Nerval, "Adrienne"

A prose poem ("Adrienne") by this French man of letters.  You can read the original as part of this collection.

I regained my bed but could not find any rest.  Plunged in half-somnolence, I watched reels of my entire childhood cascade through my memory.  This state, in which the mind continues to resist odd combinations in dream, often allows one to see – if hurriedly in only a few minutes – the most striking paintings one may ever behold.

I imagined a castle in the times of Henri IV, its pointed roofs covered in slate and its reddish front with jagged corners of yellow stone; a large green clearing then appeared, framed in elm and lime trees whose foliage was pierced by the setting sun and its flaming strokes.  Young girls danced around the lawn singing old tunes inherited from their mothers, in a French so naturally pure it might have still existed in the old Valois country where for over a thousand years the heart of France had beaten.

In this circle I was the only lad.  Here I had brought a companion, still very young as well, Sylvia, a little girl from a neighboring hamlet, so alive and so fresh, with black eyes, a straight, neat profile and her skin lightly tanned!  I loved nothing but her, I could see nothing but her – until now!  I had just noticed in the circle in which we were dancing a blonde girl, tall and lovely, who was called Adrienne.  All of a sudden, in accordance with the rules of the dance, Adrienne found herself alone with me in the middle of the circle  Our heights were identical.  We were told to embrace, with the dance and choir now more vivacious than ever before.  In kissing her I could not help but squeeze her hand.  Her long flaxen curls caressed my cheeks.  From that moment on a hitherto unknown concern took hold of me.  My beauty had to sing to gain the right to rejoin the dance.  We sat around her and, just as quickly, in a voice both fresh and penetrating, almost lightly misted like the voices of girls from those hazy parts, she sang one of those old romances replete with love and melancholy.  It was a song typical of a princess incarcerated in a tower by her father who wished to punish her for having loved.  The melody stopped at each stanza for quavering trills that so enhance a young voice when, by modulated thrill, it imitates the trembling song of its foremothers.

As she sang darkness descended from the large trees, and the nascent moonlight retrieved her alone, isolating her from our tight little circle.  She fell silent, and no one dared interrupt her wordlessness.  The lawn was covered with weak condensed vapor which unraveled its white flakes upon the grass blades.  We thought that we were in paradise.  Finally I got up and ran along the castle's terrain where laurel trees were planted in great monochrome earthenware vases.  I brought back two branches which were then woven into a crown and bound with a ribbon.  Upon Adrienne's head then I placed this ornament whose lustrous leaves flashed on her blond hair in the pale streams of moonlight.  She resembled Dante's Beatrice who smiled at the poet straying along the outskirts of saintly abodes.   

Adrienne rose, drawing her svelte figure to its full height.  To us she bade a gracious farewell and ran back into the castle.  We were told that she was the granddaughter of one of the descendents of a family allied to the ancient kings of France; the blood of Valois coursed through her veins.  For this holiday she had been allowed to take part in our games; we would never see her again since she left the following day to a convent where she was a resident.

When I returned to Sylvia's side I noticed that she was crying.  The crown given by me to the beautiful singer had been the cause of her tears.  I offered to gather her another, but she protested that she was not keen on such a gift nor did she deserve it.  In vain I sought to defend myself, but she said not a word more to me as I took her back to her parents' house.

Returning to Paris to resume my studies, I bore this double image of tender friendship sadly broken and a vague and impossible love, a source of dolorous thoughts that university philosophy proved unable to assuage.   The figure of Adrienne remained only triumphant, the mirage of glory and beauty, softening or sharing the hours of grueling learning.  On vacation the following year I learned that this beauty hardly espied had just been consecrated by her family into the monastic life.

Italian for Beginners

In Denmark in the early nineties a man named after a German city had the audacity (born, we are told, from a severe religious crisis) to return modern cinema to a charming form of dalliance.  Gone were the lavish sets, thunderclap soundtracks and disruptions in that sticky matrix we call the time and space continuum; in their stead came onsite filming, diegetic music, and a sharp focus on the ineluctable modality of the visible with the help of a handheld camera.  Von Trier, a man of devout belief in the future of cinema and his soul, has tinkered with his pretentious manifesto in enough ways as to elicit the envy and derision of far less talented filmmakers and critics, which, of course, only augments his Jupiter-sized ambition. Yet what is most interesting about the Dogme 95 declaration is that it emanated from a small country.  Denmark has fewer than six million inhabitants, but in the last thirteen years it has probably produced thirty first-rate films as well as many others that are sufficiently watchable (the crown jewel of all these titles having been reviewed elsewhere on these pages).  Being a laid-back, attractive, fun-loving nation, if reticent at times, Danes are naturally equipped to handle the rigors of spontaneous acting because hysterics, wild gesturing, and insane monologues simply do not do.  Life and society, however informal Danes tend to be, are constructs that have propelled them to the forefront of European style and urban culture; that they should venture into cinema to record this modern expansion is therefore hardly a surprise.  Yet there is almost nothing modern or progressive about this pleasing take on an old-fashioned comedy of manners. 

