Posted by write4change
(here)
THE MIRROR HAS TWO FACES is one of my favorite movies starring Jeff Bridges and Barbra Streisand who also directed. It is also quite funny. And it is about the issues of love and loss from a woman's view, style over substance, and the lengths men go to avoid pain knowingly. Streisand was 54 when she made it and it is the last film she directed. The critics were brutal and most of the reviews I read were by women. Janet Margolin was so over the top. I play the film periodically and always see more layers. It is a work that will stand the older it gets. It will be seen as particularly appropos our time.
I have pursued love all my life like most of us. I have found it is always there waiting when you are finally ready enough to be still to feel it. While I pursued love I feared it for I always felt I would loose it. That is addressed in the movie. She is a professor at Columbia teaching literature and the moment we see her teaching about myths and archtypes and why they were created to explain love. She asks why do we continually pursue love when it is usually so brief and its loss so painful? And her students answer the need to propagate, DNA, etc. And she says, too intellectual for me. We all pursue love for when we have it even for a moment it feels so ****ing good we remember it all our lives.
I also always had a problem with the relatively recent idea of unconditional love. Where is unconditional love? And maybe that is why christian never worked for me. The prodigal son would never be a jewish story. There is no justice to it. The rebel son takes his share and splits and the faithful son does his duty and his reward is his father celebrating the rebel son and there will be a reduction in the faithful son's shares. etc. There is not the acknowledged joy of being faithful so much as the job of the return of the rebel.
The longer I have lived the more I have come to understand that all love is different. Not better, not equal--different. I have had many cats. When the first one died, I cried for three days. I did not have another cat for 7 years. When I was gifted with the second at a very needy time in my life, I found he was totally different and I loved him differently. Nothing of the memories of the first cat changed. They were never comparable, they were always different. Silly as it sounds, this insight changed my life with men and people in general. My first marriage legally lasted 7 years. I did not marry again for over a dozen years. The men in between were all different. Those I loved I loved differently and I was different with each of them.
Now as the circle is becoming complete in this life---I don't think about unconditional love, or monogamous love, or eternal love----I just think love. And I have found that if you keep loving and I have lost a daughter at 13 years and 10 months that almost killed me---that love will lift you beyond any pain and you can keep loving until all there is --- is love.
This is the best I can do to write of something I feel so profoundly.
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