Rilke, "Rufe mich zu jeder deiner Stunden"

A poem ("Call me each hour you still resist") by this Austrian writer.  You can read the original here.

Call me each hour you still resist  
The endless hours you call your life,                  
Beseeching near in dog-faced mist, 
Yet always turned away in strife

Should you now see their meaning's gloam. 
And mostly yours was what we lost; 
Yet we are free, left there to roam
Where we believe our paths first crossed. 

And fearful do we yearn for pause,   
Too young sometimes for yarn and lace, 
Too old for that which never was.  

And we alone still praise that place,
Alas, where we're both branch and brawn,
The sweetness of ripe danger's song.

Green Tea

Our headlines have long since been saturated with the modern notion of the Devil, what we have come to call the serial killer.  The circumstances will always be gruesome and the bewilderment of the police will only match their repulsion (although, with the plethora of such events the faces and words of investigators have begun to seem jaded and unshocked), but day in and out we learn of more monstrosities.  Now surely some of these flagitious people are the victims of their own crapulence or other such addiction; perhaps they are even inherently rotten in bone and vein.  Yet others are often depicted as having been hitherto the model of average citizenship.  What compels them to their horrid deeds cannot be explained, not by psychobabble, not by the testimony of neighbors ("he was such a quiet man ..."), not even by the recapitulation of small failures in the course of one human life now construed as a mounting catastrophe.  No, there is something else that lays its hand upon your shoulder, directs your gaze and maintains your attention.  And the identity of such a being lies at the heart of this tale.

Three narrators will be refracted through one another like a hall of mirrors: an unnamed philologist and wanderer, "educated in medicine and surgery"; his master, Dr. Martin Hesselius, a Faustian polymath of sinister leanings; and finally, the Reverend Robert Lynder Jennings.  We learn almost nothing of our first speaker as he quickly diverts attention to his mentor, more than three decades his senior; yet in truth, little too of Hesselius can be derived.  It is the initial Boswellian narrator who translates from the German Hesselius's correspondence to a fourth man, a Dutch scholar by the name of Van Loo, in which his discoveries on the human soul are revealed in scientific detail.  Jennings has all the qualities of "a perfectly gentlemanlike man": he is serene but witty, bright but hardly arrogant, and, although moneyed, more interested in the pursuits of his vocation than his estate.  There is about him, however, something not lost on the keen observer – and Hesselius is far keener than most:

Mr. Jennings has a way of looking sidelong upon the carpet, as if his eye followed the movements of something there.  This, of course, is not always.  It occurs now and then.  But often enough to give a certain oddity, as I have said, to his manner, and in this glance traveling along the floor there is something both shy and anxious.

Hesselius is thankfully also a man of principles, which means that all those keen observations are not squandered.  He believes that "the entire natural world is but the ultimate expression of that spiritual world from which, and in which alone, it has its life."  Conviction in a God sublime and indefinable does not impede Hesselius's science, nor, for that matter, his compassion.  His friend Jennings is not a man in clover.  Proof of his misery comes in the form of that most literary of devices, the casually perused book replete with underlined passages.  In this case, the book turns out to be this mystical work, and the most vibrant passage reads as follows:      

The evil spirits associated with man are, indeed from the hells, but when with man they are not then in hell, but are taken out thence.  The place where they then are, is in the midst between heaven and hell, and is called the world of spirits – when the evil spirits who are with man, are in that world, they are not in any infernal torment, but in every thought and affection of man, and so, in all that the man himself enjoys.  But when they are remitted into their hell, they return to their former state.

As implications loom, so does a project to which Jennings has always wanted to devote himself: the religious metaphysics of the ancients.  Unlike most monographs that focus on symbols, totems, and rituals, Jennings is drawn to the "actual religion of educated and thinking paganism."  And when he begins his study, he finds himself for some inexplicable reason consuming a large daily amount of tea – first black, then green – at which point his life shifts in a most dramatic and terrible direction.  

