This
Journal

November
1999

Looking back on yesterday's comments about numbers, I recognize a creepy arrogance in me...as if there were no good reason for people to buy into numerology or astrology or phrenology or whatever. I think people buy into that stuff not only because they're stupid but because we have not yet settled or satisfied our deep human need for Magic, Romance, The Beyond. As long as we're emotion-laden, death-bound beings, we'll always want More. And that's a good thing I think. Religion is always there to remind us that we'll never get it in this life. Religions go wrong when they try to get us to stop looking for it. (Well, that's one of the ways they go wrong.) We are not wired to stop looking...the transcendant/heroic quest seems a necessary part of our survival kit.

Tonight I saw Tim Burton's gorgeous Sleepy Hollow. It looks great but is unevenly stitched at some seams. We get too many speeches (well, two or three - but any are too many) solely for the purpose of catching us up with the plot. It's as if they knew, "We better explain what they just saw because they are too dense and we are too tangled to make sense in any other, more cinematic way."

Still, I had an English Teacher Moment during one of these awkward spells. Ichabod has been having dreams of a beautiful woman, a grim man in black, a white room, a red door, etc. He has unaccountable scars on the palms of his hands. When it finally all comes back to him, he delivers an explanatory speech to Katrina (and us). As noted, the speech is meant to clear away the debris so the plot can keep rolling; but Ichabod's insight led to my own ETM. The primal (oedipal) battle between the forces of beautiful Natural Magic and the dark powers of narrow-minded, death-dealing Religion was enacted in his childhood. He has become a scientific detective, a rationalist, now confronted by the utterly irrational: a murderous headless horseman. In this I sense a whiff of Washington Irving's spirit (though he had next to nothing to do with this plot). Beautiful Nature and Grim Religion had a baby, who grew up in love and in conflict with both. He became Scientist, Detective, Rationalist (in Irving's original, a boring schoolmaster).

My ETM involved a vision of three big literary "isms" (puritanism, rationalism, romanticism) swirling around in a bubbling pot. Dad is the Puritan; son is the Rationalist. The storyteller (Irving, Burton) is the Romantic, engaged in the impossible quest to reclaim the mother, Nature. In this film the Son only finds the Mother in The Girl (Katrina) who casts protective spells. It takes him awhile to recognize this; he first had to be willing to admit Mystery into the mix.

I have more thoughts on this, but I will hold off. I'm sorry. I needed to try to figure this out. Sometimes I just write for myself. Sometimes I confuse myself. If you think you understand what the heck I'm talking about here, please write to give me a brief paraphrase - because I haven't a clue.

There is a small steam engine in his brain which not only sets the cerebral mass in motion, but keeps the owner in hot water.
New York Weekly Mirror, (5 July 1845)