The Limits of Control – film review

This is a stunning film of extraordinary beauty.
Opening with a quote from Rimbaud:

As I descended into impassable rivers
I felt no longer guided by the ferryman

the film grasps the viewer’s attention and never relinquishes its grip.

A hit man is commissioned to carry out an assassination in southern Spain, and the film follows his journey across Iberia through a series of stylised meetings with a cast of enigmatic contacts in the most photogenic locations. Isaach De Bankolé delivers a mesmeric central performance as the assassin, coolly pursuing his mission armed only with a selection of sharp suits.

Not overburdened with distracting dialogue or action, the viewer is able properly to concentrate on cinematography, composition and soundtrack.

Perfection. Film of the year. Essential viewing.

control vs creativity

“I have nothing against control, it’s when control exceends creativity that I get worried.”

I heard that on the radio this morning, spoken by the CEO of Conran.  He was explaining why he thought that Financial Directors should never be CEOs.  He used a nice metaphor which was that FD was like the brake in a car and the CEO the accelerator.  You wouldn’t want two brakes (or two accelerators).

I have a friend who is an accountant (and was talking about accountancy to someone else yesterday) and I recalled that she was saying something similar about accountancy and why she enjoyed it so much.  She prides herself on her logic and realism but really loves people who are creative and quite clearly sees the accountancy role as not simply limiting but also supporting creativity.  For someone like me who hates constraints on my creativity I have learned to value the input from people like her and people at work who bring reality to my projects.  I used to think they were dampening my ideas but I’ve come to realise that actually they make them possible albeit sometimes in a reduced way.  But they happen rather than remain fabulous ideas in my own head or conversations with colleagues.

It also put in mind of the the wonderful film MrP and went to in December – Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control.  I await his review with excited anticipation

[hint]

apologies

Why do we apologise?  Is it to make things better for us or for the person we have wronged?  What is made better?

I started wondering about this a couple of days ago after someone let me down on an arrangement to meet up.  It wasn’t a date, it was just a drink after work, but it had been a definite arrangement made by telephone 5 days previously.  The other person had double-booked, not realised they had a prior commitment, a commitment which they had incorrectly remembered as taking place the week after.  Presumably at some point he’d looked in his diary and seen it was last week and not this.  Easily done.  Thing is I only found out because we accidentally bumped into each other a couple of hours before we were due to meet up at which point he let me know he couldn’t make the drink.  He’d clearly forgotten our arrangement.

Apologising is an interesting human invention.  I have no idea of its history and any first records of its inception.  It’s clever, the idea that if you have ‘wronged’ someone you should express your regret and be forgiven.  I suppose it’s pretty easy to see a link to Christianity here.  Sin, repentance, forgiveness.  Perhaps that is it’s origin.  In Buddhism you try not to harm others but when you do, it’s karma – consequences of actions which are played out in your lives or others.  I’m not sure if there is that possibility of redemption (see that’s a Christian idea again, trading in sin for forgiveness).  I know the Nichirin Shoshu buddhists say that by chanting you convert your karma – perhaps that’s why it’s popular in the West, because it feeds into a cultural need for forgiveness ingrained by the Christian philosophy which permeates our society.

I personally feel apologies are important.  I’ve always made my children apologise when they have transgressed in some way but I’m not sure I’ve ever really examined why I feel so strongly about it.  I know that for me, it was important for them to feel forgiven because my childhood was a constant experience of wrong building on wrong till the only logical consequence was my own terrible deficiency and inadequacy.  I was punished, but never forgiven.  My wrongs, some within my control and some without, like my inability to sleep as a baby, were brought out for airing as fodder for my mother’s storytelling again and again in my presence.  These narratives defined me as the difficult, bad, contrary child, hopelessly flawed and constantly in need of correction, about whom nice people should be warned.  I saw the process of apology and forgiveness as the antidote to that with my children.  You do something wrong, you take responsibility and apologise, you are forgiven, that’s it.  The person is undamaged, the action dealt with.

