Recently while searching on Swedish local television for a programme in English that I could watch and be able to have some understanding of what was occuring, I encountered an American miniseries called "Angels in America". The series, produced by HBO, the famous US movie channel. At the time that I saw this show on Swedish TV they showed 3 episodes back to back and I thought that it was very interesting. For more info see the link peovided. Subsequently, I managed to borrow a copy of the full series and I am in the process of watching all the episodes. The other night I was not feeling well and woke up after midnight. Unable to go back to sleep I decided to watch some more. I was watching the 5th chapter I think, when the angel\messenger (played by Emma Thompson) visits one of the main characters, Prior, who is dying from AIDS, and she tells him the reason for her visits and his supposed purpose and role as a modern day prophet of sorts.
During their discussion, there was one line that jumped out and me and is the basis of my blog today.
"If you cannot find your heart's desire in your own backyard, you never lost it to begin with" Angels in America
To me this line in a long conversation stuck out because it seems to hold a quality of infinite wisdom but at the same time is a bit mysterious and calls us to ask and interpret for ourselves how this translates into our lives. I'd like to take the quote piece by piece and give my take on it. "If you cannot find your heart's desire in your own backyard..."- what does this mean....why would our heart's desire be in our backyard and not in the house with us? Does this suggest that our hearts' desires are usually buried, not in plain sight and requires some energy and sweat to uncover?... the second part "...you never lost it to begin with" the addition of this part of the sentence complicates it a bit for me to be honest. Maybe the idea is that a person may be looking for his\her heart's desire and their first instinct is to think that it is buried somewhere and they need to look for it in the proverbial 'backyard' but after we search through the backyard and spend time and energy trying our best to locate our desires if we don't find them they were never lost, they always resided in the very place they should be in our hearts. The statement could be a call to us to recognise that all the we need and we look for in life is usually resident in our hearts and if we take the time and energy to search in the chambers of our hearts before our 'backyards' we may find the journey towards discovering our desires much more productive and pleasurable.
2 comments:
That line is a quote from The Wizard of Oz, and it's meant to confound--that is, it doesn't make any sense, logically. That's why Prior (who is gay, of course, and we all know The Wizard of Oz has in some respects been appropriated by gay culture) knows the line and says it with the Angel, and that's also why she seems so surprised. Because, as Harper points out in the first play, the mind cannot make anything new, it just reassembles things.
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