The view from Sirius……I was exploring the origins of this idea today (it’s actually a French phrase “point de vue de sirius”), and found that someone had helpfully linked it to this clip from the great Dead Poets’ Society (haven’t seen that film in YEARS!)
I like it. In French, this idea relates to the idea of the “vue en haut” – the perspective from on high. Voltaire’s 1752 tale, Micromegas, is often cited as the origin of the Sirius reference. In this amazing, centuries ahead of itself tale, a person from Sirius, Micromegas, visits the Earth. The idea of “le point de vue de Sirius”, refers to both that ability to stand back and take an overview, something we all need to do from time to time (and which I’ve been doing on my week’s break from work these last 7 days), and, also, that ability to experience the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Years ago I chanced across a little paperback in a secondhand book shop – the poet Stephen Spender’s “Life and the Poet” where I read his idea of the poet getting into the mindset of a traveler from Earth visiting the Moon for the first time. The view from Sirius idea encompasses that idea.
However, it’s Pierre Hadot, the French philosopher, I have to thank for explaining it in his brilliant “N’oublie pas de vivre” (“Don’t forget to live”).
Whatever its origins, I think it’s a great concept – so why not try to adopt the “view from Sirius” today, and see how things look now?
Is it just boys who are fascinated by numbers? Remember this scene from that great Scottish movie, Gregory’s Girl?
Well, you tell me….but here are some numbers I find completely fascinating.
In India, an aeon (a Day of Brahma), is 4,320,000,000 days, is followed by a Night of Brahma, which lasts another 4,320,000,000 days. That’s a total of 8,640,000,000 days.
In Iceland, there are 540 doors in Valhalla. At the end of the world 800 warriors will go through each door. 800 x 540 = 432,000.
In Babylonian mythology, there were 432,000 years between the crowning of the first Sumerian king and the Deluge.
In the Bible, between Adam and Noah’s Flood were 1656 years. The number of 7 day weeks in 1656 years is 86,400. (according to Julius Oppert, the Assyriologist)
Look at your watch. Each hour has 60 minutes, and each minute has 60 seconds. In 24 hours there are 86,400 seconds – 43,200 seconds of day, and 43,200 seconds of night (ok, not exactly, I know, it depends on season and latitude, but you can see what I mean!)
I saw this angel overlooking George Square in Glasgow…….got me thinking about angels and one of my favourite films of all time – Wim Wender’s “Wings of Desire”. If you haven’t seen it, you might have seen the US re-make which was called “City of Angels”.
What I love about this movie is how it is a celebration of the wonder of being human. It tells the story of angels watching over people in Berlin (the original movie does, anyway). One of the angels longs for the opportunity to experience what human beings can experience, and he gets his wish, falls to earth and becomes human. His wonder at the range of physical sensations, his connection to others and his longing for love are portrayed wonderfully. It’s that “emerveillement” I’ve posted about recently.
If you’ve never seen it, you’ve missed something. The original is in German but is readily available with English subtitles.
When preparing this post, I stumbled across this fanvid on youtube, where someone has set some scenes from Wings of Desire to Nick Cave’s “Into my arms”. It works.
The TV News each evening doesn’t carry many uplifting stories but tonight on channel 4 news they had a piece that grabbed me and fed my optimistic nature. It was about Filmclub. This is a project started by Director, Beeban Kidron, which introduces movies into schools throughout England. She’s had a trial running and it’s been hugely successful so it’s now being rolled out around the rest of the country.
“I think that stories and the telling of stories are the foundations of human communication and understanding. If children all over the country are watching films, asking questions and telling their stories, then the world will eventually be a better place. That’s how important I think FILMCLUB is.”
“ Films have the power to raise your gaze and raise your game and give you a ticket to pleasure and enlightenment forever more….”
YES! Well, that’s aiming high, isn’t it? How wonderful!
I use movies a LOT in my teaching (I teach mainly doctors, but also nurses, dentists, vets and other health care workers). I know that some of you (yes, mrschili, I’m talking to you!) also use movies a lot in your own teaching work. This Filmclub idea has sparked a thought for me – what if I started a Filmclub for patients in the hospital where I worked? If I was going to do that, which movies would I show? Patients are often suffering and in distress. Which movies might be catalysts to discussions which encourage healing? Any suggestions?
I love movies. I’m an addict. I think it’s my insatiable thirst for stories which hooks me. I’m not a fan of the blockbuster kind of movie that’s all special effects though. I like a movie which draws me in and absorbs me in the characters and the story. Of course, that fits with my other great addiction – books. I’m really never without a book and I’m often reading more than one book at a time.
