The Portrait of Jennie

The Portrait of Jennie is a black and white movie made in 1948 that I saw recently. It is about an artist finding his inspiration for his work through an imaginary love in his life. The voice-over goes "the winter of the artist is not the cold in the wind but the cold in the indifference of the people towards the beauty around them". Then there is a tag-line by an art dealer "... an artist must find something he really cares about...". The movie is about the soul of an artist and the struggles he has to go through to create the divine spark in him.

The movie has some interesting characters Mrs. Spinney an old lady who trades with portraits and sees in Eben her onetime beau, the painter Eben Adams who struggles to find his spark, follow his soul and make a living at the same time, the mechanic Guz who admires Eben and tries to give some pragmatic help. And of course there is Jennie herself played by the great Jennifer Jones who is an actress I like the most. She is awesome when she plays the role of a poignant naive girl who has in her demeanor something deeply mysterious about her. She plays a very similar role in the movie the Song of Bernadette.

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In this movie she appears as the ghost of a dead girl whom Eben Adams falls in love with, completely enamored in her naivety and the timeless mystery that shrouds her. The first time he meets her she is a little girl out alone in the dark and she sings in the most captivating poignant voice "Where I come from nobody knows and where I am going everything goes... The wind blows, the sea flows nobody knows... and where I am going nobody knows" no matter how many times I see this, I feel like I am seeing it for the first time. It is just so full of simplicity, sadness and mystery.

The little girl asks him if he would wait for her to grow up so that she can marry him and then she runs off leaving him wondering how funny the little girl was. He goes home and draws her portrait as a little girl. He captures the melancholy and mystery about the little girl. Mrs. Spinney is impressed.

Now, Eben meets the girl again suddenly she had grown too quickly. They talk and then she goes off only to come back a few days later much grown, grown enough to be married. He draws a portrait of hers and falls in love with her. She goes off again, now he decides to track her and realizes that she had been dead for many years. He goes searching for the place that she got drowned to seek and find himself there as he was lost without her, his inspiration was gone.

The portrait that he does of her is the "Portrait of Jennie". Mr. Mathews an art dealer comments that it was a stroke of a genius where the essence of a woman had been captured. The essence of a woman says Mr. Mathews is her mystery and timelessness. When Eben and Jennie part for the last time, Jennie tells Eben that his portrait of hers should hang in a Museum which many other girls would come to see her and so it was

In the beginning of the movie, when a disgruntled Ebens tries to sell his passionless paintings to Mrs. Spinney, she tells him "... Andrea Del Sarto drew a perfect hand and Rafael drew a formless claw, Andrea Del Sarto had everything and nothing but Rafael loved his work... poor Andrea Del Sarto (didn't) ..." then she continues "there isn't a drop of love in any of these (paintings of yours)... an artist must have something he 'deeply' cares about" and then buys from him a painting worth less than $2 for $13. When Mr. Mathews questions her as to why she did it, she says that it was not because of what the picture was worth but because of what Eben Adams was worth. In spite of his loveless creation she was able to see something in him that could be unlocked by love and so it was. She tires her best to help him.

Eben has another helper, a mechanic friend Guz who is a kind of a pragmatic philosopher, though that is more of an oxymoron, who empathizes with Eben saying things like, "if there is star-dust in your head, there is a jumble in your soul" and in a way understands and respects the kind of agony Ebens undergoes. Guz gets him a contract to paint and make money, Ebens completes it and gets more fame, a heavier pocket and an empty soul. Guz realizes that he cannot help Ebens much.

There is only one person who can uncork Ebens and that is Jennie or rather the timeless love of Jennie. The movie is a depiction of timeless love in which the pair defy time and space. Unsure of what is to happen of their love, Ebens says 'the greatest distance I fear now is the distance between today and tomorrow'. It is this ageless romance that kindles in him the flame which would capture that mystery and timelessness of the 'Portrait of Jennie'.

I LOST and realized it takes courage and confidence to loose

In the debate competition in our company, my team reached semi-finals but couldn't reach the finals. We lost today. I seldom loose debates, debates are my life-line. I felt the judges were not really fair. I almost laughed aloud when one of the judges said that I was speaking too emotionally and that that was a negative for debates. I couldn't understand how he thought that I was an emotional speaker, I did not cry neither did I make an attempt to narrate something so poignant so as to make anyone's eyes wet. I was not emotional, but I was passionate, the judge unfortunately couldn't differentiate between someone making an emotional speech and someone making a passionate speech. A few folks came and told me that the judgement ought to have been in our favour.

Nevertheless, my team lost. I lost. It was a shock to me, because I never thought I would loose this debate. There haven't been many things in my life where I really wanted to win but lost. In this debate competition I really wanted to win the finals. I was too passionate about it. I believed I could do that. And the loss in semi-finals, after what I thought was one of the best debates, having to defend the British idea of Monarchy, came in as a rude shock to me.

I was there thinking...

It was then I realized that it takes a lot more courage and confidence to loose in something that one yearnestly wants to win. The courage and confidence to accept oneself even after having failed. The courage and confidence to look at peole and say 'Yes I lost, but still I am looking you in the eye. Yes, I took a punch, but still I stand ready for the next.'

