In 1969, Pier Paolo Pasolini directed a film version of the classic tale of Medea.  Maria Callas, the infamous operatic diva, played the title role and sang not a single note.  In 1969, I was attending lots of “art films” shown at the University of Minnesota where I was a new faculty member.  “Medea” was not among the choices.  In fact, I only just saw the film on the recommendation of a good friend.  The story is known to many:  Medea becomes furious at her husband, Jason, for his philandering with another woman.  He puts her aside to marry the younger woman and Medea, seriously bent on revenge, causes the new bride to burn alive, kills her and Jason’s two children, denies him burial rites of his sons, and finally immolates herself.

What’s amazing is the visualization of this tale by Pasolini and his expert crew.  Never have I seen mythic time made believable.  The sets are mammoth but not quite buildings as we know them; the landscape is uniformly beige because of all the sand.  Characters wear masks that are humanoid but not quite human and their movements resemble sheep or lemmings, moving as a great group rather than as several individuals.  For the first segment, we watch in frozen fascination as the group performs a ritual in which a young man is hacked into small bits that are eaten by the masked populace after blood from the corps has been spread on vegetation in the belief that it will help things grow.  The music is neither tonal nor atonal; it is just raucous sound executed at a high and consistent decibel level.  I felt I was being thrown back to a time and place before regimented time or tamed civilization.  And as Medea loses hold on her sanity and propels herself and those close to her deeper and deeper into revenge with all its self-consuming capacity, I also felt that Pasolini and the Greeks who first wrote about her were coming to understand a trajectory away from the herd instinct of early humans and toward a more individualized idea of life and death.

As I watched this stunning visualization of one of Western culture’s major classical tragedies, I kept asking myself why I had to wait forty-five years to see what Pasolini was able to realize in his filming.  As a feminist, I am constantly caught up short at what no one has bothered to tell me, to show me, to guide me toward knowing.  When I taught Women’s Studies, I told students to ask constantly “Who benefits from this?”  If I resurrect that old question and turn it on this gripping film, my answer is halting but certain:  No one.  So I thought to write about my experience with wild-eyed and fierce Maria Callas in her only film role, so others in the cinematic dark along with me might get this movie and be caught up in its sweeping orbit.  You won’t regret the effort.

Until about a month ago, I had no idea who or what Siri is, but now I have been introduced.  This happened through a friend who told me a funny story of how a friend of hers “asked” Siri to tell a joke.  At first Siri demurred but when asked again told this joke that seems genuinely funny to me:  “The past, present and future went into a bar—it was tense.”   The day after I heard this joke told by an artificial intelligence “person,” I actually heard Siri speak through the iPhone of my next door neighbor.  As Siri was speaking, I remembered hearing on Public Radio about a movie called “Her” in which a man actually falls in love with the AI voice on one of his electronic devices.  All this raises questions in my mind about what constitutes a relationship and whether there has to be a physical person across a table or room or beside on in a bed to qualify.  Friends tell me I need to watch the movie because it takes on precisely these ethical puzzlements that grow ever more pertinent as computer technology gallops along way ahead of anything as amorphous as ethics.

Before I watch “Her,” however, I find myself going back to a 16th c. poet, Michael Drayton (1563-1631), who, like most of his male contemporaries, wrote a sonnet sequence.  Drayton’s sequence is entitled “Idea’s Mirror” and is comprised of 64 poems about Drayton’s “idea” of an ideal lady love.  Because the object of his affection is not someone he might meet on the street or in a coffeehouse or inn, Drayton is able to have total control on how their relationship develops.  Many other 16th c. sonneteers lamented the corporeality of their heart’s desire precisely because some of the ladies in question refused to conform to the poet’s wishes and dreams for how courtship should proceed.  So Drayton was smart to create from wholecloth the idea (and ideal) sweetheart.  But he was also complex enough to pen some sonnets in which his “idea” didn’t behave exactly as he wished, thus allowing him to lament and struggle in order to feel even more accomplished once he brought his ethereal lady around to his way of thinking.

So Siri may be a new AI invention coming from the world of chips and bytes, and “Her” may be a current film version of virtual reality, but neither has anything on Michael Drayton who understood what we all know:  It is so much more convenient to construct a relationship in our heads than to try and maintain one that involves some flesh and blood that is not our own.

For the past couple of months on Sunday evenings, American educational television channels have been broadcasting two BBC programs centered on women and our experiences/challenges/talents:  “Call the Midwife” and “The Bletchley Circle.”  Both programs are based on historical women living and working in the 20th century.  “Call the Midwife” is an adaptation and enlargement of the memoirs of Jennifer Worth; “The Bletchley Circle” tells of the lives after World War II ended of some of the women who worked at Bletchley Park in England to crack the German codes, an act that stopped the mass sinking of British ships and most likely began to turn the tide for the Allied Forces.  Both are set in the 1950’s, an era when women were being encouraged/forced to return to “feminine” spheres and activities after the hiatus occasioned by so many men’s being in the military, leaving jobs usually filled by men open to anyone who could do them.

