Deeblog

Women are cellos, fellows the bows.

For what is the body but a swamp in which the spirit drowns?  And what is marriage, that supposedly seamless circle, but a deep well up out of which the man and woman stare at the impossible sun, the distant bright disc, of freedom?

                                                                                                                 Tom Marshfield

There is a fine quote from an old film which will be admitted here in paraphrase to ward off the Google hounds: there is a time to frolic, and a time not to frolic, and this is not one of those times.  Readers of these pages know there are works that make it to Deeblog, a warm, fuzzy salon of positive thoughts, heady coffee aromas, and headier observations, and many more that do not, for a variety of criteria, the simplest of which is that they do not induce the back-chilling aesthetic bliss necessary to be memorialized.  For reasons that will become resoundingly clear, this novel is really neither one of those works, in no small part because it is hardly a novel at all.

We begin --  I take that back, we do not really begin anywhere at all.  Our narrator, who introduces himself through the generally dishonest tactic of self-deprecation and martyrdom, has been shipped to a rehabilitation clinic somewhere amidst the sands of the American Southwest.  He is a wiry, nervous Anglo-Saxon in his early forties (in the opening chapter he declares himself, "41 this April, 5'10", 158 lbs"), apart from his calvity almost feminine in his shape and shadow, a father of two and in principle -- in fact, very much in principle -- a married man of the cloth.  We do not yet know the crimes that precipitated his commitment, but they will be revealed by the man itself with glee bordering on malice.   He looks around his sanitarium, for that is indeed where is housed, if a nice sanitarium with golf and tennis available to its inmates, that is, its guests, and rightly contemplates what on earth or beyond he could have in common with this pack of rats and their keepers.  His description early on affords us a hint or two:

All middle-aged men, we sit each at our table ... suppressing nervous gossip among the silverware.  I feel we are a 'batch,' more or less recently arrived.  We are pale.  We are stolid.  We are dazed.  The staff, who peek and move about as if prepatory to an ambush, appear part twanging, leathery Caucasians, their blue eyes bleached to match the alkaline sky and the seat of their jeans, and the rest nubile aborigines whose silent tread and stiff black hair uneasily consort with the frilled pistachio uniforms the waitresses perforce wear.

The era, in case it mattered to you, is late Nixon.  Our preacher has been confined for a month due to an acute case of satyromania, which may conjure up a picture of a man-goat in our beclouded minds, but which could make for some interesting insights on what has led our man of God to become a man of the insatiable flesh.  The Reverend Marshfield cannot really tell us why, but we may understand his diminishing faith in his own convictions (hearing out a sobbing parishioner he deems, "but as an act of fraternity amidst children descended from, if not one Father, then one molecular accident").  He feels enslaved by his chosen path, which at once must have been chosen for him by some Other force and must not have been.  His wife Jane, herself the daughter of a clergyman by the name of Chillingworth, his two teenage boys, his weekly sermons, the lonely, broken women who sit through those sermons and gaze unknowingly at a spry, sexually perverse minister and suggest with their bodies' lack of movement the consent Tom seeks with his roving, raving mind, his sporadic visits to his father deep in the throes of dementia -- all this conspires to drive our holy man away from both the Holy and mankind for all its flaws and stigmas.   His solution, at least for the lower half of his mortal coil, is a wonderland where everything that should not be is, and everything that should be is not.  And not surprisingly, the heroine of this land is a single mom by the name of Alicia Crick.

Alicia is also the musical director at Tom's small church, and on Sundays they are united if not in common purpose then in melody.  When Jane and Tom were courting, he saw his future wife "walk[ing] a cloistered path to me, [and] it was as if a lone white rose were arriving by telegraph," a Beatrician image for those who believe in beatitudes.  Not so much with Alicia, whose "jaw wore a curious, arrogant, cheap, arrested set, as if about to chew gum."  Jane, as mentioned is as lithe and fragile as her husband, even if her husband's fragility is only manifest in the cavities of his conscience.  Mrs. Crick, however, possessed "small ... smartly tipped breasts," a "comfortably thick" waist, "homely" and "well-used looking" feet, and "active hands, all muscle and bone."  Mrs. Crick swiftly turns out to be such a "revelation" in bed -- our novel is saturated (Tom might say satyr-ate-it, and be almost funny) with puns and footnotes on puns, and puns on footnotes -- that life with the "good wife's administration sex," that "solemn, once-a-week business, ritualized and worrisomely hushed," becomes absolutely unbearable.  One evening, the horrible truth descends upon Tom like the rain upon a lost hitchhiker along a lonesome midnight road:  