What happens to Jennings will not, of course, be disclosed on these pages.  Modern readers accustomed to the narcotic rubbish of the beat or smash or crash generations will sketch large rings around Jennings's claim that all serious writers compose on a substance – be that substance caffeine, nicotine, or something more potent – but these are all cheap conceits.  Apart from the suppleness and ease of his prose, Le Fanu's strength as a writer comes from the frequent suggestions that he does not quite believe all of what he describes.  That is not to say that his works are insincere (such disingenuousness is reserved almost exclusively for the charlatans and jesters of postmodernism), but rather that two possible explanations may be provided without diminishing the supernatural effect.  In this tale it falls to Hesselius to make sense of the events and to bring them onto a plane of human understanding at once intelligible and awesome, and admittedly he wavers so elegantly as to have us doubt the dénouement.  If only poor Jennings had vacillated in the slightest.   

The Sorcerers

Those who believe in something greater than themselves – something almighty, something all-knowing and something all-encompassing – should not take umbrage at the arrogance of men of science.  Now it is true that that the discoveries of the last few hundred years have greatly changed how we view our universe, and how agreeably we exist within it.  But we should not forget the nihility of the physicist's black holes, the bondage of being nothing more than a link on a long chain of beasts, the emptiness at the bottom of the zealous chemist's alembic.  Through fortune and ingenuity we have surpassed all our predecessors in speed of communication as well as some creature comforts that we would not likely give back – yet this comes at a price.  Although we are advanced and equipped like never before, we no longer fend for ourselves.  For keys to all the things we value we consult a locksmith; for the meat we devour we need a butcher; for the software and computers that have transformed our lives in so many extraordinary ways, the vast majority of us still require the aid of a technology specialist.  We know the tools that science has laid at our feet, but their manufacture is divided among so many masters that we might conclude that for every step towards man's conquest of his planet he has become increasingly helpless.  Which brings us to a story from this collection. 

In a forest in Eastern Bolivia that is home to this tiny tribe, our guides are a pair of British anthropologists, Wilkins and Goldbaum.  Perhaps it is always the British, renowned for being emotionally distant, that feel impassioned by these miniature studies of miniature civilizations; perhaps the fact that one of them may be of Jewish descent makes us more sympathetic to their interests.  They have learned hitherto only a "hundred-odd words" of Siriono, much more than what English they have been able to teach "the most intelligent and curious man in the village," Achtiti.  And their struggles, already keen and daily, are exacerbated by the destruction – whether it was wilful remains one of the story's many mysteries – of their campsite.  They dare not leave the site with Siriono instructions since these might prove fatal.  So they decide to ask the tribe to dispatch one of its own to seek help from a contact, Suarez, in Candelaria, the closest town:

The following day, Wilkins prepared the letter for Suarez in Candelaria.  He had the idea of drafting it in two versions, one written in Spanish for Suarez and one ideographic, so that both Achtiti and the messenger could get the gist of the mission's purpose and put aside their evident suspicion.  The second version showed the messenger himself walking southwest, along the river; twenty suns were intended to represent the length of the journey.  Then came the city: tall huts, and among them many men and women in trousers and skirts and with hats on their heads.  Finally, there was a bigger man, pushing the motorboat into the river, with three men on board and sacks of provisions, and the boat going back up the river; in this last image, the messenger was on board, stretched out and eating from a bowl.  

The vision of Candelaria, a town of admittedly no more than five thousand inhabitants, differs so greatly from the tiny Siriono enclave that one might have imagined Wilkins was describing London.  In the meantime, there is little the two foreigners can do but hope that a boat returns with Sanchez and that they will not be slaughtered ("as they do with their old people") owing to their immediate uselessness.  Useless, that is, until the Englishmen survey their remaining belongings and find a tape recorder, gobs of currency, two watches, and most importantly, a box of matches.  The tape recorder was used before the story's events to record Achtiti's voice, playback that engenders fear and loathing; but when the explorers produce small sticks that burn after contact, the natives become very restless indeed. 

The story has a moral that is all too obvious, although sometimes the best lessons are the ones we have to repeat.  It is never determined whether Wilkins and Goldbaum are good men or even good ethnographers.  What can be said about their approach to one of the world's most notoriously primitive tribes is that they care for accuracy and justice in human affairs, even if there are many indications that they do not think all men to be equal.  Towards the end of our tale, we learn more about this tribe, so baffling in its simplicity:

They are not familiar with metals, they do not possess terms for numbers higher than three, and although they often have to cross swamps and rivers, they do not know how to build boats.  They do know, however, that at one time they were able to do so, and the story is passed down among them of a hero who had the name of the Moon and who had taught their people (then much more numerous) three arts: to light fires, to carve out canoes, and to make bows.  Of these, only the last survives; they have even forgotten the method of making fire.