I’ve been riveted to both series from the beginning because the stories are so feminist and the women acting in the television versions have conveyed with such clarity just how special their characters were in the fields of medicine/midwifery and military intelligence.  Every week the secular nurses, along with the Roman Catholic nuns who run the “house” from which the midwives go forth to help pregnant women living in the East End of London in less-than-ideal circumstances.  Every week, we see at least one tiny new-born being guided out of its mother’s body and swaddled in whatever blanket is at hand.  Sometimes, these moments are cherished by all involved, but in at least one segment, the mother and the midwives feared for the infant’s safety.  The tiny baby boy was the product of an extra-marital union between the white mother and a black man, so the white husband is ready to throw away or even kill the new-born as he vents his rage and sense of being betrayed by his wife.  All the while the midwives are delivering babies, the program deftly portrays the personal lives of the nurses and nuns, all of whom are sharply delineated by the scripts.  There is the old nun, played to perfection by Judith Parfitt, who is slightly mentally “off,” but who quotes marvelous poetry to suit the occasion and who values old ways and objects over what she fears about the present with its bustle and sharp edges.  The central character, Jenny, grows from a novice midwife with theories that can’t handle the messiness of her patients’ poverty-ladened lives into a mature woman who loses her fiancé to a freak accident at his work and who comes to understand that she can no longer function in a strict hospital setting where she is not allowed to follow a given pregnancy from beginning to delivery.

These programs invite viewers to take women seriously in fields where they have been traditionally accepted but undervalued by the medical establishment and in fields where they have been deemed less than qualified for outstanding performances.  A final “plus” surrounding these two series is the atmosphere on the sets.  After each program, actors as well as directors/writers speak about what’s it’s like to be part of the program.  The male directors have both commented on two ways the atmosphere seems different because of the minor role played by male actors.  First, they say it’s hard to get the actors to stop talking among themselves animatedly so as to progress the actual filming of the segment; then, they comment on how refreshing it has been to work with mostly women because there is so little competition and back-biting that usually pervades such sessions in the high end television world.

So if you’ve not known about these series, find them on Netflix or whatever provider you use.  Your viewing time with be richly rewarded by watching stellar actors telling moving and powerful stories that do not have simple plot lines or clichéd emotional qualities.

I recently had breakfast with an old friend who is also a fine photographer.  In the course of our time together, she told me she is embarking on a new project to try and photograph “time.”  She then asked me if I would share some thoughts about what time is.  My first comment was “Time is an illusion invented to simplify our lives.” 

As our conversation evolved, I heard myself saying something that has stuck with me as absolutely what I believe:  I said “Art freezes time and memory holds time.”  In the days following that evocative breakfast, I have kept returning to this idea, wanting to flesh out what I meant when I blurted it out as I ate my delicious croissant with my friend.   John Keats’ marvelous “Ode on a Grecian Urn” came back to me as a perfect example of how art freezes time.  In that poem, he describes several scenes on a particular antique Greek vase or urn; at one point, he reflects about an image of heterosexual lovers poised to kiss.  He says “Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave/Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;/Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,/Though winning near the goal–yet, do not grieve;/She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,/For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” These lines speak of the inherent stasis that all art shares.  And Keats affirms the inherent ambiguity inherent in this frozenness–while the lovers will never complete their action caught by the person who decorated the urn, they will never grow old or come not to want to kiss one another.

So, if art suspends time by freezing what it so beautifully depicts, where can we humans look for a means of preserving the ever-elusive nature of time as it plays out in our lives?  I maintain we look to memory as an ever-expanding repository of time.  When I remember a person or place or feeling, I am able to reenter the moment being remembered.  If we separate the word, it makes what I’m claiming clearer:  “re-member” suggests a putting back into place something we think is over.  Now this process of memory’s holding time can either be experienced as sustaining or terrifying.  Surely anyone struggling with PTSD knows just how powerfully memory can hold time.  Each time something in the present “triggers” the debilitating memory, the person feels as if s/he is
“in time” again, that nothing is “over.”   Toni Morrison describes this element of memory’s ability to collapse and hold time in her novel Beloved, when Sethe can’t keep from remembering Sweet Home, the slave plantation where she grew up.  In fact, in that powerful work, Morrison speaks of her characters’ mighty but futile efforts to not remember precisely because they know that their memories contain every smidgen of a time they would dearly love to forget.

For many of us, however, as we grow older, we cherish certain memories because they take us out of what passes for the present time, allowing us to magically return to a situation or person or emotional moment categorized as “the past” by clock-watchers and schedule-setters.  I trust that my memories are stockpiles or silos where I can find all sorts of moments and people no longer tangibly in my life.  So I work to sharpen my memories in my efforts to outrun or simply sidestep the clock.  Even when honoring a memory brings me renewed pain, as if it were happening again, I welcome the process.