My porch.  My door.  My stairs.  Again the staircase rose before me, shadow-striped, to suggest the great brown back of a slave; this time the presentiment so forcibly suggested to me my own captivity, within a God I mocked, within a life I abhorred, within a cavernous unnameable sense of misplacement and wrongdoing, that I dragged my body heavy as if wrapped in chains step by step upward.

We will not say much more on the matter except that Alicia, bless her soul, is acquired and discarded early on in our fragmentary flashbacks, and cannot be considered happy about such a reversal of fortune.  And so Tom begins his real journey, his journey back to Alicia that merely re-captions his journey back to his lost youth of irresponsibility, which involves prurience to a degree found only in erotic trash, cussing of the kind found only in popular trash, and an apotheosis from both of these hellish straits through the occasional visits to his Alzheimer-ridden father, who alternatively does not remember Tom, or confuses him with his brother, thus erasing Tom's childhood and innocence in one fell swoop.  Without first, of course, causing him and us a great deal more grief.

As a stunning exception to the vast majority of his peers, Updike, who died three years ago today, was very public about his religion and religiousness, even if he migrated congregations more than once.  Consequently, he was essentially obliged to make any protagonist clergyman a skeptic (what then would be the fun if not?) to avoid the execrable label of zealot.  At some point I remember reading that Updike was Hawthorne's literary descendant (the ballad of Tom Marshfield begins what would be known to Updikeans as “The Scarlet Letter Trilogy).  In hindsight this claim seems less far-fetched, although Updike was far more prodigious than any other serious author and Hawthorne was, like so many, rather fussy about his prints.  The problem with such productivity is not leaving yourself enough time to reflect and reconsider (there is also such a thing as leaving yourself too much time), not only your work but also your existence on this green globe.  So does a novel like A Month of Sundays get nearly ignored by posterity by virtue of its rambling, pointless beauty -- much like the rambling, pointless beauty of life itself -- a novel, admittedly, in binding and bookstore category alone.  There are overwritten and overwrought passages, surely, and sometimes one wishes there were fewer (occasionally they begin to crowd against our sunset), and the book cannot be read in one or two sittings.  It is more properly a patch of poems, a purple, thriving, majestic patch, with real genius, a rarity in our era of half-baked hallucination and urban rage.   Consider: "From the far end of the house sounded the electric sloshing of television's swill";  "That money, green and golden money which instinctively seeks the light"; "I loved shedding each grade as I ascended through school"; "Children returning from school shout in the acoustic wet street"; and Frankie, one of Tom's conquests, long since rich but undersexed, "lets out, with a giggle even older than the mink" (this same woman would later be "feeding mosquitoes on the nectar in her veins [and] admiring [her husband's] dragonlike skill at igniting brickets," perhaps the novel's most sensational passage).  Only the artistically obtuse would complain that there is no plot, structure or even point to Tom's peregrinations, apart from the very acceptable excuse of wanting to create more purple patches.  And maybe like Alicia, we won't mind the hypocrisy, just the unhappiness.

A poem ("Yesterday, in the evening") by this French man of letters.  You can read the original here.

Breathe, evening wind of yesterday's lost truth, 
Which brought us scents of flowers' last bloom phase;
Night fell with birds asleep in shaded maze. 
The fragrant Spring has nothing on your youth;
The stars shone bright, but far less than your gaze. 

My voice kept low.  It was the solemn hour  
When souls their gentlest hymns so love to sing.
As night is pure so are you beauty's power; 
To gilded stars: on night the heavens shower! 
And to your eyes: sweet love upon us bring!

We will leave an explanation of this film's title to the curious who believe that the Internet could not possibly lie to them.  Its translation may indeed shed some light on the plot -- that is, if you like your plots brightly lit -- yet the English novel on which the film is based is called A Judgement in Stone.  And while most movie versions employ a literal translation of the French, German has chosen "Beasts," and Italian, "The Darkness in the Mind."  What kind of film could possibly inspire such diverse nomenclature?  One most certainly of beasts and judgements, although these labels hang loosely to more than a few objects.  And the country home that serves as the centerpiece of our action has more than a few objects to go around. 

