To ache is human … Nunez’s Ruby in Paradise

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

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