Our common humanity : and the search for redemption.

I just listened to an interview,with the British film director Terence Davies about a new film he has directed Benediction concerning the life of Siegfried Sassoon the first world war poet who survived his two better known contemporaries Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen. Sassoon was gay but like many of his contemporaries decided to marry. The themes discussed were both guilt and redemption which was interesting as Jason Di Rosso’s earlier interview was with another director Paul Schrader who has also made a film dealing with related issues.

The guilt Sassoon carried was survivor guilt and perhaps the unnecessary shame over his sexuality but what interested me more was were the hook lay for Davies.. I do not know if you have seen any of his films which include Distant Voices, Still Lives, but apparently he was shunned and sidelined at one point in his career.. In speaking about how people can struggle in later life to come terms with certain issues he spoke of how often we may tend to seek our redemption from something outside when really that kind of thing needs to be worked out within a person.

It got me to thinking of so many things. My sister and my mum were very much on my mind this morning.. I was thinking of a time after I moved back here in 2011 when I was really struggling and they both came over.. I remember my sister at that point being quiet unwell.. She had had several hospitalisations for depression and there were resentments I still carried and they came out in a bit of verbal tirade at one point, but I so strongly remember how vulnerable my sister looked in that situation and how big her tummy had become from all of the meds, being so close to my Mum it was like they were one person and later my sister said a begrudging apology for things that went down in those two years after my ex husband left and I was thrown back into the family.. I now see it was I who had to work my way out of all of that pain, the pain of being the youngest in a family where I needed so much more than I got, but then so probably did my sister. I had to work out my own freedom from the family and seek for deeper understandings on some level. Today I thought of how I am struggling in not having seen my sister since August even though both my therapist and I feel it has been good for me to pull my energy back from family.

I headed this post our common humanity and I do not know why but shortly after starting it I thought of how when I first joined AA we were encouraged to look for the similarities and not the differences.. It is a sense that we can always find justifications for why we drink when we do not understand that others too, can struggle in similar ways even if they close down on that inner world or try to keep it private..There are just so many masks we can wear, and seem to be encouraged to wear in this society.

Jason Di Rosso conducted his interview with Davies over the phone since the director shuns technology, he said he does not understand it and that he finds the current culture very narcissistic and in his words ‘venous’ he also sited an example of being disgusted at seeing a young couple on a train put their young baby on one of the tables provided to rest books, papers and drinks or foods upon and change a dirty nappy there in full view while photographing it.. as he shared this I thought of a similar incident that made me uncomfortable when I visited one of my nephews and he showed a video of his young son on the toilet struggling to have a pooh while laughing about the incident with his young daughter, the son in question was highly distressed about this, being a very sensitive and somewhat shy boy (it was an older video from some years back).. At the time it made me feel very uncomfortable for him..

Di Rosso focused on the fact that Davies had very strong roots in the Catholic religion.. and it made sense to me that he was talking about the great silence surrounding so many survivors of war who witnessed abject terror and decimation and then coming home had to put it all behind them and ‘just get on.’ There are healthy aspects of positive narcissism but for a generation silenced and not able to live certain aspects of the shadow I guess they will always have a problematic relationship with the darker, primal, more messy side.

I think too while writing this of how horrified my Mum would be when I swore.. Anger was frowned on but we got not help growing up dealing with frustrations, possibly due to the fact that my mother didn’t either.. So what we all grew up with was a huge load of repressed frustration that so speaks to the astrological configuration of the Moon I carry from my mother’s ancestral lineage.. Mars Saturn and the Moon in Aquarius all widely square my own natal Neptune in Scorpio and the Sun Mercury Saturn influence of my mother as well as the Saturn in Scorpio influence in my sister’s chart. all of these currently being opposed and squared by transiting Uranus (the light bringer or awakener of consciousness) in Taurus.. Both my Mum and sister kept a tight lid on emotions although Mum was more capable of emotional expression than my sister who has been now so medicated in her life. She so often said to me in recent years that she wished she could cry.. I know Mum’s death in 2017 really hit her hard. Mum was her only ally in the family, I think losing Dad when we did also hit Sue hard as she as a sun sign Pisces was so soft just like my Dad who sadly also repressed a lot of his own emotions. Unlike me she did not go away as she had a young family in those years and was working with my Mum in the family business so she tried to support not only my Mum but her husband’s father too after the death of his wife.

I guess the interview with Davies triggered some thing around my father and family I wanted to express today. I am not sure what it was but it had to do with the concept of guilt and redemption.. My therapist Kat says so often that she feels I suffer from undue guilt.. I was also raised in that Catholic system where honest emotional expression was seen as wrong and sexual expression most sinful.. I did absorb that on some level. I identified with Davies never the less perhaps the reason why I am writing about him today.. When I find a common humanity with others it makes my own inner struggles easier, people wrestle with so much that so often remains lost to speech or insight.. .I see myself as very lucky to have gone down a path where I can explore some of this inner stuff and its one of the reasons why I am so drawn to films, poetry and writing. In these and the people involved in making some kind of sense of our common human struggles I manage to find my own particular form of wisdom, understanding and inner redemption.

If you would like to listen to the interview with Terence Davies and Paul Schrader it is embedded below

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/the-screen-show/paul-schrader,-terence-davies/13614802