girls in the school; she was studying to be a doctor) from one side to the other, which left much shattered. Forever crippled in this way, she suffered through miscarriages—and expressed her grief in a rare way (rather than letting silence engulf it all).
I paint flowers so they will not die.
She was held in traction in bed often, her head in straps, the doctors thinking taking the weight of the head off the spine may help with her pain. She painted from her bed where she had to pass much of her time. She endured more than thirty surgeries and many treatments that did not work. There is no painting of the accident that nearly killed her and left her disabled, but there is a drawing, a photo of which was at the exhibit.
My painting carries with it the message of pain.
In a stroke of beautiful symbolism, a man was traveling alongside Frida on the nearly fatal bus ride carrying gold leaf foil to bring to a cathedral, if I recall, and when the accident occurred gold flakes went all over Frida.
Frida's prosthetic leg,
following her amputation
later in her life (mid-1950s)
I love you more than my own skin.
No matter that he was a womanizer and known as such; I cannot believe that Diego her husband had an affair with her sister, Cristina. They divorced over that but remarried a year later. She seemed so very in love and affectionate with him. She said in her last years that she had the ignorance to think he needed her, as he had told her so and she believed him, but she says that she is suffering so.
Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves,
everything revolves, everything flies and goes away.
Of the shawls, amazing green necklaces and colorful skirts and shirts, I am particularly struck by the medical corsets for her body. They were casts, and apparently for one body cast she was hung by her head alone for a couple hours and then stood on tiptoes for over an hour to make it. I try to imagine this but cannot. On one she has painted the Communist hammer and sickle across the chest and a beautiful fetus in the stomach area. In the next corset however, there is the symbolic hammer and sickle but there is a four to five-inch hole cut in the belly area, perhaps practical in nature, and perhaps also signifying the loss of her child(ren).
Frida painting her medical corset
These were two of the corsets she wore, and thus the utter feel, intimacy, and significance of this exhibit are at a maximum. In fact, her husband Diego would order that her belongings be locked up in her Blue House for decades beyond her death. According to this article, there were 22.105 documentos, 5.387 fotografías, 168 trajes, 11 corsés, 212 dibujos de Diego, 102 de Frida, 3.874 revistas y publicaciones, y 2.170 libros in the room.
This is the first time the exhibit has been shown in the US (it was unearthed in 2004), and it is a sold-out exhibit.
They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t.
I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.
Staring at photographs and videos of her face, I am willingly taken by her, marveling at how beautiful and serious and thoughtful she was. Seeing the videos of the Tehuana girls wearing the resplandorheaddresses, I was taken by the special aspect of making the young women’s faces like flowers. I enjoyed seeing the couple that Diego and she were as they worked quietly side by side at the industrial panel and their affection in other media clips.
Here is a modern clip on Tehuana women and their dress--made for a tourism outlet (not in the exhibit) and thus not nearly as interesting as the black-and-white video from the exhibit, but still an interesting glimpse of the resplandor:
"Self-Portrait as a Tehuana" (1943)
As for her clothing, I couldn’t help but visualize her alive and beautiful in them, having her being in her world in such uniqueness through dress, while also being extremely practical for her disabled and uncomfortable physical condition. This exhibit revealed the Frida we know of as a Frida to know even further. She seemed to come alive through her personal objects, family photos, and journal writing. She was bored in bed, disabled, and learned to paint, her parents finding her a special easel so she could paint from bed following her accident. She would say Diego got along okay as a boy painting but that she was the big artist. Her life is inexhaustible.
You deserve the best, the very best,
because you are one of the few people in this lousy world
who are honest to themselves, and that is the only thing that really counts.
Living one’s life is so important, as I have learned during my trip to the city (and the words a chemo patient said to me in the waiting room at MSK). And also I see the deep, inner value in letting oneself be shaped by suffering—and letting the flowers come up out of the mud… this is all something Frida did so marvelously that, years after her death, some of her magic is still trickling down powerfully to those who lack the color and strength and passion she had.
I was a child who went about in a world of colors…
My friends, my companions, became women slowly; I became old in instants.
"Appearances Can Be Deceiving"
Drawing by Frida Kahlo
This drawing, uncovered in the locked room in 2004, reveals how the Tehuana dress allows her to choose whether to reveal her disabilities or not. From the outside one cannot see her leg or medical corsets. "Las Apariencias Engañan."
Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light. Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing.
I think that little by little I’ll be able to solve my problems and survive.
I hope the exit is joyful. And I hope never to return.
I am deeply inspired by Frida's words (some quoted in color throughout the post) and her massive strength, talent, and perseverance. It may very well be life-changing to come in proximity to her belongings and drawings as the aura speaks volumes about strength and resolve. I am in awe of nearly every aspect of her passion & life as the true woman and true artist she was. What she did while suffering is unforgettable. Here, I am not simply speaking of how prolific she was.
How to see something that is very dark in an atmosphere that is very dark? It is almost an impossible question, but today mathematical theory revealed itself in visceral reality.
One hundred years after Einstein, humanity had our first view ever of a Black hole. A Black hole has long been "invisible" because it swallows everything, including light. Nothing can escape it due to the force of gravity, neither light nor matter. Today's images reveal the black hole at the center of Messier 87, one of the biggest Black holes known, more than 55 million light-years away.
To view it, astronomers collaborated around the world in the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) to make direct imaging of the Black hole possible, thanks to eight telescopes around the globe--in Chile, Spain, Mexico, Hawaii, Arizona, and the South Pole in Antartica. Making them interact as one earth-sized telescope required amazing collaboration of more than 200 scientists around the world, with many obstacles to overcome.
The direct visualizing of a Black hole is described as "émouvant," moving, and "presque magique" in its play of light and darkness: It reveals something very mysterious and enigmatic about the universe, as shared in a fascinating way by a astrophysicist on France Culture today.
"Singularities do exist in our universe--as Black holes."
We see almost a halo of light around the obscure hole. To my amateur eye, it almost seems so simple at first sight, that is, its first capture, but its rarity attests to the phenomenal mathematical complexity and bending of space-time that went into such a sighting. But what do I know? Scientists say it is exciting because the images match the simulations. Something once thought to be impossible (to prove) became real today. Einstein's theory of relativity was seen.
NASA image:
The excitement naturally makes one think of Stephen Hawking, who I had the joy of meeting and seeing smile as he met Jacques Derrida at the University of California, Santa Cruz. It also makes me also think of my uncle Lance, who loved Hawking's book.
What does a Black hole make you think of? The diverse network of possible responses is surely astronomical.
Like the theory of the butterfly wings, the butterfly effect, I think it had implications all around the world from a more "spiritual" perspective as well, at least for me. Life has been a battle on every side, and today, I was able to tell God a few things in a way that was a bit like a watershed. Simple things like: I need you / I want to live for my son. And thus simple it will be: gratitude, hope, and a collaborative spirit to overcome future obstacles.
The breath is so important to releasing what no longer serves you.
We live in our world of buttons, where if I press UP on the thermostat, I expect the heat to come instantaneously to warm me, but life and evolution have not categorically been instantaneous, though much has happened in an instant. We mere mortals live with the illusion that our ego is capable of producing phenomenal results, as I press the switch and a fireplace comes on, I turn a dial and the kettle begins warming water, I enter digits and hear a friend's voice, I click and receive a book in the mail. We try to use buttons resourcefully yet we neglect to think of their machinelike way of mediating our world. I didn't control time on the screen or calculate algebra or produce a moving picture with sound. The button did it all. I just pressed it.
Some could distort the use of buttons by making the hour false or the temperature extreme or the attendant too busy. Buttons can be abused. But more than that, the quarter-inch or half-centimeter press of a synthetic surface and poof, a change occurs, a door opens, a light turns on, a connection is made. Comparable to push-buttons are books, which when opened, allow our perspectives to shift along with the universe. Here, the button becomes a button, an intermediary that is not just an automatic gesture. It also becomes the fastener like the fabric button.
A button can be worn or undone, pressed or dismantled, acknowledged or jammed. It can be all of these things and it remains a button, in service to man. Only a button could reveal the power we humans have--and the extreme dependency, frailty, and futility with which we seek to control the world. We are bound by age and form, electricity and matter. What was the world like before all these buttons?
The energy we gain from the existence of buttons, may we use it to illuminate a smile or kindness around us.
There is a voice beyond the button saying it's okay, it's okay...