Just as I was thinking about this a note sent by our HR person in charge of sending out reports about debates made a special mention of our team with the note "Every loss makes the bone as flint, the gristle into muscle and man invincible" made me glader.

In spite of the fact that I am sad that I lost what I passionately wanted to win, I am somehow glad that I 'experienced' defeat. Somehow through this loss I as a person am more invincible than I was before in that I can loose something I most yearnestly want to win and still smile :) I thank God for this experience.

Man 'blinks' at his Happiness

At a time when all stocks are falling in the US because of the recession induced by the sub-prime fiasco that is getting the US economy by the balls there is one stock that has risen 40% year on year . That is the stock of Netflix, the postal movie rental service.

As people keep loosing jobs, seeing their retirement saving erode, experiencing foreclosure of their homes and their net-worth going down, they still want to keep doing more of one thing which is watching more movies. This again proves the cliché that Hollywood is recession proof.

Here is depicted a need for man to escape reality into a world of fantasy. Why does man want to make this irrational jump? After all he will only live in the real world, he knows fantasy is vanity. After a two hour fantasy ride, he has to come back to the real world and face it brutality.

Of course, generally speaking, movies have the artistic and the entertainment appeal to many folks depending on their (finer) tastes. But the reason for people wanting to escape into fantasy at such times as this belies something more fundamental about human nature and that is man's yearning for freedom to be happy.

As man finds himself more and more constrained and determined by the happenings around him, he seeks a world, fantasy as it may be which will cater to his sense of freedom to be happy - freedom from having to think and deal with the depressing reality around him, the freedom to plug into the fantasy world and feel as happy as one needs to feel.

There is nothing wrong in employing the creative abilities of human kind to pep up ones spirit. But when this becomes an obsession and an escape route from reality, it would result in a kind of imbalance which would have disastrous effects on human kind’s ability to live a real life. The distinction between the real and the unreal blurs. Even as we analyze our lives there is an eerie feeling that life is getting less and less real.

When Nietzsche said ‘modern man would invent happiness… and then he blinks’, in a sense he foresaw this state of man in which man invents happiness in his fantasy world and then he looses grip with his real life and then once life is does away with all that signifies the real, he ‘blinks’ not knowing what he has to do with happiness anymore now that he isn’t sure what is real and what is unreal.

The Untidy (kind) Man - Perceptions Deceive

Yesterday, after evening service at St. George’s cathedral we had our first youth fellowship after even song. From Church I went as is my usual custom to Thrivanmiyur beach to sit at the edge of the beach feel the fresh breeze, gaze into the dark vast nothingness ahead teaming with live out of which is created so much activity, hear the waves crashing against the sand, smell the dampness in the air and read a book from the light of the floodlights behind me.

I was reading Eric Berne when suddenly I noticed an untidily dressed guy walk unsteadily about. His long hair was ruffled, top few buttons in his shirt were undone, his long grubby beard covered the exposed part of his torso, his lungi was folded up to expose his knees, his feet were bare. I noticed all this and thought to myself that he needed some psychiatric help. I went back to my book.

Suddenly I startled when I saw he was standing diagonally behind me and was staring at me. My mind was racing to ascertain what he was up to. Did he want to snatch my bag and run away? Or was he up to some other mischief. I was bracing myself expecting something unexpected to happen. But he was still, I concluded that he definitely needed psychiatric help and I decided not to mind him and went back to my book.

Seeing my suspicious look on him, he attempted to explain why he was standing there staring at me. His explanation astounded me. I never expected that. What I did not expect was how a man who I thought needed some psychiatric help could have been so sensitive to others needs.

I was sitting at the edge of the beach, close to the waves and reading the book, the flood lights were to my back. If someone were to walk behind me, which people often did, their shadows on my book would be a nuisance.

Now back to the explanation of this guy… He told me that he was waiting to see how he could go past me without his shadow falling on the book I was reading. He had just needed a moment to think how he was going to do that. Saying this he went past my back, I did not see his shadow and continued reading but my mind racing again this time about how wonderfully sensitive he was about my need and how I had come to very wrong inferences about him based on his untidy appearance.

Over the weeks, many well-dressed, civilized, decent folks have gone past me, not even stopping to consider if they were disturbing my reading. Of course, beach is not a place were folks normally read books. But still they didn’t give a damn about others. This guy who I thought was perhaps going to rob me was in fact trying to do as much good as was in his capacity to do for me.

If only, just like this guy, the civilized folks of the world were as considerate in doing as much good as is in their capacity to do, the world would be a better place to live in. In a way he first appeared to be a man to be loathed but that perception was deceptive, he now seems like the ideal human who ought to be emulated, in heart.

Making Previlaged the Under-previlaged.

Last weekend I was at Tirunelveli, my hometown, back to my 'home sweet home'. I did quite a lot of different things from going on a picnic to sharing the Word in a village church to watching the musical 'My Fair Lady' for prolly the tenth time.