Our protagonist is a morose, tomboyish yet attractive housekeeper with a name out of a socialist realism novel, Sophie Bonhomme (Sandrine Bonnaire).  When we first see her, she is somewhat late to an appointment with the debonair and rather stunning Catherine Lelièvre (an equally stunning Jacqueline Bisset) at a café that admittedly makes Catherine nervous.  Why should a woman of the world, a former model (we are informed later by a dubious source), and a member of the upper crust of society, feel ill at ease in a mediocre little bistro, the likes of which litter France as pigeons occupy Rome?  Better to let the events speak for themselves.  Catherine warns Sophie, -- although the warning is like much of Catherine's persona, wholly disingenuous -- that the house is remote.  "Is that a problem?" she asks, also not caring whether it is.  "I don't know," replies Sophie, an answer that startles Catherine.  Throughout the film Sophie will recur to this slogan of her ignorance, and on numerous occasions Catherine will be startled either because Sophie should obviously know or because her indifference to that knowledge comes off as terrifying.  Catherine's clear, lightly-accented French hints at a privileged life spend abroad in foreign tongues, perhaps indeed very privileged.  Alas, she has had little success with domestics of late (such is the curse of the wealthy unable to acquire the perfect assistant) and Sophie was laid off after her employer's husband died suddenly.  "She's moving to Australia to be with her son," she tells Catherine, who couldn't care less what happens to the former employer provided Sophie's references are solid.  Sophie presents her letter of recommendation, but does so in a manner that will strike the careful viewer as unusual.  We cannot see Catherine's face at that very moment, so it is impossible to detect whether the same sensation creeps over her features, but the way she points to the name and address on the top of the letter makes us uncomfortable.  The two ladies hit it off as much as they can given that they are negotiating the blandest of business deals, Sophie agitatedly mentions her previous salary, Catherine catches on and hikes it by ten percent, and all of a sudden there is nothing more to talk about.  For her first day of work, Sophie's employer will fetch her at nine on Tuesday from the local train station.  And what day is it today, asks the employee.  Saturday, says a startled Mrs. Lelièvre, who doesn't really notice anything wrong although she very well should.  

This scene, one of the very best opening vignettes you will ever see, foreshadows every detail to come.  We may even generously interpret Sophie's listless looks over Catherine's shoulder as symbolizing her gaze at another character, one who hasn't been mentioned but who figures prominently in our story, and one who can also be symbolized by a letter since her work comprises the handling of others' written correspondence.  That remarkable shrew is the local postmistress Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert).  For my money, Huppert and Emily Watson are the world's two most talented actresses, but let us not digress.  Catherine returns to her remote manor for a family dinner of moules-frites, without, it appears, the frites.  The reactions towards Sophie's hiring are mixed: her fourteenish son Gilles (Valentin Merlet) inquires as to her looks (Catherine, of course, "did not notice" anything except that "she wasn't awful"); her nineteen-year-old stepdaughter Melinda (Virginie Ledoyen) wonders as many educated young people do about the wages and conditions of their imminent housekeeper; and her greybeard husband Georges (Jean-Pierre Cassel) just wants to eat his mussels, listen to Mozart, and hope it all works out for the best.  One may consider this blended quartet a microcosm of upper-class interests -- business, money and labor negotiations, hedonism, overidentification with the less fortunate due, it is assumed, to guilt, and a Pollyanna-like aversion to conflict coupled with a longing for higher culture -- or one may not.  Since the confrontations that will arise pit the well-off against those who perform services for the selfsame elite, the most facile of readings will have something to do with the proletariat -- but now we must really put a stop to this silliness and return to that train station.   

