Somewhere between watching Bogart in Casablanca the other night out of the corner of my eye and an interesting piece in the Sunday New York Times about how cohabitation doesn't always lead to/isn't the same thing as a happy marriage, a minor, seemingly heretical thought occurred to me that relationships between people work out as they are supposed to. Hmm, maybe it's this attempt at a low acidity diet that has put me in a good enough mood to feel in a bit of a state of peace with the Universe. You can't go around kicking yourself for all the mistakes you made, that thing with her, well, it just wasn't meant to be. It all happened for a reason. I know you can go around telling yourself that things work out as they are supposed to, but, eventually, you find yourself believing and accepting that.

What is this? Maturity? Reaching a point that distinguishes artistic juvenilia and artistic maturity? Wishful thinking (ha ha ha)? Why the heck do such realizations take so long?

I don't know, friends, I know this is all already perfectly obvious to you. You've probably gone through it yourself enough times to already know it. I guess a writer has to state the obvious. A writer has to go through these exercises where she or he takes out an old and perhaps simple, maybe even obvious theme. And then sits and looks at it for a while, runs it through a couple times, and then feels about to be launched in a vast series of variations.

Milan Kundera alludes to the nature of variations on a theme, a story of him with his father, later Beethoven, 'drilling down to the very center of the earth' with each progression, (mentioned somewhere in this completely redundant blog thing.) One gathers it is something artists like to do.

What, subliminally or unconsciously, I wonder does one have to go through the find this sense of peace? Will it be ephemeral, short lasting? What rite of passage attends the dawning? Was it the yoga? Peace with one's self, that is what the self preaches, and one day, it seems, the self finally listens.


Now, of course there is a fine amount of kitsch and cornball in Casablanca, perhaps like a necessary gluten to hold the dough together, though. And I like that scene of old Rick alone with his bottle, slamming his glass down, uttering the famous line, and Sam telling him, let's just go fishing. Note that this is not where Rick ends up psychologically. Sure, it's a beautiful and moving scene at the end, a great actor and a great actress realizing characters must part, but, Rick seems okay in the end, because, quite possibly, he has found himself, in that continual on-going i.e. real sense. Perhaps it was a timely message to the world, back then in the midst of WWII, and probably now, too, thus the story's mythical resonance from a place mythical to Americans.

The hardest thing for an artist, perhaps, is the self-acceptance, not a task accomplished in a facile way. Somehow to make it an acceptable and palatable life choice. And so we must move on from our night with the bottle bemoaning, consider for a moment that maybe we essentially dodged a bullet, as much as it may have hurt to. It wouldn't be much help to stay there anyway, with the bottle. You move on, and hopefully that helps you do your work, even as bungling and amateur as it may be.