Because my memory is weaker than I would like, I pressed ON to video record the affection I shared with a little girl some summers ago... With a button I hoped to somehow capture the adorable cleverness of a little girl who wanted to tell me a tomato was not red (rosso) but yellow (giallo), all because she knew I'd kiss her if she did so one more time... And so buttons also have to do with the emotions and not just the drive we feel inside to do, accomplish, manipulate, build or destroy.
This post is inspired by the following images, which came from a previous post touching on Jean-Luc Godard's film, Contempt (Le Mépris). A creative and exemplary film of French New Wave, the film jumps to colored Classical statues, which stand out from the rest of the cinematography.
Brigitte Bardot in Contempt
After listening to an interesting lecture on the
interiorization of self in modernity this morning, I began to realize a bit
more the relation between the coloring of ancient Greek statues in Contempt and
the content of the film, which is the story of a production of a film on
Odysseus and Penelope which, in its reinterpretation, parallels a tragic love
between the screenwriter character in the film and his wife, played by Brigitte
Bardot. As this film (1963) evokes the ancient Greek epic poem, Homer's Odyssey,
it draws on rich archetypes, smartly modernized in the trailer to the film: woman,
man, the kiss, the crazy man, the sea, tenderness, vengeance, sufferance. Then
the stairway, tragic love, betrayal, death, love, fatal beauty. All the themes
are there for une tragique histoire d'amour.
While I wondered what the greater picture was behind the unusual coloring of ancient Greek statues in Contempt, aesthetically and symbolically speaking, I didn't give it due thought until I listened to the lecture by Dr. Larry Norman today. The talk was on the tragic passions and the interiorization of self as a mark of modernity. I began to think that perhaps the coloring of the statues is Godard's modernizing or romanticizing of the ancient Greek statues--or rather, subjects--in this film-within-a-film. In the film, there is a German director, an American producer, and a French screenwriter and cultural incongruences in between. The producer and screenwriter agree on one thing only: the theory that perhaps Odysseus left on his voyages because of his wife's infidelities.... thus obliterating the essence of marital fidelity that the Classical Penelope came to incarnate and symbolize.
Penelope (1896), Franklin Simmons
It is easy to see the evacuation of meaning as we move (through the arts) from one worldview to another, Antiquity to Modernity. Everything in the strange age (Kali yuga) we are living in begins to make a bit more sense as one contemplates the times in which we live and their difference with ancient times, revealing not least of all the way that the individual's sense of the divine, the self, and the world is carved within the context of art and literature, as these communicative forms become the fossilized reflection of the individual's sense of self and place in the world. What became palpable is something we all seem to live with in modern day--the disconnection of the self from x, y, or z.
Modernity is the period beginning at the end of the Middle Ages (mid- to late 1400s) through present-day, although some French historians have said that modernity ended with the French Revolution--and that we are now in the Late Modern period. In the French Wikipedia source, this new contemporary epoch is poignantly described as as a time in which "living people, in significant numbers, can testify to historical, political, economic, and social events and a time in which the trace of these events remains relatively alive in memories and oral transmission. This period corresponds to the atomic era and the computer era, as well as to decolonization and the Cold War." Exactly.
How was the Classical carried into the modern in arts and literature? At the start of modernity, the Renaissance (1500s) looked to Antiquity, or Classicism, for artistic and literary inspiration, as evidenced by the formalization of the Greco-Latin tradition in terms of its works of art, which also developed in interesting ways in what became known in France as the French Classical period (late 1600s). We are more concerned in this post with Romanticism, a literary and artistic movement that began in Europe in the mid-1700s, where artists and writers began to free themselves of the rules of thought and form associated with classicism. This was no small break with national tradition and took several decades to take root, but in fact the movement has everything to do with the modern psyche, as Professor Norman discusses in his lecture.
Odysseus, Museo Archeologico
Nazionale Sperlonga
As Professor Larry Norman (University of Chicago) points out, the literature and arts of Antiquity privileges exteriority, taking for its subject human action fully as it is engaged in the world, which can be observed in its exemplary images from physical nature and the human body. Inversely, Romantic literature and arts privilege interiority, taking for its subject la conscience intime du sujet (the intimate consciousness of the subject), preferring the nuances of intention and feelings to the brightness or loudness of action. However nice it is to celebrate the body, this penetrates the heart. [my translation, paraphrasing]
To support his argument, he refers to a beloved French tragedy by Jean Racine, which was inspired by the classical Phaedra of Euripides. Norman makes an excellent point: While in the Classical Greek tragedy, Phaedra is plagued by an outside force and divinity, Venus, in Racine's French version of Phèdre (1677), the torment stems more from her own psychological makeup and her awareness of the unstoppable tragic therein.
