Writing here on the blog has been slower as the pace of screenwriting has seized the waking hours of my day. You’ll forgive the glazed over eyes, the seeming inexplicable delving into rabbit holes, the burden of the finite clock exacts its price and works to contain the prolific.
I have been putting ukulele chords to work playing Bossa nova where I find myself stuck and pondering how to turn the plot.
Here I can test rhythm and lyric of the Brazilian songwriters. Jobim brought Bossa nova to the world where it lives to this day.
Here is where you will find songs that speak of joyous longing, unrequited love, and heartache.
Brazilians have by song and emotion elevated having the love of our life coming to an end to be an essential aspect of one of most common life experiences. If you haven’t loved and lost then you haven’t really lived— the term of art is saudade— and describes a sense of melancholy that overtakes the heartbroken state of the spurned lover, and how in this ache there rests a kind of nostalgic yearning to understand the purpose of a lover suffering such a devastating emotional loss. It is painfully exalting, utterly devastating and absolutely necessary.
Sometimes we’ll exercise and find it lifts our spirits even though while we are working out, we struggle trying to do our best. We fight through the resistance, some of us, sometimes we can’t go another step and give up, surrendering to our bodies call to quit. We are all too easily deluded into giving into these voices within us.
Comedy is rhythmic, there is a physical link to the well-timed set-up and precisely delivered punch line. Paradoxically it is predictably rhythmic while at the same time benefitting from the way our mind delights at the surprise of the perfect stunning image that triggers our laughter.
While we are in the throes of unrequited breakup our unbounded misery quarries no disrespect from young fools who’ve yet to have been made mad by loves loss.
It comes as a shock to most of us how odd it is the way love chooses. It is impossible to imagine that without our hearts consent no amount of thinking will persuade us to take loves leap. A few years later we may carefully consider consolidating the treasure we have found in our partner and surrender our independence upon the altar of a church we’ve rarely known.
If your rocket has soared into the heavens and now decades later, you are far removed from that incendiary beginning you’ll find the rewards of remaining true to the love of your life a relentless mystery. What time bestows upon a relationship is what we know as intimacy. We love despite all faults, there are your flaws and your partners, and between the two with some patience arises a resilient intimacy. This clear-eyed view of other can sometimes lead us back to grapple with saudade. Here we find loves depth, we can’t find this aspect of love without investing time, and because we are such skittish creatures we’ve discovered it is best to access the depths of what love has to offer by use of commitment, and in our vicissitudes, we painfully deal with the limits of our 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows. If we can find a way to stick with our hearts choice, we will find a reliable love to use as ground to grow deeper emotions. We will belong is the promise, at least for one day before it is all over.
If you are nearing the latter part of your life and you walked away from love only to find the partner you couldn’t commit to has returned, you’ll have to reckon with your choice again. What if they’ve lived life well, you see a vibrancy, bounce to their step, a spark to their eye— and once again your heart involuntarily crushes the lifelong loner you’ve made of yourself. This isn’t new love, it is love returning to test you, to find out what kind of fool you have been. This is not an uncommon experience. You may well have fallen to sleep a thousand nights of your life conjuring their likeness in your heart’s involuntary cravings. Indeed, if you walked away from love I am sure you have reckoned with one of the great losses any of us may suffer.
Screenwriters need lovers. We use emotions to trigger their acting. It is all too funny when you are not playing it as too serious. Reversals are funny— the guy that vows he’ll never be married is swept off his feet and renounces his previous opinion.
I’ve two kinds of love in this script, one arises from the ashes of the past while the other begins at first sight. That’s the idea in part as I explore ways to write an engaging climate change comedy.