Somehow we know when that nine o'clock Tuesday morning train arrives that Sophie won't be on it.  We are so sure of this, in fact, that we search for the same intuition in Catherine, who seems to know it as well, although she cannot quite fathom why.  Since we are still in that tenebrous age before cell phones, our brooding employer takes out a cigarette and puffs away furiously -- that is, until she espies Sophie on the other side of the platform.  Sophie, who is wearing exactly what she wore to the bistro, has taken an earlier train with the explanation that she did not want to be late, which may ultimately rank as the most plausible of her countless lies in La Cérémonie.   As the two approach Catherine's car, they are accosted by Jeanne looking for a ride to work, and we really should say something about this Jeanne.  In and around town Jeanne Marcal is known for four things: her gaudy, Pippi Longstocking-like wardrobe; her snooping (in her profession that means rendering unto mail recipients what Caesar's taster used to render unto Caesar); her volunteering for the Church, although she has no evident spirituality and simply desires to help the poor; and her past tragedy, as she once upon a time was acquitted for the negligent death of her small daughter.  The description of this dreadful event that she confesses to Sophie omits so much detail as to make us wonder what, if anything, she ever says is true.  Everything she utters, be it whimsical, cruel, or objectively intelligent, is punctuated by the same myopic smile.  Yet somehow we believe, if for but a moment, that it was society not Jeanne who killed her daughter.  Society who made her an outcast and a single mother; society who let her dwell in a tiny apartment with an exposed oven; society that rushed to damn her before she could even muster a defense.  Thus ten minutes into our film, we have been sufficiently introduced to the three female leads, all seated in one car and revving off in the same and yet very different directions.  When Jeanne smiles at Sophie with that myopic smile, the latter looks perplexed as to why anyone would smile at her.  Later, towards the middle of the film, Sophie will finally return the smile and our story assumes a very different tenor.

There is a poorly-kept secret in La Cérémonie that outrattles the other, less impactful skeletons surfacing one after another like zombies.  The scene in which the truth is 'revealed' (any half-awake viewer would have reached the same conclusion well before this point) seems overwrought and melodramatic, but the grief and anger that ooze out foretell the wickedness of the tale's end. In more than one scene we see despair, white-man-in-China despair, an abyss of hopelessness that gapes like a leviathan.  The secret soon becomes the justification for all of Sophie's passive-aggressive charades, although it should be said that her personality is so damaged to begin with that no excuse will suffice.  I have said less about Jeanne, a creature from a very black lagoon, because what is said about her in the film is so clear yet so terrifying that we shudder to consider the fact that we probably all know people just like her.  Cheeky, impish, prying, cheerfully mischievous in an effort to mask true malevolence, intelligent in that way unique to very smart people who have come to envy life and all its inhabitants, Jeanne skips around, gleefully pinching fruit from a vendor like some insolent street urchin.  We find her so frightening precisely because she is mindfully incalculable.  And what about Sophie?  In one respect Sophie embodies the plight of the typical domestic servant, who may be likened in this instance to a piece of furniture: something you acquire, place in a comfortable spot, and only notice ever again when you start tripping over it.  As for the darkness and the ceremony, well, we would probably be better off just going and helping the poor.  Just like Jeanne.

What is the Dunwich Horror?  It surfaces late in the eponymous tale, and whether it meets the reader's expectations cannot be determined until one determines the reader.  There are many people who worship Lovecraft for his style; indefinitely more who just like him because, well, he writes about gooey stuff; still others who may be seeking what his characters invariably seek, which cannot under any circumstances be recommended.  Indeed, Lovecraft's style sets him distantly apart from other purveyors of the fantastic, with the possible exception of James, although James's cobwebbed ghouls could not be any more distinct from Lovecraft's extragalactic behemoths.  Which brings us to a wretched little town in Northern Massachusetts by the name of Dunwich.

Dunwich, now and then (to wit, at the time of "the Horror," the fall of 1928), cannot pride itself on its hospitality.  It is rather the type of place you approach in slow dread, sensing somehow that evil's winds caress more than chimes and porch lights.  An early description confirms the narrator's fears:

Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or on the sloping, rock-strown meadows .... Outsiders visit Dunwich as seldom as possible, and since a certain season of horror, all the signboards pointing toward it have been taken down.  The scenery, judged by any ordinary aesthetic canon, is more than commonly beautiful; yet there is no influx of artists or summer tourists.  Two centuries ago, when talk of witch-blood, Satan-worship, and strange forest presences was not laughed at, it was the custom to give reasons for avoiding the locality.

