Our Lady of Kibeho / Parliaments

[asakiyume]

I read a play, Our Lady of Kibeho, by Katori Hall. It's about three girls in a Catholic secondary school in Kibeho, Rwanda, in 1981, who have visions of the Virgin Mary. The play is beautiful--sharp and funny and light and deep and sad and true and profound, but not at all pretentious, if you can believe it. Here's just one quote, from one of the visionaries:

I saw a girl. Running down a hill. She had legs so long they could take her into tomorrow. She had feet so quick they could cut down blades of grass.

The girl is herself, but the vision gets grim, as she sees her own death. That was one of the striking things about the visions of Kibeho for the rest of the world--that they predicted the genocide of 1995. But even though the play does go there--not to the genocide, but to that prophecy--it's not an oh-my-gosh-they-predicted-the-future thing, not at all. It's more about what the intrusion of something as big and strange and extradimensional as a vision does for everyone in the circle of the visionaries. It made me think about how hard it is, actually, to accommodate that intrusion. Krishna may be able to fit the whole universe in his throat but we mortal types have a harder time with that stuff.

ETA: I forgot to mention that the play is based on historical fact. Our Lady of Kibeho is an approved Marian apparition.

* * *

In totally other news, my dad sometimes reminisces, when we're on the phone together, and some of those reminiscences can be wonderful. Even really brief ones. He was talking about a friend of his from high school: the friend lived in East Lexington and my dad lived more in the center of Lexington. They would bike to meet each other at some middle spot... "We'd sit there, smoking Parliaments," he said. That detail. My dad as a teenager, smoking Parliament cigarettes.

Okay folks, that's it for tonight. I just wanted to post *something* because it's been more than a week.

Comments

[sovay]

It's more about what the intrusion of something as big and strange and extradimensional as a vision does for everyone in the circle of the visionaries.

That sounds really good. How did you find the play?

They would bike to meet each other at some middle spot...

Aw! Do you know where?

[asakiyume]

Claire Cooney sent it to me! She knows the playwright--or maybe she doesn't personally know her, but she saw it performed?

It was really, really good. I keep trying to talk about it and not doing it justice at all.

[asakiyume]

Oh, and to your second question, he said, but I forgot the place! I will ask.

where in Lexington

[asakiyume]

So this is what my dad told me:

"If you're going along Mass Ave toward Boston, it's on the left. There's a lovely grassy area that slopes away from the road, and just before that there's a semicircular wall with flat stones on top, about 30 feet across."

I asked him if it was still around when my siblings and I were kids and if it was still likely to be there today, and he thought it was. Mind you, he hasn't actually been back to Lexington for about 12 years, so I'm not sure. I might look at Google Street view and see if I can find it.

found it!

[asakiyume]

It's across from Pelham road, at the corner of Tower Park, I think:

[minoanmiss]

//your "something" is two incredible beauties. *beams at you so much*

[asakiyume]

beaming right back at you!

[amaebi]

"She had legs so long they could take her into tomorrow. She had feet so quick they could cut down blades of grass." is so beautiful.

In my old and tired incredulity I have come to feel that the vast majority of humans (in the US, anyway) spend a lot of time and energy defending Not Paying Attention and Not Thinking. Maybe only the cataclysmic and beautiful can break through that. But then I think it's more likely that we're experiencing Julian-of-Norwich perceptions all the time and not thinking of them as important.

There are so many moments in the minds and bodies of the old, largely unsuspected, I think, by the young people to whom they may look monolithic and kind of dumb. I've been thinking a lot about that, too.

[asakiyume]

Maybe only the cataclysmic and beautiful can break through that. --You may be right. Certainly that's one thing the beautiful and the cataclysmic can do for us: break through.

Older people know (or can know; not everyone is equally interested in learning) so much more about human ways and and the way history goes, just based on time alive, watching. Younger people can't know these things in the same way--though what younger people have, or may have (again, same caveat), is the clarity that comes from a lack of that burden of experience--they have fresh eyes. When people listen to each other across generations, it's such a beautiful thing, so fruitful and enriching, but it takes care and interest and time ... like all good things we can make. .... That's just me riffing off your second paragraph rather than responding directly. It's like a linked-verse reply ;-)

[amaebi]

Yes, absolutely. And if I were to choose between a half-hour conversation with kids or with adults, knowing nothing else about them, I'd go for the kids, who don't typically make entire conversations out of reciting banalities.

Tangent/brag:
Chun Woo of course picked up some disdaining the parents habits from his colleagues. Some time in the past year or so it was getting too much for me, and I told him that I had been courteous to him since I met him (at 5 and a half months old)-- True, he said. (And then I thanked him and said that I demanded courtesy from him as well. And he's done much better since.)

Some years ago I was talking to a beautiful and dignified elderly parishioner, who told me among other things how she inadvertently found herself married to a bigamist, among other misadventures that were just grist to her mill. And I realized suddenly how seldom kids and young adults think that the older adults they know have ever been anything but stiff cutouts of some form of perfection....

[asakiyume]

Haha! That's pretty funny about the dignified elderly parishioner! She sounds like a good storyteller, among other things ;-) I think kids that are lucky enough to have similarly storytellingly inclined grandparents can get a sense of their grandparents as having an exciting or humorous or rebellious past, but I also think you're right that as for other adults and older people, kids are likely to see them as unchanging fixtures whose attitudes and behavior stretches back into the past unchanging.

I'm remembering stories my grandmother would tell about her adolescence--believing the piano practice room in the secondary school she went to was haunted, for instance :-)

I'm glad Chun Woo is being more courteous now--courtesy isn't just for strangers, kids! It's for your near-and-dear ones, too.

[amaebi]

In fact, she wasn't a particularly good storyteller, but the stories themselves were good. And I find that's often the case. Each person potentially a treasure box.

What's sad to me is the people who may think they're telling stories, but pretty much just tell you over and over what firecrackers they are, how fascinating and lively.

[asakiyume]

Yeah, that latter requires either (a) a lot of patience, (b) a way to change the topic, or (c) an escape route.

[amaebi]

(I practice patience until I can escape.)

[sartorias]

Wow, that play does sound profound.

Details, so vital.

details

[asakiyume]

They really are.

[larryhammer]

(Apropos an earlier thread, Eaglet was decidedly mixed on Little White Duck -- they appreciated the window on an earlier life in China and liked the legendary bits, but didn't like the episode with the chicks and thought the visit to the father's village was a downer of an ending.)

[asakiyume]

Thanks for catching me up. Yes, I think the episode with the chicks is sad, and the episode in the village is sad too. I think reading it as an adult, I didn't think of it as a downer so much as very sobering--if anything, I think she [ETA: meaning, the author] came out better for it--but I think that if I'd read it at Eaglet's age, I would have just felt very, very sad, and probably a bit anxious too. (As a kid, learning about other kids' hardships made me very anxious--but now I'm talking about me at a younger age than Eaglet is.)

Eaglet's reaction to the book seems like it was a good one--not that they liked it, but that they experienced it in a way that the author would hope that a young reader would experience it.

Refresh, refresh, refresh, but still no asakiyume all week and then TA DA!

[wayfaringwordhack]

I too want to put up a post about reminiscences, too! And one about cooking, and gardening and and and...

I might find the time--or take it--soon.

Re: Refresh, refresh, refresh, but still no asakiyume all week and then TA DA!

[asakiyume]

doooo iiiiit