Metamorphosis & Notre Dame de Paris

If the photograph seems to be a bit weak in a technical sense, this is why: It is a digital photo of a slide being shown on a makeshift screen. Not too bad, when that is taken into consideration, right? The exact location of this photo is not necessary to know, but it would be safe to assume the water in the background is Lake Superior and that the photo was taken atop a minor league mountain by a minor league photographer named Fram Actual. It also would be safe to assume that the top, as well as the bottom, of this "large hill" is closely associated to the photographer in question. Neat view to wake up to in the morning, is it not?

A new identity merging with an old

I do not know who among you have read Franz Kafka's masterpiece, "The Metamorphosis." I do know I have been going through that transformation since at least January.

My metamorphosis is not like the one experienced by Gregor Samsa, other than beyond what might be recognizable through the natural advent of age. Mine has been exclusively internal, philosophical, having to do with the senses and with perception, if you will, at least in as much as a battle has ensued between an old order under siege by a new and unblemished persona.

My inner self wants to remain a Marine forever and wants to exist in White Anglo Saxon Protestant male theology and political dogma forever. It wants to stand on a mountain top and shout defiance and challenge to any who dare to threaten it. (Yep, pretty typical male ego at work there.) These elements have been in conflict with new concepts that not many years ago would never have existed in my life because there was no Internet, no blogs, no person-to-person connection between worlds distant not only in miles but in thought.

I have had a personal computer since 1985, probably before some of you were born. Back in "those days," I could have bought a new car for the same amount of money. That is how much I was willing to pay to gain a foothold in then-new computer technology. So, this has not been a sudden process. No detail is necessary here, only a reminder that what is new to some is part of the old to others.

Only a few years ago, my life was set into a track that was leisurely and in which I was reasonably content, if not actually happy. But, fate intervened. The curse of modern life, commonly labeled as a divorce, led to more than the dissolution of a marriage. As I have written before, my Sanctuary/Refuge atop a hill vanished along with the marriage.

As implied, even before divorce, the last few years of marriage consisted of a life routine, somewhat dull and based on avoiding the world as much as possible. No love, no new experiences, no challenges. To repeat myself, as I said a few days ago: ".... life is experience and the object of living, to me, should be to collect it. This is a given. My own interpretation of my own words is that we are the sum of our experiences; and each experience, whether good or bad, is of value to the formation of the whole; and we should be grateful for it."

It was comfort and conformity in exchange for learning and experiencing.

Thanks to a few individuals who frequent my page, I have been in a position to know more about how people live and think in countries other than my own. Reading a textbook or a novel does not help in this sense. Watching a travelogue on television or listening to news broadcast from other countries is near meaningless in this sense. Only real people convey emotions while they tell their truths and explain their thoughts as they understand them. This allows me to grasp how narrow my field of vision has been during the past decade or thereabouts.

Still, sadly for me, sometimes I think I might be the last romantic on earth. Everyone seems to be overly concerned with material goods and the personal accumulation thereof, most of these goods being little more than toys, or, as is the case with the new inhabitants of Washington, D.C., fixated upon radicalizing traditional America. Sadly, too, for practical reasons, I do not think there ever will be a house atop the hill from which the view above is shown.

In any case, thanks to a few individuals who talk here and who write their own posts on their own pages, while I still do want another castle on a hill, I do not want it for a while yet and no longer am bitter about losing the one I did have for a few years. Once, back then, I was ready to spend all my days roaming rooms and running woodlands. Now, I am curious once again. I want to learn more about what is beyond my own world. There is much out there to learn.

What? There is more to life than rock & roll?

Magdalena, who lives near Warsaw in Poland, regularly posts music on her page. A few weeks ago, she presented the performance that I have now "borrowed" from her and listed below. I knew absolutely nothing about this song or the show it came from, but I thought the music and the vision and to be lovely and irresistible beyond words. To discover more, I turned to a popular source of data these days, Wikipedia, of Internet fame. Here is the description found there:

"Notre Dame de Paris" is a French-Canadian musical which debuted on 16 September 1998 in Paris. It is based upon the novel, "Notre Dame de Paris," by the French novelist Victor Hugo. The music was composed by Riccardo Cocciante and the lyrics are by Luc Plamondon.

Since its debut, it has played throughout France, South Korea, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada. A shorter version in English was performed in 2000 in Las Vegas, Nevada, and a full-length London production, also in English, ran for seventeen months. Popular songs from the show, such as Belle and Le temps des cathédrales have also been translated into Belarusian, Catalan, Czech, German, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian and English.

"Notre Dame de Paris," according to the Guinness Book of Records, had the most successful first year of any musical ever. The score has been recorded at least seven times to date (2007): the original French concept album, which featured Israeli singer Achinoam Nini (aka Noa) as Esmeralda was followed by a live, complete recording of the original Paris cast. A complete recording of the score in Italian was made, along with a single disc of excerpts in Spanish from the Madrid production.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_QoESuLBLQ&feature=player_embedded