The kinship with these trials is hardly coincidence, and Dunwich's actual proximity to Salem suggests that inexplicable phenomena were a daily occurrence in this troubled region.  One of these phenomena will be the birth of Wilbur Whateley on Feb 2, 1913, a "date recalled because it was Candlemas, which people in Dunwich curiously observe under another name," and what name this may be needs no mention here.  Young Wilbur-- he will remain ever young despite the astounding growth he will evince -- develops both height and speech of near-inhuman dimensions, as guided by his maternal grandfather (as it were, his paternal ancestry is more than hinted at from the very beginning of the tale: "he was ... extremely ugly ... there being something almost goatish or animalistic about his thick lips, large-pored yellowish skin, coarse crinkly hair, and oddly elongated ears").  As we learn more about Wilbur, about the nightly shrieks that rattle a clapboarded attic, about his vanished, hysterical mother, about the nature of the types of books he wishes to borrow from some of the world's finest libraries, we understand as much as can be understood from the situation.  Namely, that a smart person should walk quickly away, and if to speculate, then very far away as well. 

Alas, we cannot help but read on.  At length an old professor called Henry Armitage, a scholar at this fictional university, rejects Wilbur's in-person request for a Latin copy of the Necronomicon, a wicked tome Hellenists can tell you bodes poorly for all of us.  Wilbur, at this point, a "bent, goatish giant .... [and] probable matricide .... almost eight feet tall," retreats to his hellish estate with little argument.  His next appearance, in the same library, will be somewhat more dramatic, as Armitage and two other university professors can attest:

It was partly human, beyond a doubt, with very man-like hands and head, and the goatish, chinless face had the stamp of the Whateleys upon it.  But the torso and lower parts of the body were teratologically fabulous, so that only generous clothing could ever have enabled it to walk on earth unchallenged or uneradicated.  Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its chest ... had the leathery, reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator.  The back was piebald with yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes.  Below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began.  The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply.  Their arrangement was odd, and seemed to follow the symmetries of some cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the solar system.  On each of the hips, deep set in a kind of pinkish, ciliated orbit, was what seemed to be a rudimentary eye; whilst in lieu of a tail there depended a kind of trunk or feeler with purple annular markings, and with many evidences of being an undeveloped mouth or throat.  The limbs, save for their black fur, roughly resembled the hind legs of prehistoric earth’s giant saurians; and terminated in ridgy-veined pads that were neither hooves nor claws.  When the thing breathed, its tail and tentacles rhythmically changed colour, as if from some circulatory cause normal to the non-human side of its ancestry .... Of genuine blood there was none; only the foetid greenish-yellow ichor which trickled along the painted floor beyond the radius of the stickiness, and left a curious discolouration behind it.

What is described in the above passage is very much Wilbur Whateley in the earthly form he bore for the duration of his life in Dunwich; it is his genetic admixture that we cannot ascertain.  Armitage does not really want to know, either, but takes it upon himself to decipher an ancient text and,with the horrible knowledge therefrom obtained, avert a catastrophe. 

The curious will already have used another intergalactic tool, Google, and acquired a notion if not a rendering of the beast, and so be it.  The Dunwich Horror, while suffering through far too many paragraphs in what Lovecraft concocted as a northern Massachusetts dialect, represents his genius at its peak, even if the plot has much of the straight path of destiny.  These types of stories engage the fancifulness of the curious, because it is only through re-imagination, through the reasoned categorization of images and meanings in the conscious and well-tuned brain that permits that same brain to become saturated with fear.  Such is Lovecraft's gift: even when his characters could not possibly be of benevolent origin, real suspense nevertheless builds as to the degree of their evil.  Some agenda-toting critics have alleged that for all his sublime sense of the eerie and the otherworldly, Lovecraft himself could not believe in anything greater than the coarse desert sands of the mirage-plagued materialist.   While we may accept his own doubts (these same critics declaim all Lovecraft's quotes that even imply a hesitation in this regard) as to his faith in something akin to a monotheistic deity, to insist that Lovecraft believed in nothing greater than the ambition of his five senses would be blasphemy itself.   No writer has ever portrayed the demonic undercurrent of horror with as much verve and composure.  And no one could imbue his reader with as much apprehension of what "kind of force ... doesn't belong in our part of space," and instead exists "not in the spaces we know, but between them."  And even if you turn to Lovecraft for the gooey stuff, I think you know exactly what I mean. 

An essay ("Democracy and Art") by this Italian man of letters.  You can read the original here.

