Sarah aesthetics, book, quote

The Bell Jar

Then Doctor Nolan unlocked a door at the end of the hall and led me down a flight of stairs into the mysterious basement corridors that linked, in an elaborate network of tunnels and burrows, all the various buildings of the hospital.

The walls were bright, white lavatory tile with bald bulbs set at intervals in the black ceiling. Stretchers and wheelchairs were beached here and there against the hissing, knocking pipes that ran and branched in an intricate nervous system along the glittering walls. I hung on to Doctor Nolan’s arm like death, and every so often she gave me an encouraging squeeze.

Finally, we stopped at a green door with Electrotherapy printed on it in black letters. I held back, and Doctor Nolan waited. Then I said, “Let’s get it over with,” and we went in.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Sarah aesthetics, book, quote

Tunnels | Girl, Interrupted

It was a typical December day in the Boston area: tin-colored clouds spitting bits of rain mixed with flat watery snowflakes and just enough wind to make you wince.

“Tunnels,” said the nurse.

Out the double-locked double doors and down the stairs as usual—our ward was on the second floor for added security. There were many doors in the hallway, one of which went outside. The nurse opened another one, and we went down a second flight of stairs. Then we were in the tunnels.

First their wonderful smell: They smelled of laundry, clean and hot and slightly electrified, like warmed wiring. Then their temperature: eighty at a minimum, and this when it was thirty-three outside, probably twenty-five with wind chill (though in the innocent sixties, wind chill, like digital time, hadn’t yet been discovered). Their quavery yellow light, their long, yellow-tiled walls and barrel-vaulted ceilings, their forks and twists and roads not taken, whose yellow openings beckoned like shiny open mouths. Here and there, on white tiles embedded in the yellow, were signposts: CAFETERIA, ADMINISTRATION, EAST HOUSE.

Sarah movie, quote

Werckmeister Harmonies

Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) BĂ©la Tarr

Werckmeister Harmonies is a 2000 Hungarian drama mystery film screened at the 2000 Toronto Film Festival. It’s directed by BĂ©la Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky and is based on the 1989 novel The Melancholy of Resistance by LĂĄszlĂł Krasznahorkai written during the time of the iron curtain.

Werckmeister Harmonies is a slow-moving film shot in black-and-white and composed of thirty-nine long paced shots. It attempts to depict and explain why society is inherently flawed. The film shows Jånos, whose thrown into a mental institution, and his uncle György on their journey among helpless rioting citizens during the communist Hungarian era as a mysterious dark circus comes to town with a giant whale and a 25-lb circus freak.

The title refers to the baroque musical theorist named Andreas Werckmeister, whose harmonic principles are responsible for aesthetic and philosophical problems in music and need to be undone by a new theory of tuning and harmony. Basically, in Western music, we have a tuning system for instruments created by Andreas Werckmeister. Werckmeister’s theory is no good because his tuning allows instruments to sound good but sacrifices the purity of sounding perfect. Therefore, modern music is not pure like naturally tuned instruments from long ago. Werckmeister Harmonies is about mankind’s need to quantify the unquantifiable and our need to create artificial order. This movie speaks in metaphor and is a cinematic work of art.

Werckmeister Harmonies ranks 56th on BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century. It is a beautiful yet disturbing film.

Sarah movie, quote

Angels of the Universe

Angels of the Universe (2000)

When I was a boy, the patients went around in uniforms that looked like canvas bags.

-They changed that years ago. The policy now is to make hospitals look as much like ordinary homes as possible.

Why do you think that is?

-Because ordinary homes have become so much like hospitals.

About the Movie

Angels of the Universe aka Englar Alheimsins is one of my favorite movies that has won many awards. It’s often referred to as the Icelandic One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It’s based on Einar Mar Gudmundsson’s 1995 novel of the same name. The movie, which came out in 2000, is basically about a painter named PĂĄll who goes insane after his girlfriend leaves him. PĂĄll’s parents send him to a mental hospital where he meets a guy named Óli who believes he’s a songwriter for The Beatles, and Viktor, who likes to sign his name as Adolf Hitler. This movie shows his struggle in and out of the hospital and the people he meets along his way in life.

Sarah quote

My Experiences in a Lunatic Asylum

“In my weakened perceptions I at first thought that the mansion was a hotel. Left alone in a big room on the first evening, I was puzzled by the entrance of a wild-looking man, who described figures in the air with his hand, to an accompaniment of gibber, ate a pudding with his fingers at the other end of a long table, and retired. My nerve was shaken to its weakest, remember; and I was alone with him! It was not a hotel. It was a lunatic asylum.”

My Experience in a Lunatic Asylum. London, 1879. Print.

In February 1875, the barrister and author Herman Charles Merivale (1839-1906) was committed to Ticehurst in Sussex, a private lunatic asylum owned and run by the Newington family since 1792. Having suffered from what would nowadays be deemed as depression, Merivale spent almost seven months at Ticehurst where his mental state, intake of food, as well as his sleeping habits were recorded in a casebook. After initially being released in September 1875, he returned to the asylum within a year on account of suicidal tendencies and was later transferred out of the hospital in 1877 although his condition had not improved.

Read My Experiences in a Lunatic Asylum by a Sane Patient written by Herman Charles Merivale in 1879 on the Public Domain Review.

Sarah quote

The Insane World

“Tous les hommes sont fous, et, malgrĂ© tous leurs soins
Ne diffùrent entre eux que du plus ou du moins.”

“All men are mad, and, spite of all finesse,
The madness differs but in more or less.”
-Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux