Esenin, "Да! Теперь - решено. Без возврата"

A work ("Now all is set, and I forsake") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

Now all is set, and I forsake
My homeland's woods and sunlit glare.
No longer will the poplars cleave
Their winged foliage in my hair. 

The low house stoops without my height,
My faithful dog has long licked sod.
On crooked Moscow streets at night
I am to die, so promised God. 

This town of elms, I love it well,
Decrepit, flabby – be it so.
And drowsy golden Asia's swell
Has died upon the rounded domes.

And when the moonlight gilds the sky – 
Who knows just how it got that far!
My head hung down, I then espy
Across the street a well-known bar.

In foulest lair of noise and grime,
Through all the night until day's brink,
To hookers I will read sweet rhyme,
And heat my bones with thugs and drink. 

My heart will rise as throbbing sun,
Then I will say, in whispered shout:
"I'm just like you, o fallen one –
I also have now no way out."

On crooked streets in Moscow bright, 
My loving dog has fled the rod;
My measly house has stooped in fright:
I am to die, thus deemed my God.

The Purloined Letter

The material world … abounds with very strict analogies to the immaterial; and thus some color of truth has been given to the rhetorical dogma, that metaphor, or simile, may be made to strengthen an argument, as well as to embellish a description.  The principle of the vis inertiae, for example, seems to be identical in physics and metaphysics.  It is not more true in the former, that a large body is with more difficulty set in motion than a smaller one, and that its subsequent momentum is commensurate with this difficulty, than it is, in the latter?  That intellects of the vaster capacity, while more forcible, more constant, and more eventful in their movements than those of inferior grade, are yet the less readily moved, and more embarrassed and full of hesitation in the first few steps of their progress?  

                                                                                                                          Auguste Dupin

There is an old argument promoted by mostly young men that the world is far too complex to have been created by a single entity – as if a billionth of this Entity’s power would be at all fathomable to us highly evolved primates, but that’s really beside the point.  The mortal flaw in such an argument is that the most recondite and brilliant among us will guide us to the path of truth because if they cannot, their progeny undoubtedly will.  Arrogance of this sort commonly emanates from the flippant interviews given by top scientists who denounce any miracle – anything that can be grasped by an average mind with sufficient faith and imagination – in lieu of abstract and frankly absurd notions of our universe that are completely untenable because we have still but a small fragment of the technology that would allow us to evaluate such data.  We are so close to knowing how our solar system functions, said one smug gentleman recently (paraphrased to keep the Google hounds off his trail), and a mission to Mars will confirm what we have always believed: that Mars is the future residence of humanity.  If such poppycock strikes you as profound insight from a learned scholar, then by all means book your one-way ticket redwards.  But if knowledge encompasses more than subject equations that contradict one another because all numbers and facts eventually contradict one another, you might delight in this famous tale.

We begin with Dupin and our nameless narrator sitting in a Paris apartment in much the same positions as another, subsequent crimefighting duo, waiting for the world and its mysteries to come to them.  These riddles arrive in the form of the local Prefect, a certain Monsieur G., who “had a fashion of calling every thing ‘odd’ that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of ‘oddities,’” and is unmistakably the victim of the story’s epigraph.  The Prefect, at once a justice-seeker and an unabashed admirer of the powerful and affluent, is investigating a theft he can only describe in broad and rather opaque terms:

I have received personal information, from a very high quarter, that a certain document of the last importance has been purloined from the royal apartments.  The individual who purloined it is known; this beyond a doubt; he was seen to take it.  It is known, also, that it still remains in his possession … it is clearly inferred from the nature of the document, and from the nonappearance of certain results which would at once arise from its passing out of the robber's possession; that is to say, from his employing it as he must design in the end to employ it.

We should always be disinclined to trust a man who spends over a hundred words when one would suffice.  Nevertheless, the point is made and what follows is a meticulous recounting of the event of the theft itself and the paramount value of that document to a certain lady in high standing.  Names are never mentioned because the characters involved are the prototypes of the scandal that can only afflict those unsullied by the daily grind; for the same reason are the amounts that have been extorted from her ladyship since that fateful day likewise accorded no room on our crisp, white pages. 

