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Rivers – Welcome To The Magical Friendship Squad! http://michaelmurray.ca Michael Murray Writes Things Thu, 04 Oct 2018 19:20:21 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.3 Mahogany http://michaelmurray.ca/mahogany http://michaelmurray.ca/mahogany#comments Thu, 04 Oct 2018 19:20:21 +0000 http://michaelmurray.ca/?p=7191  

The film Mahogany was released in 1975.

It was a melodrama of it’s time, a rags to riches story in which Diana Ross fought to become a great fashion icon before giving it all up for love.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra71dvxOVX8

It was not a critical darling. It was a one-and-a-half stars kind of movie, an enterprise that revealed that although Diana Ross was a great diva, she was not destined to become a great actress, and ever since, the movie’s been slowly dissolving into the past. I bring this up just to say that if you missed it, there is little reason to want to go and find it.

Nevertheless, when a pair of friends asked if I’d like to see it with them last week, I jumped at the chance. I’ve known both these movie-going women for over thirty years now and the sheer improbability of that– that we would travel such great and impossible distances through time– and still be connected, was a kind of miracle to me and I would have gone anywhere they asked.

It feels important to note that when the movie was made the three of us were all just children. Not one of us would have yet reached the age of ten, and the worlds we inhabited then were as small, beautiful and mysterious as marbles lost in a forest. The movie, regardless of it’s failings or virtues, was an extraordinary time capsule that opened up all around us in the popcorn dark of the theatre. It was impossible not to see ghost-images of your own life as the frames passed by. Perhaps a snatch of music would summon my childhood cat, or the shape of a car would remind me of a family trip, a dress, a friend of my sister…And to be called back to those lost spaces and allowed to just float there for a few hours, to drift along this underground river free from the obstacles, complications and mortal apprehensions of the adult world, was a glowing, holy thing.

And then the movie was over. We chatted for a moment on the street, and then the three of us headed back into our current lives, each one likely marvelling at the forces that charted our days and brought us together again, compressing time on this autumn night so far from where we started.

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Constellation Jones http://michaelmurray.ca/constellation-jones http://michaelmurray.ca/constellation-jones#comments Sun, 26 Apr 2015 01:48:20 +0000 http://michaelmurray.ca/?p=5308 It feels like being swept along in a surging river. I reach out for rocks, pieces of information, something I can cling to, but I’m yanked from them almost immediately, submerged and spinning, swallowing water, and then for a moment my head pops up and I gasp for air, hoping to get my bearings and grab hold of a branch or something certain, but then I’m pulled along again, spiralling downstream….

This whole thing, this trek through the land of illness, has the definitive feel of an ancient Greek Odyssey, and I’ve come to believe that I’m on a hero’s quest.

comic achilles killing hector

Quietly, at dawn, as I’m wheeled down through the subterranean tunnels that connect the university hospitals, the porters serve as my guides.

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Their various languages flock overhead, the mysterious syllables disperse above me and it’s like they’re communicating a kind of weather instead of words. Descending into this unexplored dimension we pass creatures and topography as strange and wonderful as mythology, my porter/guides taking me on obscure missions where I must slay monsters, solve riddles and exhibit great feats of strength and determination in order to inch closer to my destiny, to my ultimate goal.

And somewhere past imagination, our son Jones pours through space. Laid bare to mystery, he carries messages and lessons from beyond. He hurtles through the firmament now, our meteor, cresting planets with a fierce, unstoppable purpose– he’s everywhere at once, multivalent. He’s assembling in slow wonder inside my wife, while I, caught in a terrestrial and mortal struggle, battle to be present, hurrying to be there to catch him, when like some sort of impossible star descending, he falls into our life.

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