Beltane                                                Garlic Moon

Here there be giants.  Fin de siecle Europe.  We’ve not recovered yet from the explosion of ideas that erupted there:  quantum mechanics, relativity, Marxism, symbolists, dada, surrealism, the airplane, electricity, lights, antibiotics, cubism, expressionism, fauvism, psychoanalysis, world war.

Just finished watching A Dangerous Method with Vigo Mortennsen as Freud, Michael Fassbender as Jung and Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein.  To my taste Cronenberg’s focus on Jung’s mistress tilted the film away from the revolutionary work Freud and Jung had created.  But, perhaps my approach would lead more to documentary.

Still, what I got was a clear sense of the frisson between them and the astonishing, breath-taking really, courage it took to think the thoughts and engage in the work they did.  That’s what led me back to the fin de siecle.

There were radicals alive.  It must have been in the water.  Seeing visions.  Looking inside the mind.  Down inside the atom.  How to lift humankind into the air.  How to cure disease.

The audacity and daring inspires me, makes me want to tread as far out on the pier as I can go, to risk falling into the void, the abyss.  To see.  To feel.  To embrace.