In my opinion we commit an abuse, if not a play on words, when we say 'aristocratic art.'  In every work of art there is always a technical part that cannot be penetrated, understood or savored except by those who have at least been initiated, or by those whose studies specialized in the field.  But this work of art always contains an ideal foundation, an arsenal of sentiments, all of which triggers such passions and breathes life into such images that the populace gains an understanding.  Through these sentiments the populace feels itself to be in spiritual communion with the work; that is why the populace feels part of it, relives it, and receives from it an illusion of a better life.  And for this reason it palpitates and rises with a force of ascent that it did not know it possessed, all of which is akin to the effect of a suggestion.

In order that the artist place himself in a direct relationship with the soul of society, precisely this power of sympathy, which both influences and dominates this soul, constitutes the popularity of a work of art.  So when we say 'aristocratic art' we cannot but mean that artificial and well-crafted art consisting solely of an ingenious combination of words, of verses, of rhymes, made in accordance with the precepts and caprices of a special poetic code, manipulated and accepted by a privileged cenacle, and living outside the movement of contemporary life.  The art, in short, of the Euphuists, of the Alcovists, of the Parnassians, of the Pre-Raphaelites, of the Decadents: the mechanical art of John Lyly and de Góngora, of Marino and Bainville.

Now if democracy could come to kill this art of the refined and the haggard, we should have nothing to complain about; in fact, we should be elated since everything that is false does not have a right to human life.  But democracy probably will not even notice these loons, who confuse a work of art with a rebus or a puzzle, and will leave them to delight and indulge themselves in their void.  If democracy could destroy art, it ought, first of all, to destroy the organic and physiological conditions of genius, restrict the concomitant cerebral convolutions, and diminish the weight of the brain.  But the day that democracy were to produce in the populace such a cerebral degeneration would be the day the populace would vanish from history.  The struggle for life is the supreme law of the populace; the most powerful force in this struggle is precisely intelligence, and if democracy decreases intelligence and suppresses genius, it will deprive itself of all possibilities of triumph and survival.  This seems to be a steep price to pay. 

On the other hand, we see that the nations or peoples who triumph in terrible battles are exactly those which manufacture the greatest number of ingenious devices, namely, instruments and arms more precise or better suited for victory.  Could it be said, then, that scientific genius in such a case may be the product of the new democratic society and that poetic and artistic genius would not have a reason to exist?  Yet nothing reasonably induces us to imagine a society of men so alien to all elevated and generous passions, so deaf to all the great emotions that the spectacles of nature produce in all living things, that it would not concede any place to the manifestations of art.  Science itself, considered the enemy of the life of art by hypochondriac or superficial minds, constantly opens new horizons to the genius of the poet and the artist, and liberates for him more and more the flight towards the infinite.

It has also been observed that for a work of art to be born and to live, it has need for certain societal and political conditions which democracy would not be able to furnish.  Thus has the last trench of the pessimists been gloriously broken by the arguments of Vittorio Alfieri and Ugo Foscolo, by now so old and doddering in all its elements that I really do not know by what shamelessness on our part they may be confined.  For an artist to be able to work he mainly has need for liberty.  This liberty is doubtless greater in a democratic government.  Thus it does not make sense as to how democracy could possibly be the enemy of art when it affords it the primary and most essential condition of its existence, that of liberty.  Furthermore, the artist has need for a certain independence from the daily necessities of living: there are activities, in other words, from which came the mouthfuls of food that Berlioz would eat at the feet of the statue of Henri IV. 

Now the artist who can and knows he can use his talents freely in a democratic government and produce works worthy of the attention of a greater number of citizens, is certainly in a better position to earn his mouthful of bread that day than both the artist constrained to placate a despotic government or the artist obliged not to displease a prince, from whom, in the end, one may expect meager subsidies, a quandary that has persisted for many centuries from the satire of Ariosto, to the weepings of Tasso, to the adulations and threats of Aretino.  If the life of poets and artists at the courts of princes -- especially Italian princes -- was miserable, it has now become a most common thing: and the portent of democracy reducing them to greater misery is contradicted not only by logic, but also, on a daily basis, by facts.  Indeed, the more that States approach the democratic ideal, the less difficult will become the life of all men of genius, for whom the nascent liberty always opens new pathways and honors for their livelihood, increases those conditions favorable to the impartial appreciation of their works, and provides the tools for the rapid and broad diffusion of these selfsame works.  This liberty also protects their rights and augments their compensation in accordance with the pleasure and utility which these works bestow upon the greater number of persons.