In good police procedural fashion, the Prefect continues to itemize the searches conducted by himself and his staff in the furrowing and organized ransacking of the robber’s apartment.  He also reports that the letter, whose contents are incendiary and its appearance known, has not been found despite months of thorough visits.  It is here that Dupin, who has been generally silent and pensive, asks his friend how exactly his team proceeded.  He also asks whether amidst the checks for hidden cabinets or empty chair legs the Prefect had snooped around the most obvious of locations for a piece of paper, the robber’s desk.  He gets a response that does not surprise him in the least:

Certainly; we opened every package and parcel; we not only opened every book, but we turned over every leaf in each volume, not contenting ourselves with a mere shake, according to the fashion of some of our police officers.  We also measured the thickness of every book-cover, with the most accurate admeasurement, and applied to each the most jealous scrutiny of the microscope.  Had any of the bindings been recently meddled with, it would have been utterly impossible that the fact should have escaped observation.  Some five or six volumes, just from the hands of the binder, we carefully probed, longitudinally, with the needles.

That this search could have taken days need not concern us; the perpetrator is a government official whose thievery wins him a massive amount of leverage, but it is his being both “a mathematician and a poet” that enables him for months to outgeneral the Parisian police.  Ultimately this same Prefect who boasts of owning “keys … with which [he] can open any chamber or cabinet in Paris,” is cajoled into revealing the amount of the reward offered for information leading to the acquisition of the letter – an offer that to the impoverished Dupin does not fall on deaf ears.

I fear that mystery buffs have always been disappointed by The Purloined Letter precisely because it is not really a mystery, but a philosophical fragment in anecdotal guise.  In a way, of course, they have it quite right.  What Poe occasionally lacks in his elegant amblings are the tantalizing turns and suspense that keep awake and conjoined a reader and his bedside lamp.  Not that there aren’t moments when we wonder what will happen next; there are just so many more that we cannot simply decide to forego.  Then again, we could probably do with fewer monstra horrenda roaming about – especially from the house of Atreus.

The Five Obstructions

Admittedly it did not take a great deal of time to locate downloads of Det perfekte menneske (The Perfect Human, 1967), a film short by this Danish writer and filmmaker and the basis of this recent film.  Film short here means all of twelve black–and–white minutes in the life of a rather attractive young Scandinavian couple dancing, grooming, bathing, eating, dressing, undressing, and discovering the contours of their outward genetic advantages.  A voiceover done by Leth himself does not wonder how such perfection was achieved (an old argument), but how it is maintained and, most modernly, how simple daily actions are beautified because the agents performing them look fresh off a modeling shoot.  Given the hints at the couple’s vapidity, the voiceover and the images provided are sufficiently ironic to make the short palatable to film studies offerings up to this day, something to be seen once or twice, discussed at length, and then stashed between copies of Metropolis and Wild Strawberries.  Or in Lars von Trier’s case to be seen twenty times and turned into a hypnotic exercise in self-awareness.

If these downloads and my stopwatch are to be trusted, then by taking in all ninety minutes of The Five Obstructions, we actually see about half of Leth’s original short interspersed.  More than enough to get the idea and enough in any case to highlight the game which is afoot: the remaking of the film with substantially different criteria.  These criteria, says von Trier, who seems to be draining a cocktail in every scene, are better referred to as obstructions because the point of having Leth remake his short is to reexamine both the ethics and worthwhileness of the whole endeavor.  How can twelve minutes of Blow–up–type footage merit such scrutiny?  If you follow von Trier (usually a very wise option), then it is precisely the inherent shallowness of the short that makes it the perfect test subject.  Leth, a man of discernible ego and one recently besmirched by some rather nasty rumors, is up for the challenge, perhaps if only to harpoon the massive bubble that he mistakes for von Trier’s swollen head.  Yet von Trier is not trying to show off.  He is trying to prove that art without clear morality may only enjoy ephemeral and topical success.  Nothing is more old–fashioned than the hopelessly modern, remarked this famed hedonist (who was really an old moralist), and Leth’s short, however popular and trendy in his day, now appears like a Mesozoic fossil against von Trier’s revolutionary (and sometimes hyperrevolutionary) back–to–basics Dogme 95 approach.  So, Leth grudgingly concurs, a few updates may be overdue.              