I can see that is very similar to what people must experience from Christianity and why people feel ‘made whole again’ when they encounter this process.  To be forgiven is to be given back one’s being, one’s humanity, one’s potential for being and doing good.  It’s a truly compassionate act.  There is, however an interesting power imbalance at work both in Christianity and parenting which positions the forgiver as having power over the apologiser, the power to restore the being.  That is a heavy responsibility and, I would argue, a duty.  To withold forgiveness is as wrong as to make no attempt to right that wrong.  Why is that?  Well I think it is because it damages the person and because I would suggest that one of the reasons to apologise in the first place is because you have in some way caused damage to a person and wish to undo that, therefore to withhold forgiveness is an act of revenge, of tit-for-tat justice.  You hurt me, I can hurt you by refusing forgiveness.

In Buddhism there is another perspective which is that there is no person to hurt and therefore no hurt has taken place but that is a view achieved through meditation and practice and which to us in the West, who have grown up with a strong sense of the individual, remains largely intellectual.  Perhaps through insisting on apologies we create individuals who are more likely to experience personal hurt?  I’m not sure because the reality is I’ve grown up in this culture and cannot emotionally step outside of my experience to test the alternative with any reliability.

So what about apology and forgiveness in the adult, secular world?  What is for?  We are not engaged in preserving humanity in the way we are with children.  By adulthood such damage has either been averted or done and we are not in that kind of relationship with those we encounter.  But I still expect people to apologise to me if they have wronged me and I would always apologise if I found I had done that to another.  I wonder though what it’s about – is the need to assuage one’s guilt, or the desire to keep someone’s approval?  I don’t think those are satisfactory adult values yet I think many adults apologise from this frame – and understandably so if one thinks of the paternalistic relationship between God/Jesus and sinners.

I think that the apology process for adults is about repairing and maintaining relationships.  It should be about acknowledging one’s responsibilities and duties towards another human being in order to maintain strong, healthy and open social relationships.  It’s about being able to trust someone.  It is a way of demonstrating trustworthiness.  We all mess up, that’s human animal.  But to deal with our messes responsibility is what makes us human beings.  As an adult an apology must not be about oneself because as an adult we are responsible for ourselves, we no longer look to others to define or repair ourselves.  As an adult, an apology is about repairing, redefining, co-constructing a relationship.  It is about returning a relationship to being one that can be trusted.  If you can’t trust the person, you can’t trust the relationship.

So what has to be contained in the apology to make it an adult apology?  I have some ideas, but wondered what you thought about this?

snow photos

I got up early and went for an early morning walk in undisturbed snow.

Anyone guess what this is?

snowqueen rules bwahahaha!

and that was 2009

January – I started a process of self-reflection which pretty much flavoured the whole year following my split from The Prince.

February – I met Princess Anne

March – I started writing my experimental profiles for dating sites, another version of self-reflection which was then enhanced by my discovery of my Myers Briggs type.  After that I joined a forum for INTPs and felt that I’d finally come home.

April – most of April’s posts are private – musings on my break up with The Prince which were too personal to publish for public consumption.  I did write one column which I quite like and which when I reread makes me wonder at how I managed to completely forget my insights when I met the L.I.

May – more private posts – goodness if it wasn’t for MrP’s film reviews there’d be no blog at all!

June – it’s not on the blog but my dear friend and colleague died on the 3rd.  He was and is a great loss to me.  His death had a profound effect on me at the time.  He was only 50, died of lung cancer – his funeral was planned to the tiniest detail by him and was in effect a love letter to all of us – such generosity is rare.  I turned 53 – also not on the blog.  I was away a lot wasn’t I?

July – I met the L.I. and so started a long painful journey into my relationship with relationships.  I started out so hopeful, feeling I was so strong and knew what I wanted and what I was doing … but very quickly I got into a sticky situation and while I did pick up the red flags, the fact that I so quickly blamed myself, in retrospect, is sad to behold.

August – I innocently went to visit my mother in Germany not realising that by the end of month she would be living with me and life would never be the same again.

September – oh God I can’t even bear to link the posts – it was all about the L.I. – it’s interesting reading for me because I have so many good insights but somehow can’t hold onto them or make them useful – I omit the effect of having to deal with my mother at the same time.  It was crazy, I was up and down, my mind was working overtime.  It’s about then I really started the intense reflection and self-examination – reading about people pleasing and codependency.  At the end of September, I stopped seeing the L.I.  Not a moment too soon.

