JUST SAYIN’-By now, many of you have seen the new movie release, Lucy—well worth the time spent viewing it (and great for thought-provoking discussion afterward). It is not my intent to review the film but to expand upon its motif.
The “original” Lucy is said by scientists to be the mother of all humans--that “modern humans evolved from this original African branch.” The Lucy protagonist in the movie seems to represent the thread that binds us all and asks us to make the connection from before the Big Bang to the future that we are left to fashion.
I was awed and enthralled by the expansive scenes that she envisioned and allowed the audience to share. Throughout this artistic rendering, I was reminded of a piece I had written some time ago that connects quite well with the themes explored in this film.
Allow me to share it with you now:
THE PLAN
And so we ask ourselves, What is God's plan? Or has another Someone set the wheels in motion? What would Faulkner say, "A wheel within a wheel"? Is it Boethius' idea of predestination or have Romeo's Fates taken hold? Was Proust right to have us live in the imagination? What of Sartre's existential view of responsibility and self-creation?
So many questions--yet never a definitive answer to put to rest our desperate, unrequited longings for the verities. And what of Rest? Remember George Herbert's pulley? We are torn between rest and restlessness. Pandora proved the case--Hope. Hope lies ahead (already dangling, tantalizing before our outstretched fingers) but always just beyond our reach--remember the grapes?
And so we ask ourselves again, What is the plan? God seems to look down upon the linear progression She has created, peering mirthfully from behind that cloud, holding back a godlike chuckle, watching us strive, hearing us question; seeing us reach out and draw back. Full of fear, full of promise--with Hope yet on the horizon.
Do we dare go forward full of courage and audacity, believing we can make our own lives, or does God at once look down on Past, Present, and Future, knowing what has been and what will be? But does that mean He has made the choices for us or is She but a witness to what must or can be?
Do we not need a foil, after all, to tell good from bad, right from wrong, virtue from sinfulness? Does sin come from the right or left hand?
Has God willed our choices or does He only know of them beforehand? What hand does She take in all of this? Can we experience freewill? May we? Can we experience both at once or only one at a time?
Who is responsible for our decisions? Is it God or is it Man? Do both take equal credit? If so, isn't Man presumptuous? Or is God? Such blasphemy! Are we scared--to think, to contemplate, to suggest, to dare? Are "scared" and "sacred" one and the same? Who are we? Did not after all God make man? Or did Man create God and thus ourselves?
And so we ask ourselves, What is Man's plan? What is God's?
Does God laugh at us as we struggle along the craggy terrain of life, or does God feel the pain of our pitiable and anguished cries as we lay injured with palms outspread? Does God thus wish to change what has been done? After all, was not Superman told not to change the course of human events? Can God re-do, un-do, re-new? Is God our Father or our Mother whose goal it is to parent us, to teach us, to prepare us, to perfect us? Does God cry for us? Does God laugh?
And so we ask ourselves, What is God's plan?
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Food for thought and further discussion … Lucy is everywhere and by inference so are we!
Just sayin’.
(Rosemary Jenkins is a Democratic activist and chair of the Northeast Valley Green Alliance. Jenkins has written Leticia in Her Wedding Dress and Other Poems, A Quick-and-Easy Reference to Correct Grammar and Composition and Vignettes for Understanding Literary and Related Concepts. She also writes for CityWatch.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 63
Pub: Aug 5, 2014