The first obstruction is to film The Perfect Human in Cuba — a place where Caribbean connoisseur Leth had some issues a while back — in Spanish, without a set, and, most annoyingly, with only twelve frames.  Since twenty–four frames is standard, an unpleasant choppiness obtains that frustrates Leth more than the viewer.  After passing this first test and evincing signs of incredulity, Leth is pushed much further by the second obstruction.  Von Trier begins his request by inviting Leth to sample some forenoon vodka and caviar, which von Trier claims should only be eaten with a bone china utensil, then moves to talking about “the most miserable place in the world.”  What is the worst patch of humanity or inhumanity that Leth has ever experienced?  Sensing a debacle of immense proportions, Leth thinks about lying then confesses that there is nothing more hideous for a godfearing man than recalling in dream the red light district of Mumbai: 

I had one of those rare nightmares you remember when you wake up. I thought it had a bit of a Faustian pact to it ...  Where fear transforms into madness, when you have to avoid sleep not to fall back into that nightmare.

This obstruction, which contains a few other minor stipulations, has become the poster piece for the film and the one in which Leth comes closest to losing the icy and objective distance for which he is renowned.  Can there be anything more off–putting than a gourmet meal in a tuxedo and a shave before a screened–off mass of undernourished onlookers?  At first Leth mocks “this notion that I’ll be so affected, that it will be visible, quantifiable,” attributing von Trier’s insistence on squalor to pure “Romanticism.”  “There’s no physiological law,” says Leth, “that says you will have too much.”  Yet physiology is not the reason that we watch the amazingly reserved Leth change his mind little by little, even if changing his mind means that von Trier was right.                  

The other three obstructions will not be mentioned here.  With each episode, Leth is granted less creative control and more incentive to strangle von Trier, who does at times seem to be having his fun.  But it is fun of the finest kind, a parody of hard–held tenets of fashion and kitschy solipsism that are blown out of the water by von Trier and his principled band of Dogmeists.  Not to say that Leth was a purveyor of this type of stuff, but the irony he intended at the time is no longer valid because it is satirical and engages trendiness on its own dull terms.  Despite its odd format and brittle accord of oneupmanship, calling The Five Obstructions pretentious is hardly accurate.  They are nothing but what they claim to be: five methods of reorganizing one’s approach to the values of observation.  When von Trier objects to Leth’s showing the poor of Mumbai (“One thing I asked is that we don’t see those people”), we know that we shouldn’t have seen them because, first and foremost, he wants Leth’s reaction to them, and with them there, we hardly see Leth at all.  And the famous quote that begins “today I experienced something that I hope to understand in a few days,” uttered by “the perfect man” while shaving and then by Leth while in Mumbai, becomes less of an imbecility and more of an epitaph: the days of beautiful decadence and luxury worship are over.  Long live the rugged realism of craftsmanship.

Vallejo, "Ausente"

A work ("Absent") by this Peruvian poet.  You can read the original here.

You're absent on the morning I depart 
To Mystery more distant than all tides,
A straight inevitable line to chart,
The graveyard path so slick beneath your strides.

You're absent on the morning on the beach,
That silent realm and lonely sea of shade;
I, mournful bird, through farthest clouds will breach;
You, captive in white pantheon, will fade.

In time, sweet time, night will dispel your glance,
In time you will both suffer and receive
The soft white wounds of penitence and chance;

And absent as you choose your agony,
Remorse in wildest pack will then perceive
The weeping bronze in your Gethsemane. 

