Word: reed
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Listen to the reed breathing...
Listen to the reed...
...13th century Persian poet Jalal al-din Rumi, the reed was a metaphor for man. Rumi was a follower of the ancient principles of Sufism, a mystical movement that is to Islam roughly what Hasidism is to Judaism. He believed that the soul and God are one and the same. The world, he taught the faithful, is but a tomb, temporarily separating the soul from its divine milieu. In order to release the imprisoned spirit, he taught the Sufi dervishes (Persian for beggars) to dance themselves into an ecstatic trance; all their movements were made in rhythm with the music...
...America to promote Turkish culture, performed their 700-year-old ritual at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Nine dervishes, solemn in long black capes and tall cylindrical hats, entered the hall led by a sheik. Beckoned by the chant of a blind singer and the melancholy solo of a reed flute, they threw off their voluminous black cloaks, symbols of the tomb that they believe encases the soul. Slowly and gracefully they began to revolve, their long white skirts billowing into circles. Gradually they extended their arms, one palm turned heavenward to receive divine grace, the other toward earth, symbolically...
FOREMAN MAKES the semblance of letting some Churchill family skeletons dance obscenely in a series of TV-style interviews. On several occasions we suddenly find Young Winston his father Lord Randolph (Robert Shaw), and the American mother (Anne Bancroft) alone in a study badgered by the bitchy Rex Reed-style questions of an off-screen journalist. "What precisely was the nature of your husband's last illness?" the journalist inquires, adding after an evasive answer, "Come, come, Lady Randolph, we live in modern times, Surely the word syphilis need hold no terrors for us." Lord Randolph's death, his wife...