Melodious Timbre

And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.--Robert Frost, in his well taught "Mending Wall"


Part of the reason I have not risked Google's ire just yet is that I do not have enough time to truly test American corporate intolerance for free speech, conjoined to the fact that I do care about what I am attempting, and why this web log project matters to me as a legacy. Now, of course, there are limits, and that I am furiously angry at the juxtaposition between independent living ideology and its institutional cruelty, this does not give me the right to behave like Al Capone with sagging breasts, and I am educated enough to know better. Inheriting my father's temper is one thing, and deploying my intelligence to circumvent my loss of strength, and to strike back, that is another, but there is more to it than that.  The larger question is, if I piss everyone off, have I achieved anything? It is an important question, because when I start digging, I am really going to burrow, and I have to weigh those risks; at my best, and perhaps worst, I spare nothing, and that is inclusive of Jimmy Carter's scarred bid for political sainthood. He and Woodward mellowed to maturity in that Georgia climate, and both the peanut farmer and the sympathetic Hollywood widow make me wonder why Lincoln did not allow Sherman to really punish the South, literally bury it beneath the furrows of its plantation caste hierarchy. That damn agrarian pathology, dragging on and on so that we can be sure the death of America's psychic historical scar tissue will outlast the viability of our nation state. The melodrama of her drawling and slightly phlegmatic voice is a superfluous excess, but in Summer Wishes, it fits the feminine state of menopause and regret.

The homosexuality of the son is nothing more than a plot device to ensure the psychological duress of Rita and Harry, but the film is so effective because of the honesty of the characters beneath the stylized mechanisms of its location scenery. What we have here is a husband and wife struggling to come to terms with abandonment (spastic is not alone) and the fact that their progeny have evolved into their own people, with the gay son Bobby exiling himself from pedestrian repression for the sake of his own survival and sanity, and that character, Bobby, transposed from 73 to  contemporary barriers being forcibly smashed, might think Andrew Sullivan is destroying the freedom of alternative choices. He is more sketched into the film to provide Woodward with her conflict, so it is difficult to know for sure, but the dialogue between Woodward and Balsam, for its era, is deft, honest, and lacking in pretension, a generation that still had fascism on its back, and wasn't sure of the right answer, but knew that affluence wasn't the sum totality of its need.