When Parsifal enters the grail castle he forgets to ask the master of the castle the appropriate question, "whom does one serve with the grail?" This question must be asked in order for the fisher king to be healed but instead the question is not asked and the castle and all the kingdon turns to wasteland. Years later Parsifal returns to have one more try and this time succeeds in asking the question and in turn the Fisher King is healed and Parsifal is able to see the grail.
The reason Parisfal does not succeed when he was young because he was not ready and this was symbilzed by his wearing the shirt given to him by his mother when he left home to follow the knights and the code of chivalry.
When I arrive to see Nic he is surrounded by women. His mother and two sisters. He is struggling to breathe. He seems the same except for his hair and some gray and some wrinkles. But not much different. He struck me as someone who never made it out of the mother realm. He was still wearing his mothers shirt. She was pissed off that he hadn't taken it off yet. It seemd like the "shirt of Nessus" that Hercules wore and caused him to burn. All these women anxious to mother him and deeply disappointed that they had to.
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The womb becomes the tomb. The cradle becomes the grave.
ReplyDeleteI watched Hitchcock's "Strangers on the Train" last night. As in "Psycho", the villain is deeply trapped in an Oedipal relationship. It seems Hitchcock is saying the worst sort of monster a man can become is an eternal boy.
I shared dinner with a high school friend last week. It was a rare opportunity to revisit what had been perceived as a betrayal and discover the other's point of view on what had transpired. Like Rashomon, the memories differed greatly. So many assumptions were untrue, clouded by one's own perspective. We are endeavoring to resurrect the friendship. It will be interesting to see which bricks from the old building can be built into the new one.