Feng Shui Fiction: How a Character Can Be One of Your Helpful People

Someone larger than life such as the very real and well-documented Frida Kahlo, can inspire us to find ways to express what we need to, to accomplish what needs to be done, and to celebrate progress when we make it. But sometimes inspiration can come from a complete unknown; a fictional character that will never see the light of day for longer than it takes their few pages to be turned.

For me, one of these helpful characters is Rita the Clutter Counselor from
Anne Tyler's twelfth novel, St. Maybe.

Anne Tyler is one of those authors who have their books made into movies that I really don't care for. The portrayal of what the characters do with their hands and feet as they move through their lives is never as interesting as what is going on inside their heads. She writes great lines of dialog, but when actors speak them, they seem to lose some of their original sense. But her novels are on solid ground, with numerous favorable reviews from the New York Times and a Pulitzer Prize.

Photo image: Anne Tyler has lived in Raleigh, NC since childhood and attended Duke University

The main character of St. Maybe is Ian Bledsoe, and we learn of his family's tragedy through him. Ian has become spiritually paralyzed by guilt, stemming from from one small action, and then makes his life choices in a state of non-decision, as a result. He isn't trying to decide among variables; he is simply staying inside his protective shell, trying to atone for what he fears was his fault.

Ian Beldsoe isn't a Walter Mitty, with frustrated ideals, or a sacrificial hero who knows exactly what he's choosing to do and why. He is more like a person stuck in neutralized shame, with a broken chooser. Because he can't figure out how to fix everyone around him, while thinking he should be able to, he idles his way through situations. Events go on around him, people make decisions that involve him and affect him, yet somehow he doesn't seem to be the one actually living his life.

So far, this sounds like a good cure for insomnia. Who wants to read about someone who is described by his impetuous adopted niece as "King Careful. Mr. Look-Both-Ways. Saint Maybe"? This isn't exactly the makings of a heroic tale. But Anne Tyler always has a way of allowing her characters to live out their private dreams and torments in whatever peculiar forms they take, shaped by a specific time and place not always under their control.

But enter Rita the Clutter Counselor, straight out of an ad in the Yellow Pages. The Bledsoe family hires Rita to help them sort through the possessions of late loved ones, and Rita quickly sees that this family is all at sea and are more like ships that haphazardly bump into each other all day and night. What she brings to them, and to me, is a sense of active urgency about life and its small importances. She is like a force of nature, even when her own gale leaves her stuck on the Bledsoe couch with a broken leg. Christmas is coming, and rather than allowing the others to just drift around the house aimlessly, she puts them to work. With a large board on her lap, she rolls out cookie dough, strings popcorn, and addresses Christmas cards, while directing the others with instructions for the oven or to fetch her supplies. While this sounds like a Hallmark movie, and it very well might be, Rita's must-do attitude reaches far beyond the simple domestic scene of a preserved celebration of Christmas.

What Rita's character taught me is that it is less important to do your work in a prescribed right style-- one that has a conventional setting, uniform and equipment-- than it is to get the finished work done right. Rita's career is to help people find a proper place for everything in their homes, but when a greater need than orderliness comes along, she is the first one to transcend those rules. It doesn't matter if baking is happening in the living room; what matters is that the baking is happening. I can't recall if her cookies came out to anyone's satisfaction, but in witnessing Rita's commitment to their own traditions-- even though she's an outsider-- the others are able to sort through the clutter and detritus of their own values. They need to decide for themselves what is important and worth putting energy into, and what is simply meeting the never-ending demand for comfort and consumption without a clear purpose.

Like Anne Tyler's work, Carly Simon's song Anticipation has been commercialized, but is a perfect song for Ian. He needs anticipation of the future, even if he isn't an all-knowing prophet.

Over time, Ian Bledsoe learns that there is no proper place for false guilt. He needs to stop working in self-denial to atone for what was not his fault, and to stop taking responsibility for everyone's elusive happiness. This unattainable charter he has set for himself has a deadening effect on his soul and his hopes for his own development as a person. He better understands how to play a role than how to live a life. The role he has chosen is one of a martyr, yet he hasn't taken up his cross so much as he has taken one along with him in his carpenter's tool belt.

Rita's approach to life challenges Ian's commitment to a form and function that holds no room for fulfillment. Her artistry is not the sort that hangs on walls in galleries, but is in the investigation and consideration of treasure among wreckage, so that each member of the family can be released from the whirlpool of disappointment and blame and get themselves back onto a high tide.

