Transgressive But in a Kind-Hearted Way in Everyday Ramblings

I took this Friday. It is, much to my dismay, another house in the neighborhood being auctioned off by the county soon. It was built in 1910.

I have better pictures of bits and pieces of it. At some point someone had put an old iron bedstead painted white out front where the little garden patch is.

The sticker on the old fashioned mailbox says “Vacant”.

They’ve fenced off the building that used to be the YMCA and then my gym across the big street. They are finally going to start work on it after almost three years vacant. I am glad about the fencing as people using drugs and mentally ill have found all sorts of uses for it over that time and the activity will send them elsewhere even though it means I now have to walk the long way to the track.

I’ve been very emotional the last few days. I think in a way it is a release from the difficulty and discomfort of the dental work as I heal but also it is because after three years of go go work, teach, learn, teach, work and then work some more I finally slowed down.

But then much to my surprise I found something extraordinary to binge watch.

It is only six episodes, a Netflix original starring Stellan Skarsgård, (the amazing Swedish actor and father of Alexander Skarsgård, the actor who played Eric on True Blood and will be playing Tarzan) called River. Both the show and the character are called River.

It is a police procedural and is dark but with this surprising twist that it contains both compassion and vulnerability and that makes it tremendously appealing.

At first I thought that Skarsgård’s body language reminded me of someone, there is this hovering thing he does, he gets close and hovers and looks at someone else as if he could see deeply into them, a kind of embodied wisdom, and I realized his son does that too, in a completely different context in all those seasons of True Blood but then I realized that Mr. Finch did that.

I was only through maybe half the first episode when I got this and burst into tears.

Bill Nighy does it too. Particularly in Page Eight. And then there are these completely random non-sequiturs like the character will just blurt out, “Where are the trees? There are no trees here.” Mr. Finch used to do that all the time.

And the incredible social awkwardness mixed in with an easy smile and graceful precise manners. Sort of like Doc Martin, but not exactly funny in that way.

And then there are a couple of scenes, where haunted by his own demons (one of whom looks surprisingly like someone who could have lived here in the 1850’s), the character is purposefully cruel. Insightful, truthful and cruel. Totally juxtaposed against this ever-present awareness that in some way we are all in this together as damaged goods.

Mr. Finch was like that too. The character, River, is mentally ill. And of course to some degree on the spectrum, Mr. Finch was too.

The story portrays the love between a man and a woman, very very different, that is non physical in nature but wide and deep enough to contain everything that is good in a love between companions that literally take care of each other.

It is just brilliant. Best thing I have seen in ages.

Last week after I finished listening to the moving audiobook version of When Breath Becomes Air by the young neurosurgeon who was dying of lung cancer when he wrote it I tweeted that I was wowed by it and that it reminded me of Mr. Finch. That too could partially be why I was so emotional this last week.

Yesterday in the middle of watching episode three or something I got an email notification that Lucy Kalanithi, (his wife out here in the real world), had seen and liked that tweet.

That made me cry too.

This morning I took a break and watched the livestream of the service at my church and the guest minister in talking about the deepest kind of love, quoted Nikos Kazantzakis, calling it “The Full Catastrophe”.

The congregation, my congregation, laughed when he said it, but it is oh so true.

May we revel in love, with all its attendant difficulties, for as long as we are oh so humanly able.

Last updated February 15, 2016