Dear friends and readers,
Just now I’m reading and studying Victor Nunez’s screenplay and film, Ruby in Paradise, a powerful profound truthful (all that) appropriation of Northanger Abbey. After a moment of tension over very different world views,
Ruby quotes from what was Mike’s Christmas present to her, The Poems of Emily Dickinson:
She dealt her pretty words like Blades –
How glittering they shone –
And every One unbared a Nerve
Or wantoned with a Bone –
She never dreamed – she hurt –
That – is not Steel’s Affair –
A vulgar grimace in the Flesh –
How ill the Creatures bear –
To ache is human – not polite –
The Film upon the eye
Mortality’s old Custom –
Just locking up – to Die
Ruby will not accede to conventional Christian morality as imprisoning and painful no matter if it costs her Mike; he cannot but hold to it. Is this a poem about being one’s self at the cost of being alone. Which is it to lock the self up: when you pretend to what you are not, or when you are true to your beliefs, act them out? Dickinson paid a high price and here she expresses how the hurt feels. How others might see her choice. (see Pilgrim Soul)
How do you read this poem?
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 