Fun Home by Alison Bechdel: The Book and the Musical

 

Two weeks ago I saw the musical "Fun Home" an adaptation of a memoir of the same name by Alison Bechdel.  A week later, I started reading the graphic memoir which the musical is based on.  I finished it this morning.  

This sad, compelling story presents the pain and mystery of the suicide, or maybe not, of Bruce Allen Bechdel, Alison's father.  Bruce was gay. Alison finds out her father was gay only when she discovers she is a lesbian while at college.  Bruce's suicide or accidental death happens soon after Alison comes out to her family.  

Though presented in a musical and graphic format, the memoir is serious and deeply revealing.  I felt the love Alison had for her father, the tension between her parents, the confusion Alison felt throughout her childhood about herself and her family, and the isolation each member of the family lived in.  

In the graphic book, Alison uses maps to show the small area in which her father lived his life: a circle of a few miles covers his birth, life, work and death.  Alison notices on recordings of her father's voice she heard after his death that he had a local accent.  And yet, he aspired to the world: loving beautiful things and teaching great literature.  

Alison is 20 when her father dies.  She goes on to become as notably out as her father was closeted.  She created the comic strip "Dykes to Watch Out For" which is where she introduced the Bechdel Test: a measure of the representation of women in fiction. It asks whether a work features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. The requirement that the two women must be named is sometimes added.

I have read many memoirs. They are among my most and least favorite books.  Truth, unvarnished truth, must be at the center of memoir, because we readers will sense when we are being served the public relations story rather than reality. This memoir is among my favorites. The struggle of Alison finding who she is had me from the first act and the first page.  

Thinking and Feeling: The Inside, Outside Difference

 

The past and the future are infinite and meet at the moment we are thinking. 

Our thinking can reach into infinity.

A friend recently posted a question asking about the difference between thinking and feeling.  The French poet Paul Valery said:

"Sometimes I think and sometimes I am."

[Tantot je pense et tantot je suis]

When we think, we leave the world of feeling.  Valery says we leave the world altogether.  We engage in a dialogue within ourselves. In this inner conversation we examine an idea, weigh it, try to find its worth, but all of this is done within our minds.  

When external reality intrudes we stop thinking and return to living in the present, to sensing or feeling the world around us.  When we feel we take our world through our  five senses and act or react. We can take in that information and react immediately, or we can, as the expression goes, stop and think.  

Modern English usage hardly makes a difference between the words think and feel, but they are different to the point of being opposites in how they inhabit our lives.  

From the outside, the difference is just as big.  A person who is feeling, who is reacting to the world, will show that reaction.  We see a friend and smile: see an enemy and frown.  When we think, especially when we are deep in thought, we look like someone in a daze, or half awake.  We say a person is "lost in thought." The metaphor is right. The person lost in thought is not fully present in this world.  

When I think, I may sit and stare and not notice someone entering the room.  When I ride in traffic in Philadelphia, I am looking, listening in every way sensing my environment and reacting to multiple inputs every second.  

The graph above of thinking is especially evident in those who create. Whether art or science, thinking remains hidden within the thinker until the painting, or story, or building, or equation, or breakthrough formula expresses the thoughts hidden inside the mind.  

For more on thinking, The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt is fascinating.

The Taliban are not Medieval

 

Chartres Cathedral

During the flurry of worry as we abandoned an ally to barbarism, many commentators and social media "experts" said the Taliban is Medieval.  

This is America and we are, as a country, as dumb as a sack of lug nuts when it comes to history, so I was not surprised to hear the Taliban to be labelled as Medieval, but they emphatically are not.  

The Taliban are not Medieval. They are ignorant, despicable thugs who hate civilization, freedom, light and love.  The Medieval era brought beauty to the entire world. It celebrated knowledge and learning. Eventually the Renaissance and the Reformation sprung from its problems.  

The Taliban, like all fundamentalists, look backward and express their faith in death and demolition.  

There is nothing Medieval about the Taliban.  They are Westboro Baptist Church with a national flag. 

As with every attempt to label eras of history, the period roughly between 1000 and 1500 could be called the Medieval period, though some put the start date almost at the end of the Roman Empire in 472.  Either way the term Medieval only applies to parts of Western Europe under the influence of the Catholic Church and of the Holy Roman Empire. 

In some ways, the Medieval period the zenith of culture in the west.  Chartres Cathedral was a work of centuries by people who had an eternal vision and expressed their beliefs in stone--most knowing they would never live to see the final result of their life's work.  

Chartres Cathedral inside and outside

The popular image of the Medieval Europe is dominated by The Plague, the corrupt Catholic Church, and the Inquisition, but this Monty Python view ignores the beginning of the modern university and the beginning of Romantic Love as equal to other loves. The Divine Comedy and the Arthurian Legends brought Romantic Love to the center of western culture. 

Dante's Divine Comedy, the entire universe, 

physical and spiritual, in 14,000 lines of poetry

Literature left the confines of the Latin language in the Three Crowns of Florence:  Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch.  They wrote in vernacular Italian. And the world followed their lead.