A STAR IS BORN



I was disappointed by most of the films I attended over the last few years. Is this another example of time passing very quickly and not being in touch with today’s popular culture? Last weekend I decided to take another chance and decided to go see A star is Born…  

Within the first few minutes not only was I not disappointed, but I was transported to another world, forgetting where I was and totally immersed in it… It is a great movie, fantastically acted by Lady Gaga and wonderfully directed and acted by Bradley Cooper.

Both bring so much honesty, depth and truth in the characters they portray that they made me forget time and where I was.

During the movie, I felt tears running down my cheeks many times. Sometimes tears of sadness and pain and sometimes tears of joy and happiness for the characters’ total immersion in life. By telling their stories, they were able to bring to the surface my understanding of who I believe I am. Elements within me forgotten for years or even decades. I was not watching them- I was with them- I became one of them. Laughing and suffering with them.

I left the theater with a new hope for an art form that was a great passion of my life for many years: films. Yes, movies when they are real piece of art or showing real humanity can bring us discoveries and some truth about life, and new ways of thinking and even being.                           

I walked home along the same old dirty streets as I always do but this time, they were looking different, people were suddenly more interesting, and many aspects of the surroundings were now visible to me for the first time. I was walking with a mind full of Passion and Renewed Desire to go deeper in my thoughts about the passing life, the purpose of existence, day-to-day experiences and the essential nature of being alive.

One line in the movie was haunting me:” IF YOU DO NOT GO DOWN TO THE BOTTOM OF YOUR SOUL, YOU WILL LOSE YOU LEGS” … This line whispered by Bradley Cooper to Lady Gaga about interpretation and being an artist was resonating very strongly in my head. 

It was a powerful reminder of what had often been a guiding force of my youth and later most of my artistic enterprises. This line is the equivalent of that line I incessantly repeated to myself, to actors, singers, friends, and even strangers…This notion was, at the time, a rule of life and the rule of managing ourselves. It was a way to handle relationships, and even the most basic of rules for behavior in a wide array of situations and opportunities presented by life.

And now, after all these years, it was coming back to me so strongly and I recalled what I believed to be true throughout most of my life: REACHING THE BOTTOM OF YOUR SOUL IS THE BEGINNING OF TRUE ART AND EVEN TRUE LIFE. 

BUT SOUL??? SOUL???? We can ask, what does the word really mean?

How can we define SOUL? Is soul the conglomeration of what we were given at birth, by genetics, by education? Is it a given from the beginning?

 YES, ALL OF THIS! BUT IT ALSO contains our great happy moments and the big traumas and sometimes tragedies, the different experiences, the learning adventures, the successes and the failures, the encounters, the accumulated knowledge from every day moment of discoveries… The books we’ve read, music we’ve heard and sometimes, EVEN FILMS. 

All of these build our souls… 

But we must keep our souls perpetually present and at the surface or at least ready to be brought to the surface. We must use it often and not bury it in the dark depths, comfortable sense of security created by living without feeling. 

We all have a soul. Some souls are more intense, or more experienced, or have more wounds or joys built by life, but each of us has a soul and we have to dig into it and learn from it and bring it to the surface when demanded by moments of significant challenges or pain, and also in the big moments of trust and love.

Yes, of course, if we are not careful or really in command of ourselves, bringing our soul to the surface could be dangerous, could be threatening, could be at the edge of catastrophe. This is especially true in a world laden with selfishness, with intense competition, with people waiting for any small misstep to take advantage of us and even sometimes use it to destroy our lives.

BUT IT IS THE WAY TO BE IN CONTROL OF OUR DESTINY, TO BE ALIVE, TO BE AN ARTIST, AND ALSO TO FIND SOME PEACE IN OURSELVES ...

I left the theater almost as a new man, or at least a renewed man, full of strength and full of the reborn desire to tell everyone around me what I think to be true… and to share with others what I believe, what I know and what I dream about… Yes, I still dream…It is and always must be part of my soul.

Do not be confused, dreams are only the reality we hide…the reality of the surreal… Too often in life we seat in the waiting room of achievement. We rarely are totally satisfied, wondering and wandering. Or more precisely, we go through a perpetual attack of self-attempt to define ourselves, always trying to pursue the road to finally become a fully-realized entity…                                                                                                                                                                    

GO TO THE BOTTOM OF YOUR SOUL AND SAVE YOUR LEGS, and you will transport yourself to another dimension, you will be assaulted by the discovery of yourself through your revealed soul and your revealed SELF. 

We will suddenly wake up from an eternity of self-indulgence, when we believed that the world owed us something… After too much time spent in non-action, in limbo of the antechamber of revelations, after years of neglect, of waiting for Godot…Let’s get comfortable GOING TO THE BOTTOM OF OUR SOUL and our world will change.

Yes, some of us have our souls always omnipresent, but this is a GIFT FROM GOD. These people represent a very small minority; Most of us do not have this luck or destiny, so we must continuously build ourselves by the intense, incessant search for our soul.

Unfortunately, to have one’s soul omnipresent and at the surface is not always well received by others, and the vulnerability that it creates can be difficult and challenging… Sometimes it can be a big handicap for functioning in our society and is perceived as a threat.

Some of us are perceived as difficult people, or egocentric, or strange, or non-conformists, and sometimes are not accepted by the majority.

                                                                                                           What to think? What to do? Where is the truth? I know every generation has problems, I know that every generation is asking for something different while the preceding generation wants to protect its norms.

When I was 8 or 9, I dreamt of becoming a famous actor as an escape from the nightmarish world in which I lived…. I collected in a book, looking at it every day, pictures of my favorite American actors. Closing my eyes, I was transported in the Wild West with John Wayne or I was on ‘On the Water front”. with Marlon Brando. 

Or I dreamt of being a character in a Russian novel, a character of Gogol or a character of Pushkin.

How did these men become so famous? Why were they so often idolized? Were their souls always present in their performances? I think they were, we can deny them as people or negate them as artists, but their souls were always present, and they achieved a total unity.

In any case, I am thinking of my friends or the people I believe are my friends, and even the young people who want to be REAL PEOPLE and the ones who want to be artists, performers, and singers.. 

To you I say: GO TO THE BOTTOM OF YOUR SOUL and develop a cult for work, a cult for perfection or at least an attempt at perfection.

Dismiss the world of immediate retribution which has engulfed us, build your soul with who you are and not with what you believe you deserve to be.

Accumulate experiences, memories, and knowledge and bring them to the BOTTOM OF YOUR SOUL.