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Bette_davis_the_little_foxes

I sometimes wish I’d had a more exaggerated life. Reading about theatre divas in murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea I have been reminded of how much explosive drama has been missing in my life

This may just be a strange fantasy to have. Why idealise the thought of living in an operatic hell? I just read about ‘massive symbolic moments and operatic gestures” in connection with Andrei Zvyagintsev’s ‘Leviathan‘ and I guess I have liked the expression and what it conveys in my head. I had the same feeling reading Peter O’Toole’s obituary. A hunger, a craving for the excessive being that I wish I had (I dream I have) in me…

I love the idea of exaggeration. Of overdoing it. But, I must admit i mostly love it in my head, in film, in books. I cannot think of a single truly exaggerated person I have been able to stand (other than my wonderfully larger-than-life grandmother, perhaps!) Certain relatives (C code) and, god-forbid, that ‘I-wish-I-could-obliterate-from-memory XXX (I can’t even spell the name!!), these are people I cannot bear. So perhaps my love for the overly dramatic is just a rhetorical ploy. Or just a carefully managed inner persona that I only truly want to feast on in my imagination.

I should surrender to it in my writing. This could be a way of enacting my fantasy. The fantasy of an over-the-top, drama-queen me… … In love with all divas, as long as they are invented, acted, narrated on paper, drawn, sung, danced.

It is the gesture, the idea, perhaps, what matters most. The possibility of… the possibility of allowing oneself to be lost, to scream, demand… tener pataletas y tantrums… but always within the safe measure of the imagined, the carefully crafted, sculpted, designed, directed… faked?

mmm…

TBC