Now it not infrequently happens that the most sublime and brilliant works are misunderstood, or not understood, or neglected.  This occurs at the present time as it has in every other era, in Italy and elsewhere, because a work of genius is essentially rebellious and anarchic.  It tends to modify the social environment, and will never be able to be fully appreciated until the conditions of this environment have been changed and the minds of men are driven by historical forces towards that luminous ideal first espied from the darkness by the genius with other eyes.  An ideal towards which he turns all the power of his flight and all the enthusiasm of his generous soul.  Moreover, if history offers us very few examples of geniuses fully understood during their time, I do not believe that library and archive researchers of any countries can boast of having discovered geniuses who remained not understood and obscure for many centures in their respective nations.  Genius is sooner or later recognized; and if its epoch does not come to understand it, it will also leave us traces which will reveal it and make it admired in the future.

In centuries past the greatest danger to an artist and to a philosopher was to see, along with his body, his work devoured by flames, damned by errors and predominant prejudices.  But in this case we also see his work, if not his life, emerge victorious from ruination, and from the sacrifice of the author, we see it succeed as something almost sacred and imposing to the hearts and minds of mortals.  In fact, I do not believe that it would be possible to name a work of any scientific or literary value which has been destroyed and erased from the memory of man by the efforts of political or religious fanaticism, which have committed so many works to abomination and to the flames.

And so, if a work of genius always emerges victorious from the innumerable obstacles and dangers it has traversed surrounded by tyranny, one is forced to conclude that the improvement of political and social conditions in accordance with democratic ideals will make the manifestation of genius even easier and its power more widely diffused.  And its victory less hard-won.

A casual observer will notice that the average filmgoer's attention span is commensurate with the time it takes for a gaudy, exciting movie poster (seen from afar) to be approached and understood (seen at arm's length) as yet another ensemble of preposterous gags.  Yes, we are all drawn to the gaudy and outlandish -- they would hardly exist otherwise -- and that brief moment is enough to lead the more impulsive among us purchase a ticket, download a song, or enter a store with a mission.   In a world filled with near-equivalents, we are naturally attracted to what involves an idealized partner, location, or version of ourselves (no nonsensical psychology classes required to come to that conclusion).  Thus the least successful advertising campaign, a staunch effort at sabotage, might boast heaping doses of dreariness, ugliness and mystification.  Who would want to see such a film, and, more importantly, who would want to make it?  The same small segment of mankind that can appreciate a conceptual endeavor if the images correspond to the motifs.  To wit, if from that murky mystery something profound and artistic can be derived, which brings us to this highly unusual production.

Our setting is Germany and our time is around 1800.  These details, we note, are gathered simply from the language spoken and the attire worn; nothing in the way of context is afforded the viewer.  We begin with a shepherd gazing at some misty cows, then, much more sensationally, at lush hills that appear and disappear as the mist wends around their girths.  When a ruthless cataract becomes the camera's subject, a voiceover expresses some pseudo-philosophical concerns ("I begin to feel the cataract.  It pulls me down.  Death pulls me down."), yet we are still uninformed as to why we're looking at these nature shots at all.  After several minutes in slow preamble, our lens focuses and we follow our herdsmen whose name is Hias.  Hias is probably short for Matthias, and the basis for this character, as well as for another character called Mühlbeck, may well be this alleged soothsayer (Mühlhiasl and Matthias Stormberger seem to be separate accounts of the same person), the "prophet of the Woods."  Whatever one may think of such folk heroes, if one such figure is the cornerstone of your film, you are interested neither in realism nor straightforwardness.  And indeed, once Hias retreats to his herd, he is besieged by villagers who claim they have seen a giant.  Giants "break our trees and slay our cattle," they lament.  "Did you not," he chides them softly, "pay attention to the position of the sun?  Otherwise you would have seen that it was the shadow of a dwarf," which is where our film distinguishes itself from many other allegorical tales.  Most films would not have gone the extra step and added "dwarf" (the elongated shadow of a normal-sized man would be frightening enough), yet Herzog underscores that what we are watching is not only a nightmare, but a nightmare destined to come true.  One day, dwarfs will indeed walk like giants.  But for the time being the villagers face a more immediate crisis: the death of Mühlbeck, the glass factory foreman.