The manners involved are those of a small village's batch of eccentrics who range from a widowed and tattooed pastor (Anders W. Berthelsen) to a foul-tempered restaurateur (Lars Kaalund) to a hopelessly clumsy shop assistant (Anette Støvelbæk).  Their sextet is rounded out by an awkward middle-aged hotel employee (Peter Gantzler) who has been, ahem, without love for an extremely long time, a hairdresser (Ann Eleanora Jørgensen), and the Italian in the lot, a young woman called Giulia.  They are all, for one reason or another, single.  Andreas the pastor soothes his grief by driving a Ferrari; Finn takes out his frustrations on the few people who dine at his small establishment, where his service staff includes Giulia; Olympia is so incompetent she can barely hold a job and has to care for an old vulgarian of a father who seems to hate her; Karen cuts hair every now and again, but mostly spends her time seeing to her sick mother; and love-deprived Jørgen keeps making eyes at Giulia although they are, shall we say, linguistically incompatible.  By all indications Danish villages are very bizarre places.  So when an Italian class taught at the local community center unites the characters (except, of course, Giulia), we sense destiny weaving its loom around all involved, which should bring them happiness or at least a new lease on their tired lives.  There might even be a chance of a field trip to that southern land!  Romance shall blossom like jasmine on a young woman's clavicle!  All will be redeemed and the sun shall rise anew on this little Danish village we have come to like so much.

Well, not exactly.  In the middle of the first class attended by Olympia, one of the earth's most cursed mammals, the portly, middle-aged (but very suave) instructor gets a little light-headed then promptly drops dead.  Since this is a canonical Dogme film, no signs of death are actually allowed (that is to say, an actor may fall down and we may assume him to be dead, but a close-up of him not breathing or any fake blood is prohibited).  Their sole respite from the daily tedium now gone, the masses revert to their semi-suicidal state until one student decides to take matters into his own hands and teach the class himself.  His Italian for a non-native is quite good (everyone, it seems, has a secret talent or two) and this makes the dream of Italy much more tangible to his classmates.  My policy of nondisclosure precludes any more details, but I will add that certain things that are expected to happen do indeed take place, with twists that are hardly contrived.  The magic of Dogme is precisely its proximity to our real existence untempered by the manipulative imagery and tones that are supposed to direct our thoughts.  Conflicted emotions, half-gnawed assent, and hesitancy are all perfectly acceptable because that is how we feel most of the time about most of the world.  You may be pleased with the Danes and their cosmopolitan approach to escape or you may say that this sort of stuff only happens to other people.  Or maybe you'll simply forget you're watching a film about strangers, which is exactly what these sweet if misled people might have hoped had they been showing you, for example, one of their prized home videos.

Secular Knowledge not a Principle of Action

We have already belabored the back-and-forth between those who believe in something greater than themselves and those who think themselves the jewels atop evolution's crown, and readers of these pages know how I stand, not being able to do anything else.  The universe, say the men of science, is a vast mystery in which there is little room for divine revelation, yet we have discovered one hundred billion planets (or perhaps one billion galaxies each with one billion planets, the number is as fluid as the authorities that count).  What may or may not have happened two thousand years ago in a warm and intellectually rich desert land is a legend perpetrated by a long list of global conspirators, but the progression of those prehistoric monsters who died millions of years before we became sentient is as clear as the microscope used to examine their fossils.  And the universe itself, that bulging mass of infinite energy, decided one day that it should be, and exploded into what would become our world a long time down the line, so thinking that the universe is actually a stage designed by an Author would be the most preposterous mistake ever committed.  If you are convinced fully by these arguments, please proceed to your nearest popular bookseller and find your reading material in the largest and brashest displays scattered at strategic points throughout the store.  If, however, the more you consider these asinine gourds of leaking potions, all of which have the same bitter chemical aftertaste, the more you find the whole concoction a vile emetic, you may want to order your books from less complacent sources.  Which brings us to this short essay.

