Roses Supposes

Saw an awesome Saul Williams concert last night. Or as he would have it, participated in one.

It was a transcendent experience. His voice breathed this warm timbre. The spoken word portions, and the lyrics, thrilled with intensity and meaning. The beat and the music brought everyone in the audience into this single kind of living organism, beating their arms against the air and feeling the music sway throughout the body. (sorry if my writing is trite. I’m trying to describe with vivid verbs, but my language often fails me.)

I wonder why this kind of experience is so much more transcendent than a Sunday morning. Mr. Praise-music bounces and jumps during worship and I find myself barely able to clap, even though we have an awesome musician at the helm.

I just watched A Room with a View on Masterpiece Classic (ah what a ruination of a perfectly good name). I was struck throughout the movie with the innovations Forester (or the director) took with the romantic genre and the capitulations he also made. I haven’t read the book or seen another adaptation, so this is all I have to go on.

Lucy starts out as such an innocent, trying to live and see the world and yet also conform to the expectations of the traditions of her class and ethnicity. She is horrified and entranced by the passion she witnesses in Italy, as she is horrified and entranced by George’s forwardness.

Forester mocks the romantic genre with his over-adventurous authoress smelling the streets of Florence and gamely stepping over drunks in back alleys. Yet he uses her novel to bring the two lovers back together, even while mocking the overly saccharine language.

Lucy became most interesting to me in her calm rejection of Cecil’s engagement (she ran away from George and to the probably gay dispassionate Cecil) and in her argument with her mother. She had finally recognized her own capacity for emotion and the possibilities for her independence. She had found that she had her own mind and her own value system that could neither be Cecil’s nor could be her mother’s. And I thought, just perhaps this will not end in the way we expect.

But it does. Why does Forester put George and Lucy together? It would have been so much more innovative for him to send her off on a tour of Constantinople with the brave old biddies and set her up in a Room of Her Own in London. And there she might have tasted the bitter dregs of loneliness, or perhaps gotten in with the Fabians or some such.

I honestly could not decide when Lucy and George are in bed at the end, seemingly abundantly happy with each other, whether I was sad, disgusted, happy or nothing (expectations fulfilled).

As I write this, though, I think perhaps Forester was sketching a border that many women (and men?) still live on. Lucy felt herself pulled in three directions–backwards toward the safe and traditional life offered by Cecil. Towards passion, offered by George. And towards independence and individuality. Was that second choice the most liberated or most modern? But conversely, must self-actualization come through lonely independence? Perhaps when Forester wrote the novel that third path did not seem possible. Or perhaps he thought by choosing passion Lucy was choosing the best of herself.  Then again, as Henry May documented in The End of American Innocence, at least for this side of the pond, modernity for some women before WWI was sexual liberation, not some sort of self-actualization or independence.