"It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things." -- Georgia O'Keeffe

Image: Oil painting "Black Cross with Stars and Blue", 1929

Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

Exceptional Excerpts: Salma Hayek Speaks about Frida, the Globes, and Teaches Me About the Love of My Life

The following interview with Salma Hayek, the force behind the film Frida, is one of the best I have heard on the topic of winning awards for your work. At the time of this interview, she had been nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actress, which went to Nicole Kidman for The Hours, instead. But still to come was the rest of the award season, including the Oscars. Additional nominations came from BAFTA, the Screen Actors Guild, the American Film Institute, the Broadcast Film Critics Association, and from other festivals, foundations and international circles. 

She was suddenly recognized all over the world for bringing the life story of Frida Kahlo to the screen, after years of various scripts, directors and detours. Before this, she had only been seen in occasional roles on Mexican and American television and in small films. She had not yet proven herself able to take on the leading portrayal of such a complex and iconic figure in Mexican history. Nor was she known to American or European audiences.

Photo image: Salma Hayek 2001. Bringing herself and Frida to the Silver Screen

She speaks about how all of this sudden attention and acclaim has affected her, while it was still going on, and while the outcome of these awards were unknown. Some of her thoughts are forming as she answers the questions. You can watch the entire interview that comes with the DVD's special features, but below I have selected the statements that have stayed with me over the years. They reflect what she learned from Frida Kahlo-- and then taught viewers like me-- about passion and focus, and how to stay committed to a love affair with your own purpose.

"I think this project has changed my life. And it might seem that it's changed my life once [Frida] came out. But it changed my life the minute I became involved in it. My life has changed, but the way my attitude changed is very specific thanks to the process that I lived in those eight years.

"All of these awards and this award season puts you in a situation where you've never been before, so you're exploring a different part of yourself. I learned my competitive genes are not as many as I thought (laughs). I was, "Oh, my God, this is great! I want to win this!" for… two weeks, maybe. Or maybe not even. The first feeling I had when I got nominated for the Golden Globe-- and it was a shock-- I felt lonely. I felt a sensation of loneliness, because the rest of my gang was not there with me. Because they didn't nominate a lot of people that I wish had also been nominated. So, instead of being overjoyed, immediately the first thing that came into my body was this loneliness.  

"I think-- I have learned to think--  we often dream and want things we don't [really] want. [We think we need certain] things to obtain, to manipulate, to get the things we really want. So, I used to think about these awards like, "I want to get the award-- I have to get this award-- so that I [will] have respect in this town and so that I [will] get better opportunities. All of a sudden, I feel like I do have respect in this town; not because somebody decided to give me an award, but because I decided to earn it with hard work. I already have what the award would give me. The difference is, did somebody choose to give it to me, or did I choose to give it to myself?

Photo image: Frida Kahlo circa 1935.  Choosing to give herself What She Wants.

"When Nicole (Kidman) won the Golden Globe… I was very happy because she said, 'I want to thank my agent for giving me this script (The Hours) and making me read it.'  And I got a huge smile on my face because I was the one with a script going around for seven years saying to everyone, "You've got to read this!" And so there was a sensation of accomplishment that goes beyond any award, because I made it happen.

Photo image: Salma Hayek at 2003 Golden Globe Awards

"[Now], I feel peaceful. I know this is a very exciting time in my life, but Frida has given me so many things, and I think she will continue to, because she's been an inspiration and I've learned so many things. But if I could put everything in one word, and I think this is probably the biggest, the most important thing in life that you can get is… a great sense of peace. I feel that. I wanted to do something so badly, and I learned how to channel my passion into one thing and stay focused on that one thing. And it took eight years. And if it had taken sixteen years, I would have stayed in that place. She taught me how to do that. I have a great sense of accomplishment, but because of all the things I learned in that seven years, it's not a sense of accomplishment that comes with an ego. It's a sense of accomplishment that comes with peace.

Still photo from Frida, Scene: Writing letter to Diego Rivera from Paris

"And so, I take it easy, now. I see life from a different perspective that is more simple, but more satisfying. So I think the biggest thing she brought into my life was this peacefulness. I still get passionate about things, but my passion is not so scattered, and it's not needy. It's a lot more powerful because it comes with this groundedness and peacefulness that its about the process and not about the results, and that's a great sensation."

