Sitting here at the kitchen table, cast propped on a chair and tea at my elbow, pondering the interconnectedness of all things. What else is a hobbled truck driver to do with his time when he cannot go out and pick up offal and other assorted livestock byproducts?

However, sadly, for many the interconnectedness of all things is veiled from sight, obscured by the brilliance of our daylight rational round.

“The patriarchal point of view is distinguished from the earlier view by its setting apart of all pairs-of-opposites—male and female, life and death, true and false, good and evil—as though they were absolutes in themselves and not merely aspects of the larger entity of life.”—Joseph Campbell, Occidental Mythology

Those are the type things I read and ruminate upon when cast and crutches force me to stay home. Oh blessed cast and crutches!

It’s intermission, hence the tea. I’m watching Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Flute for the second time in as many days.

And of course, there it all is again.

Yesterday I watched a National Film Board documentary entitled The Goddess Remembered. It was good, though it stuttered a bit when they interviewed the talking heads, who were naturally all female. Lots of chatter about ‘hierarchy’ and ‘patriarchy’, and returning to the more ‘nurturing’ values of a ‘matriarchal’ order of life.

A line from Joseph Conrad’s The Heart Of Darkness just flashed to mind. It goes something like: “We must help women remain in their own world, lest our’s gets worse.” It’s one of those divinely inspired lines which enrage vociferously feminist factions. To me at any rate, it’s connected to The Goddess Remembered doc as much as the Campbell quote, as well as Mozart’s mytho-poetic Magic Flute. Not to mention another film waiting patiently in my iTunes rental library: Apocalypse Now.

  But back to Mozart’s Magic Flute. The male and female principles are estranged and quarreling. Ring a bell? The daughter is caught between them and has recently been lured away from the mother by Sarastro, her father, a sinister figure at first. But he is not so, although his servant Monostatos–who has imprisoned the daughter–is.

Monostatos is a moor, vaguely Levantine, via North Africa and Spain. Can he be Mozart’s circumspect personification of the one true and everlasting Christian Church? Having imprisoned maiden nature?

Enough. The orchestra is tuning up for the second act.

Will the daughter, Pamino, and Prince Tamino, fired by the strength of their love for one another overcome all trials set before them and thus reunite the sundered principles of Life, the male and the female?

What year was the Magic Flute produced, 1791?

Have they yet?

Don’t tell the guys at work how I pass my days, please.