Mühlbeck is never shown on-screen, augmenting his legendary status as the only villager privy to the formula of the red glass, the lifeblood of the village's economy.  I should say, the lifeblood of the wealth of the factory owners, an unnamed father and son complacent and paranoid in their mansion as the rest of the town drudges through hand-to-mouth squalor.  Upon the foreman's death panic strikes the locals, most of whom are employed in the factory.  Protracted scenes of attempted glass-blowing and actual craftsmanship remarkable in their simplicity and beauty are interwoven with the melodramatic worries of the nobles.  "Will the future see the fall of the factories just as we have understood the ruined fortress as the sign of inevitable change?" the son tells his pint-sized butler, Adalbert.  Yes, the butler is a dwarf, and the son claims he will die if the secret of the red glass is not discovered ("I need to put my blood in the Ruby glass or it will trickle away").  The father, whose laugh suggests insanity, has not left his armchair for twelve years, the last time he put on his shoes and inspected the factory and the outside world.  With the image of the factory owners more fully defined, it is not difficult to imagine what is really going on, especially after Hias, renowned for his prophecies, states: "those with smooth hands will all be killed."  What is being predicted is an overthrow of the ruling elite -- the means of production has literally changed hands -- but the villagers seem to be the last people to know.  In fact, it would not be surprising if the events in this little isolated hamlet postdated this notorious period, and Hias's visions were both prescient and things of the recent past.

Many critics have detected in Herz aus Glas not only the advent of the French and October Revolutions, but all of the future of mankind.  While it is not my place to belittle such assumptions, it might be better to restrict our ambition to the era in question: that is to say, the general upheaval, unification and democratization of nineteenth-century Germany.  As such, we could describe some of the minor characters: the lobotomized exhibitionist who seems to live in a convent; the sexually repressed, destructive maid Ludmilla; Mühlbeck's deaf-mute mother, garbed like a Corsican widow, who sees her son's favorite Davenport sofa torn up and restored as the nobles' search team ferrets around for the secret; the two mates, Ascherl and Wudy, who are told by Hias that one will end up dead on top of the other and decide to drink their sorrows and fears away (every time a beer mug is picked up, we assume it will be downed in one gulp); the endless assortment of clownish and clueless extras, some of whom appear to be wearing lipstick.  Who are all these characters?  Most of them are parodies of standard figures from German folktales, whose heyday is coming to a screeching halt.  It may also help to know that Herzog, in an unprecedented move, hypnotized the entire cast apart from Hias.  The herdsman then became the sole bastion of reason and, consequently, slightly aloof and disdainful of everyone else ("If nothing changes," he says to them with disgust, "you think it's a blessing").  Since Herzog has a long and vivid history of casting locals with little or no theatrical experience, it is impossible to determine what kind of performances he could have elicited were his charges not as sleepy-eyed and sluggish.  The film's best scene takes place when the sofa is actually delivered to the nobles' house.  "I am excited about this letter," the young noble tells Davenport.  He then requests a letter opener, slices open the sofa as if it were a piece of daily correspondence, finds nothing except springs and padding, and declares, "when a letter's words are scrambled, it makes you think."  One would hope so.  One also wonders what the young nobleman thinks when Hias whispers: "you will never see the sun again and rats will bite your earlobes."  And we haven't even mentioned what Hias does to that bear.  

A work ("Our anniversary we'll mark") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

Our anniversary we'll mark -- 
Our last; today, you know, was then:  
That snowy night of diamond spark,   
Of our first winter's sweet content.   

Imperial stables give off steam,
In darkness sinks the Moyka's flow, 
The stifling sky spites moonlight dreams,    
And where we're destined I can't know.

Between grandpa's and grandson's tombs, 
A weed-strewn garden so unfurls. 
As prison's madness nearby looms,  
Funereally the lanterns burn.

The Martian Field in icebergs shines,  
Lebyazhii nests in crystals clear. 
Whose lot can then compare to mine,
If in his heart are joy and fear?

And like that wondrous bird in flight, 
Your quiv'ring voice my shoulder charms.  
And, heated by the sudden light,
The snowy ash turns silvery warm.