I think movies are called movies, not just because they are “moving pictures” but because they can be so “moving” – they can stir our emotions so strongly. How do they do that? Well, here’s a slightly disturbing piece of research. Using the fMRI technique (the brain scan that shows which areas of the brain are active at any given moment) researchers observed which parts of the brain became active at particular moments in different movies and they used an interesting tool called “ISC” (Inter-subject Correlation) to see if different people had the same parts of the brain lighting up at the same moments. They picked a Hitchcock movie, “Bang! You’re Dead!”, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”, an episode of “Curb your Enthusiasm”, and an unedited video clip of a concert. The results were very different -
The Hitchcock episode evoked similar responses across all viewers in over 65 percent of the neocortex, indicating a high level of control on viewers’ minds;
High ISC was also extensive (45 percent) for “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”;
Lower ISC was recorded for “Curb Your Enthusiasm” (18 percent) and for the Washington Square Park, or unstructured reality, clip (less than 5 percent)
In other words, Hitchcock really was the master. His movie evoked the most similar responses in peoples’ brains.
“Our data suggest that achieving a tight control over viewers’ brains during a movie requires, in most cases, intentional construction of the film’s sequence through aesthetic means,” the researchers wrote. “The fact that Hitchcock was able to orchestrate the responses of so many different brain regions, turning them on and off at the same time across all viewers, may provide neuroscientific evidence for his notoriously famous ability to master and manipulate viewers’ minds. Hitchcock often liked to tell interviewers that for him ‘creation is based on an exact science of audience reactions.’ “
The researchers claim that these techniques pave the way for the development of “neurocinematic studies” – oh my!
I’m a big fan of Mike Leigh, but although there is a lot of humour in many of his movies, they’re generally pretty dark. His latest movie, Happy-go-lucky, is quite different, yet it retains those essential characteristics of Mike Leigh films – I can’t quite explain it but he manages to make you both care about and squirm about his characters. But what they do more than anything else is highlight what it means to be human, with all the frailty and awkwardness that comes as part of the package.
Happy-go-lucky tells the story of Poppy, a Primary School teacher in London. She’s a single 30 year old with a totally irrepressible positive spirit. She’s smiles a lot, laughs a lot, jokes a lot. Even when she encounters difficulties she deals with them positively. At one point in the movie, she’s told “You can’t make everybody happy” and she replies that it’s worth trying.
My favourite scenes are the flamenco classes. Flamenco always moves me. I love its passion and its fire. The Spanish flamenco dance teacher whose class Poppy attends is brilliant – probably one of the best characters in the whole movie. You can see a couple of scenes in this Channel 4 interview with Mike Leigh -
I have a very positive spirit. In fact, I don’t really see the point in taking a negative attitude to life. I’m pretty sure the stance we take determines the experiences we get.
I use movie clips a lot when teaching. I’ve posted a bit about some of the movies I use before (put “how we cope – learning from the movies” into the search box at the top right of this blog to see some examples). People now often suggest movies I might want to see because they show something about human character, about coping mechanisms or some of the ways in which things go wrong. Today, a colleague at work lent me “Control“.
It’s the movie based on the autobiography of Ian Curtis, the Joy Division singer’s widow. I was never really a Joy Division fan but I do still really like some of their songs. It’s no secret that this is a depressing movie. Ian Curtis hanged himself at just 23 years old. I found it a very powerful story, not least because it tells of a young man’s struggle with epilepsy. Convulsions are very scary to witness if you’ve never seen one before and the way they appear so suddenly and so completely take over a person’s life for a few seconds or minutes is always very dramatic. Ian Curtis couldn’t deal with having this complete loss of control and an experience of somebody he knew dying from an epileptic seizure probably magnified his fear of the disease and the terror that the next fit may well be his last. As the band begins to find success, his marriage begins to drift and he starts an affair he with a Romanian woman. In short, his life begins to unravel on all fronts at once. You might think success (selling more records, getting concert dates, becoming famous) would be a positive but to Ian it felt that he was being sucked empty by it. He gave his everything into his music and his performances but felt that success brought demands for more and more. He was losing control of his own life.
It was all too much and he committed suicide aged 23.
We all need to feel that we have some control in life. How much control varies between individuals and it alters at different points in life. But everyone I’ve ever met needs some sense of being in control of at least some important part of life. What a lot of people miss though is that we almost always have choices, and even though we find ourselves in circumstances outwith our control we can still choose how to respond. When it feels as if the choices have run out, it’s a very, very hard place.