For some classical peaceful sensations

listen to Dustin Jones, playing his original composition, "Neskowin"

Frida Unites Us for Cinqo de Mayo

Ten years to the screen, a labor of love for Salma Hayek

Each May, I have a tradition of watching the film Frida with Salma Hayek and Alfred Molina, directed by Julie Taymor (of Broadway's Lion King fame), written by Edward Norton. Frida Kahlo's rebellious spirit and then revolutionary spirit, relationship with Trotsky among others, made her infamous or inspiring, depending on your viewpoint. Regardless of what was happening to her, or what she was getting into, she loved a good party.

What many people love about her work is its dedication to her own personal experience of life, when everyone else was painting huge murals of great social unrest and governmental change. Many of her paintings are very tiny, like her own frame. She pushed her pain-wracked body into the larger world of philosophical circles, travel and celebrity, but she also inserted her personality into that larger world, with a purposefully rustic naturalism. 

She stares at us from the cover of Vogue with her unibrow un-retouched, while starlets were shaving theirs to look like Jean Harlow or Marlene Dietrich. She isn't draped in metallic satins and fur, but wears the primary colored dyes of her homeland, with ruffles and embroidery. She wasn't unaware, just determinedly unsophisticated. I imagine it probably took just as much thought and effort to be that way as it was for a Hollywood glamour girl.

"A Woman of Power" Vogue Paris issue 1938

Like a true Neitzchean, and with a strange twist on her Marxism, the force of her will is what landed her on the currency of her country. Perhaps her fame and the commercial aspect of her image was part of the choice of the Mexican government to use it in its capitalist economy. But the strongest current about her, apart from politics and the trappings of the art world, was her humanity. That is what stamped itself, without boots on the ground, all over the map.

Ironically, her portrait is less idealized than her true image

To see an interview with Salma Hayek, go to the next post.

Keep Breathing My Mother In

"Breathing" from Never Forever

Long before Lady Gaga showed up to award shows in egg coffins, Kate Bush was spinning inside a plastic womb complete with a gigantic umbilical cord. This song, "Breathing" is about the earth as mother, and how we are poisoning its air. In her music video from 1980, she makes it clear that radioactivity is our biggest threat. Now, it seems that we are instead harming everything by degrees, through the use of toxic chemicals to solve our problems.

Although her performance art has always been a large part of her career, I actually prefer this stripped down live rendition, below, where we can focus on the eerie and ethereal quality of her voice, which is more than enough to deliver the message behind her words. She intimately shares her feelings about Earth, calling her "my beloved." It seems even more important to hear this now, when we are coming more perilously close to turning "Beloved Mother" into our planet's epitaph.

or go to link

At other times, we can also rejoice that we are part of the earth and its beauty as well. I don't know how it was possible to turn a song about a couple in the midst of childbirth into a popular hit, without it being sentimental or twangy. But she did it, creating and performing with the raw energy of fear, uncertainty, and also sadness, as the old life of youth gives way to the new parental one of tenderness and gratitude. It sends chills through me every time.

or go to link

Music and Lyrics by Kate Bush from The Sensual World

Pray God you can cope.

I stand outside this woman's work,

This woman's world.

Ooh, it's hard on the man,

Now his part is over.

Now starts the craft of the father.

I know you have a little life in you yet.

I know you have a lot of strength left.

I know you have a little life in you yet.

I know you have a lot of strength left.

I should be crying, but I just can't let it show.

I should be hoping, but I can't stop thinking

Of all the things I should've said,

That I never said.

All the things we should've done,

That we never did.

All the things I should've given,

But I didn't.

Oh, darling, make it go,

Make it go away.

Give me these moments back.

Give them back to me.

Give me that little kiss.

Give me your hand.

(I know you have a little life in you yet.

I know you have a lot of strength left.

I know you have a little life in you yet.

I know you have a lot of strength left.)

I should be crying, but I just can't let it show.

I should be hoping, but I can't stop thinking

Of all the things we should've said,

That were never said.

All the things we should've done,

That we never did.

All the things that you needed from me.

All the things that you wanted for me.

All the things that I should've given,

But I didn't.

Oh, darling, make it go away.

Just make it go away now.

Kate Bush was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to Music in 2013. She received the award by Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle.

Dedicated to Steffanie, who first introduced me to this wonderful artist in her prime.