“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world, and a desire to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” –E.B. White
I am indebted to Robert Durden (as in yesterday’s link down in the comment section) for mentioning this quotation. I don’t think it’s a great insightful one, but it helped me frame a thought. Which was–the raging overtly political posts, those are the Save the World ones, and all the rest are some kind of Savoring.
The STW posts are flawed in a particular way, because I don’t honestly believe there is any chance that the world, the civilized human world, will be saved, or even should be saved. So … they’re not very productive except for providing a ventilation system for more or less justified rage. They say in essence: ‘Look. We done fucked up. Here’s exactly how. How bright and prescient am I’?
The savoring posts are on average not as technically proficient in literary terms, but they are innately more belletristic. They’re not as sharp, in either sense: not as stylish, not as deadly.
This is one of them.
I’m finally telling you about a truly good and truly noir bit of cinema.
There are a lot of outstanding performances, but of course the best parts are saved for Orson Welles, who directed, and Rita Hayworth, who in addition to being a heavenly beauty and a complex soul was married to Mr. Wellse in real life at the time.
The man is of course a cryptic template for any man who ever wanted to create real art.
From the perspective of the patriarchal, the woman is the ultimate and iconic prize for actually creating it, and at the same time inevitably a Femme Fatale. I will leave it to more qualified sensibilities to say what else she was, except for this anecdote on her Wiki page:
“While Gilda was in release, it was widely reported that an atomic bomb which was scheduled to be tested at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean’s Marshall Islands would bear an image of Hayworth, a reference to her bombshell status. Although the gesture was undoubtedly meant as a compliment, Hayworth was deeply offended. Orson Welles, then married to Hayworth, recalled her anger in an interview with biographer Barbara Leaming: ‘Rita used to fly into terrible rages all the time, but the angriest was when she found out that they’d put her on the atom bomb. Rita almost went insane, she was so angry. … She wanted to go to Washington to hold a press conference, but Harry Cohn wouldn’t let her because it would be unpatriotic’.”
Her rage points to the existence of a deeper thoughtful human being than the surface starlet status would suggest.
To choose a word, it’s Justified.
I leave you, on the other hand, something to savor. It’s a snippet of lyric from the only song in the film, sung by Rita’s character. It goes:
Comes a change in weather;
Comes the change of heart
And who knows when the rain will start?
The weather doesn’t stay the same. The heart … has its reasons, that reason knows nothing of.
Nobody knows when the storm will come and change everything, and not-knowing is an essential part of the unfathomable miracle we call our lives.
Her given name was Margarita Carmen Cansino.
Her father, a Gypsy from Spain, “partnered with his 12-year-old daughter to form an act called the Dancing Cansinos … Since under California law Margarita was too young to work in nightclubs and bars, her father took her with him to work across the border in Tijuana”.
In addition to putting her to work so that she never graduated high school, her father also sexually assaulted her. Apparently the only person she confided that to was Welles.
She said of herself: “Basically, I am a good, gentle person, but I am attracted to mean personalities.”
So of course she was angry. She overcame it to become not only the Queen of Hollywood, but the mother of a real-life princess.
Overcoming came at the price of a lot of destructive coping mechanisms.
“Orson Welles noted Hayworth’s problem with alcohol during their marriage, but he never believed that her problem was alcoholism. ‘It certainly imitated alcoholism in every superficial way’, he recalled in 1983. ‘She’d fly into these rages, never at me, never once, always at Harry Cohn or her father or her mother or her brother. She would break all the furniture and she’d get in a car and I’d have to get in the car and try to control her. She’d drive up in the hills suicidally. Terrible, terrible nights. And I just saw this lovely girl destroying herself’.”
At the age of sixty, she was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.
One wonders: How early? Did it contribute to the other destructive behaviors? Was it instead a cause of them?
In any case she was never neurotypical.
What causes us to be who we are? Biology? Environment? Trauma?
She died the night I woke up in a sleeping bag in the rain at Mount Tabor Park, Portland, Oregon, and vowed to turn my life around.