There is a basic principle in Newman's works that cannot be rephrased only reiterated, and it involves the concepts of assumption and assent.   The casual thinker − he knows who he is − may flip through a few pages of this masterpiece and conclude that the whole premise is based on religious faith, and he would only be wrong in his flipping.  Casual reviewers of the same work have commented that Newman's approach jettisons the medieval and ancient philosophies for something terribly modern, at least modern by the standard of the nineteenth century, but again this conclusion is the result of too much flipping and too many conclusions.  A simpler approach may be as follows.  Let us say that you believe your girlfriend to be loyal and loving − for the vast majority of us an assumption which a relationship can and should predicate.  You ask yourself time and again why you think this way, and are led to a number of observations that buttress and cancel each other in rather tawdry existential fashion.  First you assume that she loves you because you love her and love is as natural as the morning dew, as the morning itself, as oxygen.  You decide that this is so on the evidence of the hypocorisms and affection you exchange; you are supported in your sensations by our omnipresent and omniscient men of science who boldly proclaim that love, like chocolate and fear, is a chemical reaction illuminating a certain part of your brain as if it were a pile of links of a staggered Christmas tree light display.  You discard this sentiment when its hollowness begins to repulse you and then conclude that she loves you because she has made a decision to love.  You just happen to be the person with whom she is now as if life were a roulette wheel and she fell on your number.  This approach also has its drawbacks, namely that her willpower has been transformed into a justification for affection, which to both the logical and emotional mind cannot possibly be love.  So you entertain a third notion, love as destiny, as preprogrammed methodology on the part of natural selection or divine proportion, and understand that you must accept your lot as it is handed to you because otherwise your existence will henceforth be mired in regret.  At length you come to the fourth conclusion in your eternal square, that of deception, and now I should mention the essay in the title.

Newman does not believe in any conclusions, he believes in what he modestly calls a beginning.  He tells us that many people will risk their lives for dogma, but never for a conclusion; he knows that people die for realities not calculations.  The rather gauche modern films and novels that describe suicidal characters as keeping a tally of their world in neurotic detail should not perish because of that detail, but because that detail has now replaced their entire reality (an instructive point made in this fine novel).  He has nothing horribly against science, as no one who believes in better living standards and health for humanity should, but he has something very much against a life of perpetual deduction which begins, appropriately enough, ex nihilo:

Life is not long enough for a religion of inferences; we shall never have done beginning, if we determine to begin with proof.  We shall ever be laying our foundations; we shall turn theology into evidences, and divines into textuaries.  We shall never get at our first principles.  Resolve to believe nothing, and you must prove your proofs and analyze your elements, sinking further and further, and finding "in the lowest depth a lower deep," till you come to the broad bosom of scepticism.  I would rather be bound to defend the reasonableness of assuming that Christianity is true, than to demonstrate a moral governance from the physical world.  Life is for action.  If we insist on proofs for everything, we shall never come to action: to act you must assume, and that assumption is faith.

We may cast aside the criticism that life is not really for action, because to come to that assumption much action must already have been taken.  It is perhaps for that reason that a skeptic who has been treated with the cold, callous end of life's rod can be more justified in his mistrust of the world, and, for his insufferable ignorance, a young brash fool who thinks himself a god with two feet and lungs all the more chastened.

Whatever you may think of Newman, you will have to conclude that conclusions are based on assumptions (or perhaps that assumptions only end in further assumptions).  As silly and ultimately contradictory as it is to postulate that we may separate ourselves from the stream of time and ethics to reach some petty captions on our own, we must also understand that youth for natural reasons needs to rebel.  It needs to think itself invincible because only once it has been disabused of this notion can it weigh life's value and our cobweb of aging and loss.  If religion "has never been a message, a history, or vision," we can assert without fear of perjury that these are precisely the three elements common to all periods of youth.  We learn about ourselves and the world through our parents and their history, and we envision our future most often through the paradigms herein established, the future as an anagram of the past.  Yes, this can be said of faith, except that all future, past and present scenarios and thoughts are but anagrams of some greater meaning still.  That, if anything, is motivation enough to live what has been given us and to love.  And for what is love if not assent to the transcendental?

Der Hund (part 2)

The conclusion to a story ("The dog") by this Swiss man of letters.  You can read the original as part of this collection.

How could I ever forget our love?  The windows loomed somewhere in the room as a horizon of slender right angles above our nakedness.  We lay there body against body, sinking further and further into one another, embracing with rising desire, and the noises from the street combined with the forlorn screams of our lust.  Sometimes it was the shuffling stumble of the intoxicated; at other times, the traipsing of the neighborhood harlots; at still other times, the long monotonous stomp of a passing army cohort which resolved itself into the crispness of horses' hoofs and the rolling of wheels.  We lay together below the earth's surface, swathed in its warm darkness, no longer afraid; and from the corner where the man was sleeping on his mattress soundlessly as if he were dead, we saw the yellow eyes of the dog staring at us, round slices of two sulphuric moons spying on our love.