Las aguas del olvido

From the title of this story ("The waters of oblivion") and its first line ("No one would cross the river"), we should be able to divine what exactly will happen in the end.  Márquez loves books almost as much he loves his wife Ivonne, who does not return his affection; one wonders, in fact, whether she ever did.  He has grown tired of the river; tired of his dog Saúl and his silly games; tired ever so slightly of this world.  To change his routine, Márquez decides to invite a young yet already established writer to his mansion somewhere among Spain's many hillocks and streams, although we are never told why he selected this writer over many others.  The writer himself does not know.  He suspects the invitation may have something to do with Ivonne, who has been less than faithful recently if she ever was before.  Our narrator, who happens to be this nameless writer so cherished by Márquez, steps towards the window and looks down upon the tennis courts of the large estate.  This is, one should say, the natural reaction of most young men entering upon the middle way of life, who behold the endless energy of less aged generations with nostalgic smiles.  He lingers on Ivonne, attracted to her curves, her pelvis, her thighs, the way she stops at the net to talk to her instructor and lover, Charlie Gómez.  Why should Gómez pay attention to these two worthless excuses for men, when

He had the general aspect of those heartthrobs who pose and sell male colognes.  Tall and invariably tanned, he seemed less addicted to Ivonne than to sports and automobiles, and when he played tennis he would tie around his forehead a striped band which Ivonne doubtless found irresistible.  Sitting across from him during breakfast, I came to think that I could consider him an imbecile without a smidgen of remorse.  But could anyone who allowed himself to be called Charlie Gómez be anything but an imbecile?

While the narrator gazes upon the frivolous urges of so many people who think that life is about entitlement, Márquez tries to tell him about the etymology of the river that no one wants to cross, Guadalete.  But his guest finds unabashed adultery more interesting, if only for a few regrettable moments.

The question is whether Ivonne merits such attention.   In the realm of conventional storytelling,  Ivonne would have been a stunning beauty from whose angelic presence Márquez could not turn away.   Had he been a writer – which he certainly isn't – he would have composed odes to the softness of her skin under an eternal sun.  Instead, our narrator finds pictures of Ivonne from another time:

In the shelves above the table lay black-and-white photos of Ivonne; in some of them she was much younger but not as well-dressed or groomed; they undoubtedly stemmed from the time before Márquez entered her life.  I found myself wondering where that had happened and why it was beyond repair.

Márquez does not share the narrator's amazement.  As Ivonne and Charlie finish a meal and skip off with "premeditated agility, as if showing Márquez and me the felicitous advantages of sport and adultery," the two bibliophiles retire to the library to gaze upon things of much truer beauty.  It is here that Márquez renews his conversation with his guest: "Guadalete is an Arab word of Greek origin," a complicated introduction that failed to touch the narrator's nerve the first time they discussed the matter.  Perhaps because novelists tend to be convinced that the only thing worth reading are novels, more specifically, their own?  Márquez is duly aware of such solipsism:

'Reading dictionaries and discovering etymologies, that's what I like,'  said Márquez, looking out the window at Ivonne who had her back to us.  'Don't take this the wrong way, but I don't know of a single novel as fascinating as the pleasure of reading a dictionary.'

He then feels obligated, as all great pedants do, to elucidate his lesson with an example, using the most immediate test rat available – in this case, Charlie.  Charlie (whom the narrator calls an "imbecile" as a sign of solidarity) could be described in plain terms as "jovial," a word ultimately derived from the name of this god.  And since we know that Charlie's only god-like qualities are his stature and complexion, we suspect that Márquez finds fiction not quite as precise as the beginnings of all things.  So while our narrator tries to palliate his host by "signing different inscriptions in each one of his books," Márquez keeps a piece of wood ready "as if calculating the possibility of doing something that made him unsure" and his dog waits patiently by his side.

The story is part of a collection by this contemporary Spanish writer who has garnered quite a few accolades in his recent years.   From what we have seen, albeit superficially, of our narrator, we are inclined to believe that he finds fiction, storytelling and the fantastic much more interesting than the tedium and worries of daily existence.  In many ways, of course, he is right.  The only means to free oneself from the onslaught of bourgeois mores is to deny their validity within yourself by obtaining a deeper meaning to your own life.  This may sound preposterous to most people who have come to believe that their lives are ordinary because they are not famous or rich or otherwise important to anyone outside of their small circle of family and friends.  But the truth is that every life is extraordinary because it is yours and no one else's.  If only the same thing could be said about that river.