One could envision a world without light or fire if the sun caressed our limbs in sufficient quantity; one could even more easily do without metal, canoes or transportation of any kind; but what seems unfathomable is a life no greater than three.  What of the endless universe and its innumerable questions?  Can they really be reduced to nothing more than parents and one beloved child, the sides of a triangle, the Trinity and its contradictions that are not really contradictions?  Perhaps there's something to the uncomplicated life after all.   

A Very Long Engagement

It is rare for me to praise a work of art whose plot convention is the raw futility of organized violence, that old pastime of the bully-boy and his mindless minions.  Nothing good ever comes from the promotion of strife, from bludgeoning other humans to get one’s point across or simply to protect one’s own interests, and, as the song goes, nothing ever could.  Yet for those who lived through the two global wars of the twentieth century this is the only event that has ever taken place, and one that keeps repeating like the death of Emanuel Zunz.  Schoolteachers were very adamant about making us read a litany of allegedly brilliant novels that dwelt in the dark and loathsome realms of these catastrophes, where morality was suspended because it was not practical and because – and here we shudder – the enemy was utterly and irrevocably immoral.  Readers of these pages know what I tend to think of such rot.  It is certainly more tragic for someone to die for nothing in combat than to die at peace and rest in the comfort of one’s own home, at a jolly old age, and surrounded by one’s loved ones.  But such tragedy does not make art; it does not make anything at all except death, the opposite of everything we want and cherish.  It strips us of this life, whatever you may think this life might be worth, and pushes us into a chasm with the rest of humanity, a strange hold in an infinite ship on course through some nebulous field.  Perhaps the best tonic to these horrors is a tale of love set against a motley assortment of effects that do not seem real because had we experienced their proximity ourselves, we would not be here to recount them.  And in this regard, we have a strangely modern film. 

It may or may not be symbolic that our heroine Mathilde (Audrey Tautou) is herself a cripple.  She was born with the century, on January 1, 1900, and has become engaged to her beloved Manech (Gaspard Ulliel); but he is young and French, and the year is 1917, so the prospects of future bliss are hardly dazzling.  Still, Mathilde persists in her faith that Manech, whom she truly adores in a way that we all hope to be adored at some point in our lives, will return, safe and sound, or at least healthier than she is.  Her shin splints allow her to limp about awkwardly and distract us from her angelic countenance enough for her to play her part (for all the vapid or cutesy roles that made her famous, Tautou does this simple bit remarkably well).  She waits for a sign of life at a small house in Brittany with her aunt, who makes her struggle with polio a tad easier.  When news comes at last, after the war itself is concluded, it is not what she expects: Manech and four other members of his battalion were convicted of voluntary self-mutilation and tried at a military tribunal as deserters.  Hardly renowned for their mercy, military tribunals often tend to look at deserters with as much disdain as they regard turncoats, which explains the horrific sentence of no man’s land.  Here they are sure to die, which Manech surely did, killed as he must have been by a German bomb at some point during his miserable incursion to the lowest ring of hell.  No cadaver, but no one survives no man’s land.  A preponderance of evidence that does little to convince Mathilde.

She departs to Paris and begins her investigation.  She hires a detective, asks all the persons who might be involved or might have heard of survivors all the questions movie heroines are supposed to ask, and gets some answers.  Most of these answers are confirmations of the impossibility of her quest.  A series of unfortunate events befalls many of these witnesses, whom guileless Mathilde could not have dreamed of harming.  We are then presented with her foil, another widow (Marion Cotillard), who has less patience for the squeaky crane that is the French bureaucracy and no sympathy for the officials who casually wave off names of dead young men as if they were cigarette ash.  In a way, both approaches – the waywardly optimistic and the vigilante – make perfect sense, although our instincts tell us the film will end with one path being the true path and the other simply mocking its audacity.  And nothing is more audacious than the cinematography, which should have won every award it could possibly have accrued.  You may have heard of Mathilde and Manech's story before, but you have never seen it in such uncompromising vividness, untenable in the bestselling novel which generated the script.  Some things, some wild, unorthodox, woeful things, are best left for the screen.