When I think of Racine's Phèdre, I think of the complexity of her psychological portrait and of her own self-condemnation, as she is hyper-aware of her psychology and how it imprisons her: she was pre-written by the infamous history of her mother, Pasiphaé, and the minotaur, as well as the scandals of her father, Minos. As Racine brilliantly indicates in his Préface, no one condemns Phèdre's criminal passion more than she: she is neither totally guilty nor totally innocent. Witness Phèdre’s declaration of love to her stepson, “J’aime / Ne pense pas qu’au moment que je t’aime, / Innocente à mes yeux je m’approuve moi-même” (v. 673-74) / "I love / Do not think in the moment that I love you that, innocent in my own eyes, I approve of myself." Racine is highly adept at handling the complexity of human emotions. Moreover, it is important to know why Racine's Phèdre loves her proudly chaste stepson: he is the purer version of her adulterous husband, Theseus.
In the first image, we see where the Phaedra of Antiquity is afflicted by incestuous love from an external source, the goddess of eros. In the second image, the modern Phèdre of Romanticism languishes in her own psychological world of demise.
In the Classical tragedy, Phaedra is plagued by a winged Eros (350-340 B.C.)
Phèdre (1880), Alexandre Cabanel's romantic rendition
of the 1677 version of the tragedy, where the torment comes from within
To return to Professor Norman and the broader strokes of Antiquity and Modernity that he sketches, he makes a very interesting claim: that the aesthetic polarity between exteriority and interiority indicates an even deeper schism between two radically different world views, signaling an anthropological break between Antiquity and Modernity---which is to say how the man of Antiquity conceived of self and the divine and his place in the universe versus how the modern individual does. To draw out this contrast, he explains: "Classical art is an expression of paganism, seen as a materialist religion where divinity was perfectly incarnated in corporal form---while the Romantic connection expresses Christianity as a spiritualist religion, where the individual profoundly feels the imperfection of his terrestrial life, sees himself alienated from the divinity, tormented by this separation, and haunted by the sharp conscience of self that results" [my translation].
To my mind, this is to realize that we all suffer from modernity and to appreciate how the arts and literature reflect on this deep sense of lost-ness or twistedness of self within the contemporary era, let alone man's confusion, dismissal, or manipulation of the divine. As Norman says of the two world views: "This dualistic paradigm of history has the great advantage of [hoping] to explain all the formal differences that distinguish works of art throughout time." One can note in a stroll through any great museum of art that the Harmony between spirit and body, form and content, is first and foremost in Classical art, while the grotesque, the irregularity and the sublime of some modern works of art can be quite jarring.
While in ancient tragedy, as Norman says, "the tragic forces were from external sources like the oracles, the will of God, the values of the city, in the modern tragedy, the tragic interest lies in the psychology of the characters, in their hesitations rather than in their actions, in their evaluation of their own behavior or of the impotency of their inaction. So in Racine's Phèdre, one does not know if this tragedy, based on the original Greek tragedy, is truly Classical--or if it should be classified, despite Racine's homage to Euripides, as more romantic than classical. Any reader of this tragedy will ask themselves: Does the criminal passion of Phèdre for her stepson come from outside or from within? from Venus or from an interior impulse? Is the interest of [Racine's] tragedy in the passion--or more in the sharp consciousness that the character has of his/her passion (la conscience aigu que le personnage a de cette passion). Is it about mythology [divine play] or psychology?"
Or, as with Godard's 1963 film where the Greek statues are colored and the screenwriter and producer (within the film) want to empty Penelope of her reputed faithfulness: Are the interior forces exteriorized, while the interior is simply emptied out to the point of lost-ness? Thus the post World War themes such as alienation, irony, absurdity. And in all of this, where are we now? These questions can be terrifying if taken seriously, and that is precisely what theatre, particularly tragedy, helps us to see (see Antonin Artaud's modern work on the theatre of the absurd). Is the human situation of the Late Modern period one of radical absurdity, devoid of purpose, as philosophers like Albert Camus intimated during WW2 with Le mythe de Sisyphe (1942)? As Walter Benjamin wrote regarding the trauma of the first world war and the impact on storytelling it had, "Was it not noticeable after the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent - not richer, but poorer in communicable experience?"