October – I went to New York!!!  Now that was a wonderful week.  I can’t wait to go back!

November – The full realisation that my mother is going to be living with me for the foreseeable future hit me with the force of one tonne (that was the weight of her belongings I had shipped over …)  And I’m still processing the L.I. but thankfully I’ve discovered the wonderful NML.

December – I accept reality and start to grow up and rebuild my life.  I finally start to get clarity on my relationship patterns and then the mysterious Harold Durham posts a comment and I feel like the final piece of the jigsaw has fallen into place.

What an absolutely weird and yet strangely wonderful year it was.  I’ve always wondered at the phrase ‘It was the best of times and it was the worst of times’ but that sums 2009 up pretty well.  Lots of things happened which I didn’t blog about.  I’ve started the Reasons to be Cheerful blog to keep the positives alive.

I’ll keep up this blog too but I don’t think it’ll be quite the raw ripping apart of my inner being that it’s been this year!

happy new year!

Happy New Decade!

Well, it’s finally here – 2010.  I usually do a review of the year at this time but I don’t feel inclined to do so right now – might do it tomorrow instead.  Today I am thinking ahead to what I want to be feeling about myself.  The past couple of months have been a period of enormous inner turmoil and honest self-reflection.  It’s not too dramatic to say that I felt that my life fell apart in August when my mother came to live with me and my latest attempt at finding a relationship failed spectacularly.  The attention my mother demanded just to get her settled and her medical needs attended to, plus the trip to Jordan to clear her flat and the subsequent exhaustion I felt blew a hole into my work and actually made me wake up to how important my work actually is to me.  Miraculously I still managed to be a good mum and that part of my life goes on unimpeded.  A couple of things have really helped me.  The Baggage Reclaim blog is and continues to be a lifeline for helping me get over the L.I., The Prince and the long list of emotionally unavailable men I’ve attracted.  My Office Colleague has kept my head above water at work.  My new friend Mac has gone the extra mile over and over putting up with long self-pitying phone calls as I tried to work through the emotional turmoil of the past four months.  The books on co-dependency, people pleasing and relationships which I’ve devoured have all helped me to clarify my patterns when relating to (potential) lovers.

As is traditional I have sat down and thought about my new year’s resolutions.  Overall the thing I want most for 2010 is to LIVE MY LIFE.  What I’ve realised recently (and the post I wrote a couple of days ago was the final realisation, I think) is that I have not been fully engaged in my life, in my own life.  I’ve lived life as a reaction to other people and their expectations of me or my expectations, hopes and fantasies about others.  My life has, in some very real ways, been on hold.  Over on Baggage Reclaim we are often exhorted to focus on making ourselves happy rather than relying on others.  I was shocked to realise how out of touch I was with knowing what makes me happy or making time to make myself happy.  That’s partly down to having children, of course, but mostly to do with my codependency tendency (I must write a poem with that title one day!)  And it’s not just about being happy, it’s about prioritising one’s own life and goals and saying, this is important to me, this is my life and it is important. For too long I have allowed my life to be relegated to a less important place in favour of others.  Make no mistake, I have allowed this to happen.  I have given up time to do things I want to do in order to be with a man.  I have given up time to do things I need to do through obsessing about a man.  I have given up time to do the things I want and need to do through wallowing in upset about the things people have done to me in the near and distant past.  I’ve felt justified in that upset – trying to prove something but at such a ridiculous cost to my own happiness and wellbeing.

In the midst of all of this if I actually stop and look at my life, I am, as Howard Harold Durham said, ‘a unique and amazing person’.  Harold said that a chapter I wrote in a book was ‘life changing’ and I was completely freaked out for a brief moment because I realised that Harold knew who I am in my work life.  And he was pleased (pleased!!!) to find out that I am a ‘human’ as well as a successful professional.  And that was a life-changing comment for me because I had always believed that I wasn’t as good as my colleagues because I was still a mess in my personal life, that I was in some ways a fake.  But in that moment I realised that despite what goes on inside my head and my emotions, I still manage to be useful to others, to contribute to wider society and to produce some quality work.  And I manage to stumble through managing a household, I look after my dependents and somehow or other I still have friends!

