Just finished watching Iris. Mr. W had put the DVD in while we were still having brunch, so that the main menu played repeatedly. In a sunlit spot in a white hallway of what appeared to be a convalescent home or a hospice, the seasoned actress Judi Dench danced alone with an invisible partner, drifting contentedly to soft orchestral music. The blank wall on the left showed, like a superimposed slideshow, a misty image of a young woman (Kate Winslet) swimming underwater naked, reaching out with her arms, and then a man’s arm joined and locked fingers with hers as the two swam toward each other. The blank wall on the right showed an equally fuzzy picture of an aging Judi Dench swimming alone underwater in a black swimsuit. “Ugh,” I sighed wistfully at the music during the main menu display I’d described, “This is like On Golden Pond meets The Notebook.” And that was exactly how the movie went as it unfolded.

Stevie Wonder had directed me to note the two lectures Iris Murdoch gives in the movie, which “are brief extracts” of “the promise of everything she has to offer.” The first speech Iris gives in the film was during what appeared to be a benefit dinner for her college. She stands and tells the audience of the “importance of education.” To her, education is the key to happiness, because education allows one the means to realize that one’s happy. I disagreed with this instantly. I think of those people less educated or less intelligent, and the ease of their contentment. I think of those aware of the boundless possibilities of the universe, who realize the insignificance of their achievements and the distance between their finite personal probabilities and the infinite potential imaginable, even those potentials past the limits of our imaginations and perceptibility, and I understand why Einstein was manic-depressive, and why the higher a person’s IQ, the more likely he/she is to be diagnosed with depression. I remember my court reporter telling me about her new appreciation for our lives here in the U.S. after she went abroad to Panama and watched the local poor carry water baskets on their heads, sweating and straining as they bring their family’s only source of water from the river to their village. She said that these Panamanians’ lives are so hard and they have it so bad that it makes her feel like she has nothing to complain about in her life of luxury in this country. And I had asked her then, “What makes you think their life is hard? If that woman’s entire goal is to bring that water back, then she has done it, and she is successful to the full definition of that success, and she may be happy because her family’s needs are met. I don’t think she is dissatisfied with her life, or unhappy about what we perceive to be their limitations.” That water-carrying woman will never know the stress of meeting a publishing deadline, or fear losing her job for not logging enough billable hours this month. She will not lose years of data due to a computer crash, and the stocks mean little more than fresh meat or labor animals to her.

The movie Iris depicts the decline of novelist/professor Iris Murdoch’s life (along with her husband, a professor John Bayley), as she is afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease. The storytelling of her mental deterioration is broken frequently by vignettes and snippets of her early years from the time she meets John to the time they become a serious couple. The scenes in which the previously bright, ultra-coherent Iris begins to first be confused by Alzheimer’s were especially terrifying to me. Iris defines thought through words. Without words, she has said, how does one think? As much as I am not a particular subscriber to the theory of limiting thoughts to words, the fact that Iris does, and seeing her lose her words while slowly and simultaneously losing cohesion in her thoughts, made me unravel some of my own fears and associations.

For the first time, it occurred to me that something may be more of a sense of identity to me than looks. Having tied my self-esteem, identity, social behavior and just about everything else to my looks since high school, I had not realized until this moment that I would be more lost without my thoughts than I would without my looks. All this time when my primary physical goals orbited around getting into a particular physical shape, maintaining or getting back into a certain dress size, hating myself for the fat rolls, loving myself for muscle tone, being oversensitive to the way people treat me and attributing their responses to me to how I look to them, being fearful of body changes that come with age, gravity and pregnancy, it had not occurred to me that there’s a reason why when asked what my greatest fear is, I had always answered it with “becoming ignorant,” or “being unaware,” and never with “getting fat.” My mind is who I am. My opalescent thoughts, my ever-changing opinions, my constant analysis and self-analysis. Without that as the nourishing soil, the roots of my physical identity will not have any substance to grip, and the flower of my person will stop burgeoning and wither away in the cruelty of the external (natural) forces.

For Iris, the inability to form her thoughts into solid shapes and express them in cohesive words while still having the awareness to see her mental shortcomings must have at once been terrifying and hope-draining. To have the glimmer of initial thought extinguish before your very eyes as you reach out and grasp for it, when you’re accustomed to nurturing and fanning the flames…it’s like Keyes’ “Flowers for Algernon;” it’s like, in paraphrasing Iris’s words, powerlessly sailing into darkness. After an exam during the early stages of her disease, Iris tells the doctor that when she loses a thought or gets lost, sometimes it terrifies her, and then, sometimes it doesn’t. And she doesn’t know which is worse because not being scared of it must mean that it’s winning. To which the doctor responded tactlessly (my opinion), “It will win.”

If present life on this planet is how we define ourselves, to be aware of our own mortality and to see the imminent approach of death is probably one of the most frightening things imaginable. If thought and language is how Iris defines herself, to be aware of her swift loss of the ability to think and express herself in language must be equally frightful.

There are glimpses into Iris’s early life and her, in my opinion, irresponsible hedonistic lifestyle that made me say sulkily at one point in the movie, “I don’t wanna be the Asian Irish Murdoch. Iris sucks,” which got Mr. W laughing extensively at me. But the movie, based on a book written by her husband, focuses more on their relationship in the beginning and in the end and about what happened to them, than about who Iris was. (I assume she’s deceased.) I’ve always been a believer that one’s identity does not necessarily revolve around what one does, so maybe I’m like her in mind, just not as good as justifying behavior that doesn’t adhere to a strong moral center.

And that brings up another frequent thought I entertain. Do I have the moral history I have because I am a good person with good adhesion to a good strong moral center? Or have I been good simply because the opportunities for bad have not presented themselves?

I need a break from this stuff. We’re off to a costume shop to feed our more frivolous side. Levity, here I come! *sliding out from beneath the dense cloud*