What was special about the weekend was that we hosted four Angel's friends from Ottanchathram Mission hospital, three British girls and an American one. We went to the Manimuthar falls on Saturday and on Sunday we went to Kanyakumari (hoping) to watch the Sunrise, then we went on to the cape and then to the falls Thiruparapur. All places were memorable, sceneic and beautifully overwhelming. But off all moments there was one that was most profound and it is about that I want to revel about.

On Sunday at a Village Church, we were the cheif guests the girls sang some songs and I had to preach. The village folks were enamoured 'watching' the girls sing. After the service was over. I saw the little girl sitting in the front and it seemed to me that one of the kids wanted to talk to the white-women that had accompanied us, I told Angel about it. In the meantime, Becky the British girl went forward to talk to the kids. At once, all little girls pooled around her and then Heather, Veriety and Helen followed suit getting the kids all the more ecstatic. I was busy taking snaps of this impromptu interaction that I did not know what exactly transpired between them. I was not even sure if the kids could converse with them in English.

Yet they were wide-eyed and shaking hands with them. In their urge to entertain and impress the visitors they started to sing action songs. They even wanted the visitors to visit them at their orphnage. Most of the little girls were partial or complete orphans from an orhpnage nearby.

Just seeing and being with the white-skined girls was so special to these kids. It was amusing to me as to how these girls did not have to do anything at all to make themselves special to the kids there. Just their 'being' close was special to the little girls.

I am getting a little philosophical and more objective here. The difference between these two group of girls (the little orphaned girls and the white-women) is that one is relatively more marginalized and the other is more previlaged. Now the question is about why one is previlaged and the other is marginalized and how the dynamics of their relationship work.

With previlage comes the Christian obligation to make the marginalized feel special and previlaged by making them worthy of the time of the already previlaged. It was not without reason that God sent His Son to live among the marginalized and make them previlaged by considering them worthy of His time and efforts.

When the pastor bid us goodbye, he said that often when folks come from abroad they go to bigger city churches rather than some village church and that he was happy that we had brought them to the village chruch of his.

It was my mother's brilliant idea to club a village church service with our picnic plans. My sister and I were not really excited by the idea but then on retrospect, there was a pretty profound lesson there.

The lesson being that the ones that are previlaged by race or by birth or by intellect or by riches have in them an obligation to make the underprevilaged feel special and previlaged by making them worthy of their time and efforts. And in that we imitate one important aspect of Christ.

Gates, Giving and God

As Gates steps down from active role in Microsoft, one wonders as to what makes him give much of his wealth off to the ones that are less privileged. As we try to hypothesize and speculate on the reasons, one has to remember that his act is not without precedent. In the early part of this centaury, the then richest man in the world, Rockefeller set about the task of remaking himself into a philanthropist.

There is an amazing parallel there, folks who have built their lives on the principles of capitalism which believes in meritocracy and virtue of individual greed, once they reach the pinnacle of their achievements seek to find meaning and contentment in the diametrically opposed idea of communism which seeks to reward not by merit but by mercy.

It is worth analyzing the impetus for the change in Gates which caused him to easily transition off into being a philanthropist. Religion was not the motivating factor going by what he said in an interview.

“Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.” – Bill Gates

Unfortunately, it has never seemed to Gates that religion is not about what he can do on a Sunday morning, but rather the least of it is about what God can do on a Sunday morning.
I was reading about Gates in Fortune Magazine the expert of which is below. It is here that I got to understand where the most logical impetus, for Gates' decision had probably come from.

“And there's the poignant letter his mother wrote in 1993 to his fiancée, Melinda French, cluing her in to the Gates family credo: "From those to whom much has been given, much is expected." (Mary Gates would die the next year.) That letter, in turn, led to the self-conscious irony in the slogan he and his wife hit upon for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: All lives have equal value.” - Fortune

It is this that I seek to analyze here.

The words of a mother always have a profound effect on her children. Of all things that a mother-in-law would have wanted to tell her soon to be daughter-in-law if this had taken so much precedence, it is reasonable to assume that this noble thought should have pervaded much of the conversations between mom and son.

Even though Gates may think of religion to be inefficient, he has to accept the necessary change the premise that would make his mom's platitude sensible ‘From those to whom much has been given (by God), much is expected (by God)’. Gates may blithely jettison religion out of his life. But he cannot jettison God out of the noble thought of his mother, without making it a not so sensible affirmation existing only for the sake of the affirmation.

Someone may argue that humanism could replace God in that sentence. But to do that one has to hypothesize that human logic and reason can agree to that idea that a non-person can give and expect something in return. Such a hypothesis is too wild a speculation to be considered as a reasonablse platitude to necessiciate fullfilment. For an ideal to be made to give and to expect there ought to be a personality behind it who has the ability to give and to get. And that person is God.

Even that ideal of justice, that one should do all one can to alleviate suffering in the form of malaria or other diseases which Gates is determined to eradicate, cannot make sense unless there is Someone who gives the ideal the value of Truth. Without the value of Truth any proposition stands as an affirmation made in void. And that Someone who has the ability to make an ideal True is God.

Thus the fundamental impetus for Gates to give off much of his wealth is God. After all, religion is not just about Sunday mornings.