I posted recently about change. Well in the face of too much change it can feel as if our choices have run out. But you know what? I don’t think they ever do. It’s just that sometimes it takes someone who loves us, or cares about us, to help us realise that.
It strikes me this is an important part of the practice of medicine – not just treating diseases, but helping people to see, and to make, more positive choices. A doctor can only do that if he or she understands the relationship between a patient’s illness and their life.
We construct our sense of self, and we experience our own very unique lives through the tool of narrative. Narrative means the story and the way its told. This is something I look for all the time during my consultations. I’m interested to notice not just the words people use but the tone of voice, the speed of speech, the hesitations, the facial expressions and the body language. The way a story is told is actually what gives the content of a story its meaning.
Have a look at this short French film (English subtitles)
It’s brilliant. Starts bland, with words that don’t convey much, but with a small piece of direction the words are said again in an entirely different way and WHAM – if it doesn’t get you, I’ll be surprised! (Well, it got me sniffing anyway!)
Tell me what you think. How aware are you of the way you say things? How aware are you of the way things are said to you?
A big part of the debate about homeopathy centres on the issue of ultra-high dilutions of medicines. One of the explanations wheeled out is something called ‘the memory of water’ – it’s a catchy phrase but very problematic. Does water have a memory and if so, how does that work? The anti-homeopathy campaigners say it can’t be explained. In short, they say it’s implausible. More than that, they say that the difference between a starting substance and a highly diluted remedy is the difference between ‘something and nothing’. But still, I think it’s more reasonable to say it’s the difference between something and something else. One of the commenters here, Andy, asked ‘does the water retain a memory of everything else it has had in solution since the dawn of time? Or just the things that the homeopath wants it to remember?’ I rather liked that question. It got me thinking…..and I’m still thinking! But amongst the things it got me thinking about were how memory isn’t physical but water is, about how human beings are meaning-seeking/meaning-creating creatures and how we enrich our physical world with meaning, how we use language, symbolism, memory and imagination, to create an incredibly powerful presence in the world, and how experience is more than physical, more than can be measured.
So here’s the non-science bit – first off, some photos of my own. I love water and water imagery and it amazes me how diverse and complex it is. Have a browse through this slide show. I wonder how these images of water will feel to you? I wonder what they’ll mean to you?
Here’s the slide show
And then, here are some of my favourite water songs. Let’s start with Rain
I can show you that when it starts to rain, everything’s still the same
When it rains and shines it’s just a state of mind
Patty Griffin next…..
Sometimes a hurt is so deep deep deep
You think that you’re gonna drown
Sometimes all I can do is weep weep weep
With all this rain falling down
Strange how hard it rains now
Rows and rows of big dark clouds
When I’m holding on underneath this shroud
Rain
And, the fabulous Eurythmics -
Here comes the rain again
Falling on my head like a memory
Falling on my head like a new emotion
I want to walk in the open wind
I want to talk like lovers do
I want to dive into your ocean
Is it raining with you
It’s amazing how much the rain can change our emotions, our state of mind, and our mood, isn’t it?
Let’s spend a little time by the river! Rivers are so important to us. How many towns and cities grow up around rivers? Think how we use metaphors like “river of life”. Here’s Alison Krauss set to a lovely montage of BBC nature videos.
A complete change of musical genre, but keeping a religious theme, with Good Charlotte,
Baptized in the river,
I’ve seen a vision of my life,
My favourite river song about the importance of place – really, a song that gives us a real understanding of psychogeography! (the way place fashions a sense of self)
And, finally, with Christmas coming, here’s Sarah McLachlan’s version of Joni Mitchell’s The River
I wish I had a river
I could skate away on
Which paintings, photos, songs, films, poems or stories come to your mind on the theme of water, and what do they mean to you?
This series is about using the movies to help us understand how we are all different, how we experience the world differently and how we all try to cope with challenges and change in our own ways. One of the commonest responses to challenge, is to withdraw – to hide, retreat, shut down. It’s an especially common way to try to deal with hurts and disappointments. The downside of this strategy is that we disengage and can easily spiral down into depression.
To see all five parts of this series put the phrase “learning from the movies” in the search box up on the top right of the blog.
I welcome constructive criticism and suggestions. I will not, however, tolerate abuse, rudeness or negativity, whether it is directed at me or other people. It has no place here. ANYONE making nasty comments will be banned.
