The Gray Swan...

NOTE: I cannot recommend anyone seeing this movie, ever.  It is highly disturbing and may actively offend you on many levels.  With that being said:

I saw this movie called "The Black Swan" while stuck playing on the road. It was late, there was a laud of icy snow coating the ground, hardly anyone was downtown or in the theater and my husband and young child were hundreds of miles away. I was quickly warped back to my college days when I would wait until my practice egg timer for the week had rung and treat myself to a solo movie.

My thoughts were so moved that it made me want to share them:

Song for this post:

1. This movie accurately represents the intensity of a really affective artistic process.

2. Nina, the main character, is incredibly unstable, undeveloped, ignorant, sheltered and entirely too identifiable.

3. The creative side of the mind is stubborn and powerful and should be honored with patience and reverence.

4. It took a hallucinating suicidal abuse victim to accurately represent the feeling I have when I am doing my job correctly.

There is a verse from the fifth chapter of Matthew in the Bible that says,
“Be ye perfect as I am perfect.”
The context of this verse speaks of loving others, befriending those who attempt to harm you, and there is a beautiful quote from verse 45 that says, “Making your sun to rise on both the evil and the good.” I think of this often, while playing and while living.

My musings after the movie went back to being 19 and seeing my teacher’s as heroes. Musicians that I heard were still undiscovered by me and as I listened to them, I sat in awe of the way their musical investments and sound artistry made my mind wander. I thought of the curiosity I felt when my body responded to their sound – how? why? is this a predictable reaction? are other people around me feeling this too?

I learned at those concerts: The spectrum of human emotions and experience as seen and heard in works of art is directly illuminated by the reflections of the people that are observing. (Make your sun rise on both the evil and the good.) Be it the artist or the audience, we must open ourselves up to the realities that we wish to understand and imitate, but be warned! This may come at great personal expense. In the movie, Nina didn’t have to become the black swan to dance the black swan, and she wasn’t really the white swan. She had just not yet discovered her gray. At the moment that we shared with her in this film, she was spoiled by entitlement and affirmation, imprisoned by the validation of others and she accidentally built her life around a singular, undefined goal, mostly because no one warned her not to. And the underbelly of that selfish ambition turned out to be something much more dangerous than success. Something none of her heroes wished for her:


No life at all.