After all that preamble, I’m now going to share my resolutions with you:

In 2010 I want to feel:

capable, contained, proud of myself, grounded, comfortable in my own skin, creative, engaged, focused and stable.

I resolve to learn to delay gratification so I can prioritise the things I need and want to do over short-term pleasure or procrastination.

Work

• I will use my done/to do book every day
• I will spend one hour a week writing an article (minimum)
• I will read more research/work books

Mind

• I will meditate every day for at least 15 minutes
• I will let go of thoughts about my past, the anger, hurt and bitterness
• I will keep up to date with current affairs

Body

• I will keep exercising
• I will keep eating sensibly
• I will dress and groom myself to a high standard

Spirit

• I will keep up with my friends
• I will start a Reasons to be Cheerful blog and keep it up
• I will keep my living space clean and tidy once I have cleared out and cleared up
• I will read Buddhist books
• I will continue attending the meditation group

Creativity

• I will spend some time each week doing one of my hobbies – photography, jewellery beading or sewing

puzzling

When I think about it the L.I. was so obviously a rather self-absorbed immature fantasist.  Not a bad person at all, but definitely not a grown-up sensible person.  Most definitely not the kind of person who would have been rated as ’suitable’ or ‘deserving of snowqueen’ by my friends.

I know all of this and yet I still find myself emotionally drawn to him and to wanting to get close to him. (I won’t act on it, don’t worry).   How weird is that?  I am truly puzzled about this odd response.  I know this is exactly the kind of man I keep being attracted to.  Peter Pan/idealists.  They make me feel staid, solid and boring.  Why would I want to feel like that?

I don’t want to feel like that around a man.  I would like to feel attractive, interesting and vibrant. I have a feeling that if I don’t work this puzzle out I am doomed to keep repeating this idiotic mistake till I ‘get it’.

reasons to be cheerful – 4

Yesterday I cooked perhaps the most delicious Christmas dinner ever.  Guinea fowl with an amazing sauce, red cabbage, sprouts, carrots, and fabulous roast potatoes – in fact my mother announced ‘These are the best roast potatoes I’ve ever eaten’, halfway through the meal.

Allowing myself to be miserable, without guilt, without feeling that I have no right to be miserable, has allowed me also to be happy when I’m happy.  Not telling lies allows one to feel the truth.  Who’d have thought?

I get to spend most of Christmas Day on my own in my house for the first time in four and a half months.  It’s a wonderful feeling.  I watched Angel-A which was strangely apposite to my situation.  MrP’s review is correct, a bleaker ending would have given it more substance, but as it was it did seem a rather wonderful alternative Christmas movie to the usual sentimental dross on offer.

I am reading a really good novel but Jonathan Safran Foer called Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.  It’s the first novel I’ve read for ages and it’s nice to be enjoying it.

I had a fantastic pre-Christmas day out in London with my lovely daughters and their friends.  Despite the fact that the trains were cancelled and the drive there led to fears about driving back in freezing conditions they didn’t materialise and after a near perfect day, the drive back was ridiculously easy.  Even seeing St Trinian’s 2 didn’t dampen my mood – actually it was a lot of fun.

I don’t have to go back to work till the 4th January.

Two of my friends came round yesterday, one of them dressed up as a superhero.

How can one be miserable with friends like this?

I think 2010 is going to be alright.

shattering illusions

My Young Friend introduced me to a marvellous site called Someone Once Told Me and today I found this rather wonderful  picture which perfectly summed up my current dilemma:

Ever since coming back from Jordan I have been in a near constant battle with myself.  I am two rizla papers away from sinking into depression but determined not to succumb.  I’m afraid.  A lot of the time I find myself crying.  I have waves of hopelessness which give way to waves of resentment and finally I fall into pits of despair from which I drag myself out with the scruff of my neck.

When I was a child; lonely, afraid, terrorised, trapped and tortured, I read a lot of books and succumbed to the romantic notion that One Day My Prince Will Come and rescue me from the castle of despair.  All I wanted was another human being to affirm my worth, to confirm my reality.  Childline wasn’t invented then and I literally had no one on my side I could trust.  So, as a child, I longed for that person and my child’s logic reasoned that in life one either had parents who did that or the other alternative which seemed to be available was The Prince – the boyfriend, the life partner, the husband etc.  In many ways I have moved on from that childish view but increasingly I have had to admit that in some ways I haven’t.

