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| Lee Miller's military ID. Source. |
Last week I described how we Quakers peeked out of an obscure corner of the Atheist's Companion in the form of a sort of earnest verbal caricature. Here's another place where you might not expect a Quaker to show up: the world of European surrealism between the wars.
Today's example comes from a film I watched on the plane trip coming home from the Nordic Yearly Meeting. The film was Lee, a biopic depicting important episodes from the life of American model, photographer, and war correspondent Lee Miller, starring Kate Winslet in the title role. Winslet was also one of the producers and financiers of the film.
Many critics were not kind to the film, some charging that it was a standard-issue biopic with a confusing timeline, lifted only by the gifted performance of Winslet. I disagree; a flashier treatment would not have done the material justice. I was very impressed by the emotional range of the film, starting with scenes of Miller's merry bohemian social life in the years before World War II, and going on to portray her convincing transformation into a determined wartime photojournalist, eventually talking her way into post-Normandy France, and then into a fierce documentarian of Nazi atrocities, driven by "icy fury" to record for posterity what she saw in the death camps.
In the film, these vivid experiences and the resulting photos from those episodes are being prompted now and then by questions from an unidentified interviewer. Only at the end of the film do we learn who that interviewer was and the exact nature of the interview. The framing worked perfectly for me.
(If you insist, here's Wikipedia's summary of the film, but I recommend not reading it until you see the film first.)
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| Roland Penrose. Source. |
One of her lovers, and eventually her husband, was British surrealist artist Roland Penrose, played in the film by Alexander Skarsgård. Roland is the Quaker character. His pacifism does not allow him to join up for a combat role in wartime; instead he becomes an air raid warden, and eventually makes his skills in camouflage available to the British military.
I immediately thought of a somewhat parallel Quaker character: Arthur Stanley Eddington, who conceived of his wartime (World War I) scientific research as a contribution to the scientific search for truth, a search which had no national boundaries. Therefore it was ethical in his mind to communicate across enemy lines with Albert Einstein to try to figure out why Mercury's orbit did not quite conform to Newtonian expectations.
Roland Penrose was an incredibly active artist, creative organizer, and socialite. How much energy he put into his life as a Quaker, after his early service with the Friends' Ambulance Unit, isn't as clear to me. Eddington, on the other hand, was an active Friend. His Swarthmore Lecture of 1929 argued for the compatibility of faith and scientific inquiry. Rather than becoming a full-time Quaker activist, that faith drove him to devote himself to a productive life of scientific discoveries and related worthwhile controversies.
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| The Presence in the Midst, 1916. Source. |
Both Penrose and Eddington came from well-known Quaker families. Roland's most famous ancestor (at least among Quakers) might be his father James Doyle Penrose, whose painting "The Presence in the Midst" is in many Quaker homes.
Among Roland's contemporary relatives is his nephew Roger Penrose, a well-known mathematical physicist, and also a very effective explainer of particle physics, consciousness and physics, and related topics, to the general public. In terms of faith, he describes himself as an agnostic, but see this Wikipedia summary for his own interesting twist.
I've been reflecting on the contrast between these lives, and these families, and my own background. I did not come from a Quaker background. Quite the opposite. My parents came from opposite sides of World War II and were not above fighting the war all over again in their worst arguments. My father's background was the military resistance to Nazi occupation of his country; my mother was born and raised as a German in Japan, and insisted to me that our family comes from "officer class."
My Quaker faith was a direct outcome of a personal conversion, a joyful experience of meeting Jesus and then looking for the best home to honor and continue that elemental experience—despite the weight of my parents' disapproval. You Friends gave me that home, and ever since I've wanted others to have that same generous welcome. I've worked directly among Friends in service of that goal, with mixed results, but with no regret. That may be a different trajectory from that of the Penroses and Eddingtons and their lives of creativity and research, but if they and others like them hadn't been there—with all their variety, faithfulness, eccentricities, tangents, piety (James Doyle Penrose) and merriment (Roland Penrose)—where would I be now?
Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Back on the Struggle to Thrive and Not Just Barely Survive.
Certainly, today’s ongoing political crisis should remind concerned Christians that they can’t sit out the battle for the Bible and should remind the rest of us that we can’t concede religion to extremists. Christian nationalists weaponize the Good Book because they believe they have a monopoly on morality and can distort the word of God with impunity.
Gary Shteyngart's poignant question: his parents got him out of Soviet Russia at the right time; should his family now leave the U.S.?
I imagined, in my least cynical moments, that Russia would become more like America over the years, or at the least more habituated to pluralism and the rule of law. Of course, the very opposite happened. America is becoming Russia with every day. The tractors I would watch on Soviet television leading to ever more heroic harvests are now tariffs that will bring manufacturing back to our land. The dissidents who were the Soviet enemy within are now the vastly fictionalised Tren de Aragua gang members who supposedly terrorise our land, and indeed all migrants deemed insufficiently Afrikaner.
Diana Butler Bass on Magdalene and the new creation.
I think it's beautiful that the resurrection account isn't an account of simply words that Mary Magdalene is going to preach, that she's going to go off and tell information to the other disciples. But, instead there is, in this garden, a sort of a remaking of Mary Magdalene and her whole relationship with Jesus. I think that's part of the do not embrace me yet moment. There is this reunion that is happening between them – but not as what we typically think of a male and female joining – in word and in spirit that will result in a new creation being birthed.
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| Writer's Cabin. |
What Nancy Thomas learned at "The Writer's Cabin."
C. Wess Daniels: Attention and empire's algorhythms.
Empire's algorithm wants us to see each other as enemies, as commodities, and as less than human.
But fortunately, we are not powerless against these forces.
Racism: an informal five-question survey.
Austin City Limits celebrates its 50th anniversary. Here are Gary Clark, Jr., and Eve Monsees, two of my favorites! "Pride and Joy."
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