An incandescent autumn came, yellow and red, followed late in the year by winter – mild, without the venturesome cold of previous years.  Nevertheless I never managed to lure the girl out of the basement to introduce her to my friends, to go to the theater (where radical things were taking place), or even to stroll together at daybreak through the woods that expanded over the hills and surrounded the town in waves.  She would only sit there at the fir wood table until her father came home with the big dog, and until she pulled me into her bed by the windows' yellow light.  As spring approached, however, and the town still lay in snow – dirty and wet and a meter high in the shade – the girl came to my rooms. 

The sun was shining crookedly through the window.  It was late in the afternoon and I had laid some firewood in the furnace.  And then she appeared, wan and trembling, and most likely freezing as well since she came coatless and, as always, in her dark blue dress.  It was only her shoes, red and lined with fur, which I had never seen before. 

"You have to kill the dog," said the girl, out of breath and still on the threshold of my door.

Her eyes were wide open and she had the distinct appearance of a ghost.  For that reason I dared not touch her and, instead, I went over to the closet and produced a revolver.

"I knew that you would eventually ask me to do this," I said, "so I bought a gun.  When should I do it?"

"Right now," replied the girl softly.  "Father is also scared of the animal – and now I know that he's always been scared of it."

I inspected the gun and put on my coat. 

"They're in the basement," said the girl as she lowered her gaze.  "Father's been lying on the mattress the whole day, so terrified that he cannot move much less pray, and the dog has stationed himself in front of the door."

We went down along the river and then over the stone bridges.  The sky was deep and threateningly red like a gigantic blaze, and the sun had just set.  The town was livelier than normal, full of people and cars moving beneath what resembled a sea of blood since in their windows and walls the houses reflected the evening light.  We walked through the crowds.  We hurried through ever-narrowing traffic, lines of stopped cars and careening buses that seemed like monsters with dull and evil eyes, and policemen in grey helmets motioning excitedly.  I pushed my way through with such determination that I left the girl behind.  Finally I ran down the street, panting and with my coat wide open as an increasingly violet and increasingly powerful twilight took hold – yet I came too late.  When I had kicked down the door and burst into the basement, gun in hand, I saw the enormous shadow of the horrible beast escaping through the window, its panes shattered.  And on the floor, a white mass in a black pool, the man lay there, having been torn to pieces by the dog to such a degree that he was unrecognizable.       

As I leaned trembling against the wall and sinking into the books, I heard the car sirens outside.  A stretcher was brought in.  In the shadows I saw a doctor by the deceased and heavily armed policemen with pale faces.  People were standing all around.  I called out to the girl.  Then I raced into town over the bridges and back to my rooms, but I didn't find her.  Desperately I searched without rest or sustenance.  Because everyone was afraid of the giant animal, the police was mobilized, as were the soldiers from the barracks who walked through the woods in long chains stretched over a distance.  Boats were dropped into the dirty yellow river and searches were conducted with long poles.  Then when spring came, bringing with it warm rain showers that led to an inordinate amount of flooding, the quarries and their hollows were searched with raised voices and torches.  The sewers were entered and the cathedral's screed was scrutinized.  But the girl could not be found and the dog never appeared again.

Three days later I came back late one night to my rooms, exhausted and without hope.  I threw myself on the bed fully dressed and then I heard steps on the street below.  I ran to the window, opened it and leaned out into the night.  The street lay before me like a black strip still wet from the rain which had fallen until midnight.  The street lamps were reflected on the street as coadunate golden specks; and outside along the trees, the girl was walking in her dark dress and red shoes, her hair flowing in long strands and shimmering blue in the lights of that late hour.  And beside her walked a dark shadow, gentle and silent like a lamb, the dog with its round, sparkling yellow eyes.

Der Hund (part 1)

The first part of a story ("The dog") by this Swiss man of letters.  You can read the original as part of this collection.