My inner life is always a series of binaries.  On one hand I am incredibly resilient, independent and self-determined – on the other, I long desperately for someone to take control, to rescue me, to take responsibility for my life instead of me.  I am either happy, positive, forward-looking and excited about life – or I am miserable, negative, ruminating about the past and full of despair about the future.  For many years with my mother on the other side of the world, I’ve managed to keep the negative side in check, overridden by my ongoing quest to grow up into a mature, successful adult capable of a mutually sustaining relationship.  I had the illusion of ‘progress’ – I really thought I had changed, developed into the person I wanted to be.  This whole blog was started to provide evidence of that change.

The last four months have shattered that illusion.  I’m not quite back to square one, but I don’t feel that far off.  I feel ashamed to admit that I still long for The Prince to come and rescue me.  I still can’t hold on to my own self-worth, can’t generate a feeling of self-esteem without input from others.  With my mother in my house, the whole project has become meaningless as I am confronted daily with the same feelings I felt as a child.  Invisibility, being second class, not being as important as others, only being there to look after other people’s emotional and physical needs, without rights, my needs unimportant, unmet, and forgotten, hopelessness, helplessness.  Like a child all I know to do to respond to this assault is to cry and shut myself down a little more each day.  I talk to my friends as honestly as possible but I don’t want to turn into an object of pity or someone to be avoided because all I do is complain or because I’m miserable company.  My mother has become a magnifying glass for my misery and neurosis.

I am at the bottom of a big pit and I am stuck between two binaries.  I know I am the only person who can get myself out of this pit and yet what I want is for someone to come along and get me out of the pit.  I want to be rescued from the Tower by the Prince because that I what I always believed would eventually happen.  It’s an absolutely fundamental core belief of mine.  I think this is the first time I’ve ever realised this quite so clearly.  Rationally I’ve known this is childish nonsense for years, but there’s been a disconnection between that rational knowledge and my true belief.  I didn’t want to give up that dream because it was the one thing that sustained me throughout my childhood – it was my hope.  It was the thread which drew me into my future.  It was my primary goal in life, the mark of success, the sign that I had finally transcended my childhood and broken free of my parents’ curse.

This is truly shocking because what it means in reality is that my entire self-worth and self-esteem and strength is based on achieving something which is dependent on another person.  And even more shocking is the effect that it has on the rest of my life.  NOTHING ELSE MATTERS AS MUCH.  Emotionally I get virtually no lasting pleasure from my achievements.  My successes at work, my creative output, my house, and while it’s not quite so extreme, I know that I don’t even connect to my children’s successes with the depth I should.  I get compliments all the time about what a wonderful person I am, how what I do at work is so marvellous, how much I give other people and it’s all nearly meaningless – it falls into the big black hole at the centre of my being and gets shredded and all I have is a lingering flavour rather than the full experience.  I hide all of this from people because it’s so shameful to admit that I’m just a silly little girl living in a fantasy world where my life is on hold until The Prince shows up.  But the other thing is – it worked for my mother!  Her story is that she was ‘rescued’ by my father.  Their story is the archtypal romance.  Love at first sight.  She has a box of his love letters.  I always thought it would happen to me.

So now I’m in this terrible quandary where I know that to move on and heal I have to give up my dream but if I do I have nothing to live for because I don’t know anything else yet.  I don’t know how to create real meaning in my life.  And if I give up my dream then all I am left with is being a middle aged woman who has her aged mother living with her, whose children can’t wait to leave home now and who is probably going to be single for the rest of her life.   I have no goals.  I don’t know how to get pleasure from my achievements.  Nothing means anything if there isn’t someone to share it with.

The only tiny shred of hope I have at the moment is in that picture.  ‘The life I have waiting for me’ is dependent on two things.  One – finally, finally leaving behind my past and two – creating meaningful goals so that the life I have waiting for me is actually one I want to live.  Right this minute, I truly do not know how to do that but one thing I do know about myself is that I am resilient, determined and stubborn.  In the absence of hope, the only thing I can hold on to is faith in myself.