I was always struck by the alienation of self from language and its remarkable quality in Racine's 1677 spin on the ancient Greek tragedy. In many ways, Racine's Classical tragedy is a very postmodern one. To speak is to stumble upon self-awareness – or rather, to venture away from it – as Phèdre so aptly illustrates: “Insensée, où suis-je? Et qu’ai-je dit? / Où laissée-je égarer mes vœux, et mon esprit?” (v. 179-80) / "Insane, where am I? And what did I say? Where did I let my vows and my spirit wander?" Whether trailing off or making a declaration, whether intimately confiding or failing to suppress and letting something slip out, the questions of how one speaks – or does not speak – provides an emotional map by which the spectator gains intimate access to the character’s fears, obsessions, and desires. These qualities seem to mark modernity at every turn.
Does any of this give cause for painting the eyes, the mouth, and the hair of ancient Greek marble statues in blue, red, or black? I cannot say. But in the film, I can say I think it works très, très bien.
A wise man's thought: In broadening one's view of time and of the world, perhaps one can hope to not be so locked into modernity.*
The exhibit also highlighted how she constructed her identity along the gender blur, something quite significant in her time, via the ever-present cigarette (as a liberated woman), her facial hair and face that she said are those of a man, and clothes at times. Her strength, which I heard female spectators around me commenting on, was everywhere demonstrated: in her writing, her education, her painting, her passion, her colors, and her disability. One section of the exhibit was called “Disability and Creativity” and you could see how her boots were altered to accommodate her slightly shorter leg: fashionable, practical, colorful and survivalist. The last room was called “Art and Dress,” featuring her amazing ensembles that she bought from indigenous Mexican vendors. (She never bartered, one vendor said.) For an amazing virtual peek at this exhibit visit this special site on Frida Khalo's work.
While I wondered what the greater picture was behind the unusual coloring of ancient Greek statues in Contempt, aesthetically and symbolically speaking, I didn't give it due thought until I listened to the lecture by Dr. Larry Norman today. The talk was on the tragic passions and the interiorization of self as a mark of modernity. I began to think that perhaps the coloring of the statues is Godard's modernizing or romanticizing of the ancient Greek statues--or rather, subjects--in this film-within-a-film. In the film, there is a German director, an American producer, and a French screenwriter and cultural incongruences in between. The producer and screenwriter agree on one thing only: the theory that perhaps Odysseus left on his voyages because of his wife's infidelities.... thus obliterating the essence of marital fidelity that the Classical Penelope came to incarnate and symbolize.
Or, as with Godard's 1963 film where the Greek statues are colored and the screenwriter and producer (within the film) want to empty Penelope of her reputed faithfulness: Are the interior forces exteriorized, while the interior is simply emptied out to the point of lost-ness? Thus the post World War themes such as alienation, irony, absurdity. And in all of this, where are we now? These questions can be terrifying if taken seriously, and that is precisely what theatre, particularly tragedy, helps us to see (see Antonin Artaud's modern work on the theatre of the absurd). Is the human situation of the Late Modern period one of radical absurdity, devoid of purpose, as philosophers like Albert Camus intimated during WW2 with Le mythe de Sisyphe (1942)? As Walter Benjamin wrote regarding the trauma of the first world war and the impact on storytelling it had, "Was it not noticeable after the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent - not richer, but poorer in communicable experience?"
I was always struck by the alienation of self from language and its remarkable quality in Racine's 1677 spin on the ancient Greek tragedy. In many ways, Racine's Classical tragedy is a very postmodern one. To speak is to stumble upon self-awareness – or rather, to venture away from it – as Phèdre so aptly illustrates: “Insensée, où suis-je? Et qu’ai-je dit? / Où laissée-je égarer mes vœux, et mon esprit?” (v. 179-80) / "Insane, where am I? And what did I say? Where did I let my vows and my spirit wander?" Whether trailing off or making a declaration, whether intimately confiding or failing to suppress and letting something slip out, the questions of how one speaks – or does not speak – provides an emotional map by which the spectator gains intimate access to the character’s fears, obsessions, and desires. These qualities seem to mark modernity at every turn.