My first few days in town, on the small square in front of town hall, I found a few people gathered around a disheveled man who was reading aloud from the Bible.  Only later did I notice the dog lying at his feet; and only later did I wonder how such a huge and repulsive animal, a beast of deepest black and smooth, sweat-covered fur, had not gained my immediate attention.  Its eyes were the yellow of sulphur; when it opened its mouth, with horror I noticed teeth of the selfsame hue; and its shape was unlike any other being I had ever seen.  Once the sight of the enormous animal became unbearable I cast my eyes towards the preacher.  He was a stocky fellow and his clothes hung in rags upon his person; yet his skin shimmering through the patches and holes and even the tattered clothes themselves were all extremely clean.  His Bible looked expensive, with diamonds and gold twinkling about the binding.  The man's voice was steady and calm.  His words were distinguished by an extraordinary clarity so that his speech appeared simple and sure, and here I also noticed that he never used parables.  What came forth was a calm and unfanatical exposition of the Bible.  And if his words were not convincing, this was only because of the dog as he lay at the man's feet and watched the crowd with yellow eyes. 

This odd connection between preacher and animal was what captivated me at present and made me seek out the man again and again.  Every day he would preach on the town squares and in the streets, yet he was not easy to find.  Even though he would practice his craft well into the night, it was the town that confused me despite its clear and simple layout.  Many times it was evident that he left his home at varied hours and never had a set plan for his activity nor any rules for his performances.  Sometimes he would hold forth all day on the same square; sometimes he would change location every fifteen minutes.  But his dog, black and dauntingly large, accompanied him wherever he went, walked beside him as he paced the streets, then lay down with a thud when the man began to preach. 

He never enjoyed a large audience.  Mostly he would stand alone, although I was able to observe him in such a way as not to fluster him, and instead of leaving the square, he would simply keep talking.  I often saw him praying aloud in the middle of a small street as people inattentively walked by.  Since I was never able to develop a surer method of locating the preacher and always relied on chance, I decided to look for where he lived – but no one wished to give me the slightest bit of information.  To that end, I followed him one time the whole day long.  It turned out that I had to repeat my actions for many days since every evening he would vanish owing to my efforts to keep my face hidden and unknown.  At length, one night I was astounded to see him entering a house in a street that domiciled only the town's richest citizens.  Henceforth my behavior towards him changed: I forsook my clandestineness to place myself in closest proximity so that he would be obliged to take notice, an act that, as it were, disturbed him not in the least.  Only the dog growled every time I came up to him.

And in this way many weeks passed.  It was then in waning summer when he, upon completing his exposition of the Gospel of St. John, accosted me and asked whether I would walk him home.  He said nothing more as we walked through the streets; and as we entered his house it was already so dark that he turned on the lamp in the large room into which he had led me.  The room was more deeply situated than the street so that from the door we had to walk a few steps down and I could not see the walls as they were covered from floor to ceiling in books.  Under the lamp was a large, plain table made of fir wood at which a girl was standing and reading.  She was wearing a dark blue dress and did not turn around when we came in.  Beneath the two cellar windows imposed upon the room lay a mattress and, against the opposite wall, a bed; at the table stood two chairs.  By the door was a furnace.  Yet as we approached the girl turned around and I was able to see her face.  She held out her hand and indicated a chair, at which point I noticed that the man was already lying on the mattress and the dog, as always, laid itself down at his feet.

"That's my father sleeping," said the girl, "and he can't hear us talk.  The large black dog has no name.  He just came to our house one evening as my father began preaching.  We hadn't locked the door so he was able to push the handle down with his paws and make his way in." 

I stood numb before the girl and then asked in a soft voice about her father and his past. 

"My father was a rich man, the owner of many factories," said the girl and lowered her eyes.  "He left my mother and my brothers to spread the truth to humanity." 

"Do you think that what your father spreads is indeed the truth?"  I asked.

"It is," she said, "it is the truth.  I always knew that it was the truth.  That's why I moved into this cellar and continue to live with him.  But what I didn't know was that once he spread the truth, the dog would come."  

The girl fell silent and looked as if she were about to ask me for something that she dared not say aloud.

"Then send him away.  The dog, I mean," I replied.  But the girl shook her head.

"He has no name, and so he won't go," she said gently.  She perceived my indecision and sat down on one of the chairs at the table.  I sat down as well.

"Are you afraid of this animal?"  I asked.

"I have always been afraid of him," she said.  "When my mother came with her attorney about a year ago to take me and my father back, my brothers were also very afraid of our nameless dog.  The dog of course just plopped himself down next to my father and growled.  Even when I lie in bed I am afraid of him – and then especially so – but now everything has changed.  Now you have come and now I can laugh at the beast.  I always knew that you would come.  Naturally, I didn't know what you looked like; but I knew that sooner or later you would come home with my father one evening when the lamp was already on and the streets were quiet to celebrate our wedding night in this half-underground room, here in my bed near all these books.  And here we would lie next to one another, a man and a woman, and over there father would be on his mattress in the dark like a child, and the large black dog would keep a vigil over our love."