White

Until a recent reviewing of this film, the middle part of a legendary Polish–French trilogy, I had an odd conception of what actually took place.  Both the beginning and the end were, I discovered, perfectly etched in my memory.  But of the middle part, when our down-and-out protagonist Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) escapes back to his native Poland and his fortune takes a sharp turn, I had but scraps.  I would like to think that this is owing to my internal ethical mechanism that purges me of the most superficial and materialist information to which I am exposed, leaving only the sweet and bittersweet traces of love, warmth, art, curiosity and nostalgia.  However much I wish to delude myself, my own disposition may indeed have had something to do with it.  But the main reason is because the film is really nothing at all without its climax, so perfectly woven and yet so cruel, and the whole tale resonates, stinks, and flashes with the slow destructiveness of revenge.

White is not about love, despite the fervid claims of Karol, who is impotent and married to the lovely Dominique (a nymphet-like Julie Delpy).  The film begins in front of a courthouse and ends with a strange exchange outside a prison, and both main characters have something to hide from their partner.  Karol is a hairdresser who has come to France to make his mark, leaving behind a rather popular practice outside of Warsaw.  We understand the changes that were occurring in Central Europe at the time (early 1990s), and sympathize with those who believed that the formerly socialist states might not survive the overhaul.  Karol, one of these sceptics, finds a way to Paris and then finds a French wife in Dominique.  One wonders what exactly Dominique might want with this small and scruffy Pole.  Looks notwithstanding, his French is limited to two- or three-word phrases that inevitably spurt out of his mouth once the other person has resumed talking, and we can suppose that advanced Polish was not an elective in her Paris lycée.  He is neither rich nor, as we are painfully informed, gifted in pleasuring his partners.  Love is blind, true enough.  But dumb, patient, and sexless?  The match is more than unlikely, it is nonsensical. 

You may retort that we are watching a fairy tale, and I concur.  Yet the result, while appropriate and correct, has little of the magical justice that a fairy tale espouses.  It then behooves us to determine why on earth this couple ever became a couple.  Dominique obviously has no interest in children, nor in learning Polish, but she does like both money and sex.  Karol was an award–winning hairdresser in the old country, and it is no stretch of our little grey cells to imagine that he could have saved up “quite a nest egg” (a line used in the film in a later context) in order to travel to France and set up shop under the Paris sky.  Just as easily, he could have made Dominique – who shows no signs of employment – a very generous offer in return for French citizenship.  This premise explains not only Dominique’s interest, but also why the dream wedding sequence that pervades Karol’s consciousness is just that, a dream.  They never had a white wedding, or anything more than a perfunctory mishmash of vows before a justice of the peace.  Once Dominique has Karol’s money, there is nothing left to do except throw him to the dogs.

Amidst these street urchins, Karol is found by Mikolaj (Janusz Gajos), who suggests that he return to Poland and work for him there.  Well, that’s not quite how the matter is phrased.  They take a walk by Dominique’s apartment, and he catches sight of his wife in the window with, Mikolaj informs him, no real intention of going to sleep.  A phone call confirms Mikolaj’s supposition, and Karol’s trust is won.  Then Mikolaj asks Karol for a favor in repayment, a favor so painfully clear to the viewer that we understand the significance of white’s symbolism.  Now, color coordination with symbolic meaning is a lowly pursuit best reserved for interior decorators with no imagination.  Yet the white in this sequence harks back to the whiteness of the wedding that never took place, the naïveté and innocence that Dominique is supposed to embody, but which more accurately characterize her husband.  White then becomes the symbol of purity in post-Communist Poland, of the ubiquitous snowfall that makes everything shine and glisten as if there were nothing filthy or reprehensible underneath.  Karol does proceed, in rather spectacular fashion, back home and begins to take advantage of the new economic freedoms granted to him and his countrymen.  Soon the old Karol, the stuttering doormat and cuckold, is replaced by an oily tycoon with infrastructure and influence.  The transformation is as preposterous as Karol and Dominique’s marriage, so we should not be surprised at the end when both absurdities merge into a coherent allegory.  And Karol’s sentimentality in the final scene, at once utterly sincere and utterly fraudulent, is not to be missed.