Russian Dolls

There are many metaphors for what all of us, in one way or another, seek from life.  Some may call it acknowledgement, others respect, yet the strongest word is still the best: love.   In a free and privileged world our encounters with love will be the product of our choices, not because we choose whom we love – there is, in fact, bountiful evidence to the contrary – but because for people who want to love and be loved everything we might undertake shapes and alters the possibilities of our passion (as a famous critic once said, whatever an alcoholic is planning for his day he is, in effect, simply planning his drinking).  It is therefore not surprising to see the industry of relationship advice bloom in the last century with the expansion of women's rights and the general abolition in privileged countries of arranged matrimony.  Which brings us to another conundrum: the freer we are to love whomever we'd like, the less we seem to know what to do about it.  Never in the history of mankind have we been allotted so much liberty in our mating and never before have we been plagued by so much indecision and doubt.   Despite the preponderance of half-baked suggestions that point towards love simply being a function of need and repressed desire, love is precisely what we do know.  Teenage infatuations notwithstanding, by the age of roughly our early to mid-twenties we will have gathered sufficient experience about what love is supposed to look, sound, and feel like that we will imagine a world in which our love is the most perfect, and from this unblemished sphere will be derived the one woman who is to replace all the other women that exist.  What percentage of us ever finds this woman?  A cynic would say zero; a skeptic might name a figure barely above that.  There will also always be those who claim that we are bound to impose our ideals on some poor, unknowing lass and disappoint both her and ourselves.  Yet there is another school of thought in which I occasionally swim, the school of revelation.  Revealed love, over time, over the course of a life seen at once forwards and backwards, the chance of eternity and immortal bliss, this is what we sense in every corner of our soul.  And the revelation of love is the fine metaphor in this film's title.

Our hero is a Frenchman by the name of Xavier (Romain Duris), a disarming and sensitive fellow as well as an aspiring novelist.  As opposed to the vast majority of the pretentious story lines featuring young artists, the film allows Xavier to be both sentimental and business-like in his decisions.  He opts to pen a few tawdry soap opera screenplays both for practice and money (a utilitarian sin of maturing writers since history's onset), all the while trying to finish his first novel and inspecting the world around him and the choices of his friends.  There is his ex-girlfriend Martine (Audrey Tautou) who has since gotten married, had a child and taken a responsible job to help the environment; William (Kevin Bishop), who has fallen in love with a Russian ballerina and even attempted to acquire the fundamentals of her language in order to woo her; Isabelle (Cecile de France), his lesbian friend and confidante; Celia (the late Lucy Gordon), a gorgeous actress whose biography Xavier has been commissioned to write; and then there is William's sister Wendy (Kelly Reilly), a spunky British redhead who keeps bobbing like a buoy on the lake of Xavier's regret.  What Xavier and Wendy will make of their relationship, which has obvious potential both physically and emotionally, is at the crux of the memories that engird him as he daydreams at William's wedding.  We go back in time with him, although time has been reshuffled to indicate a meaningful pattern, and we discover what he discovers. 

And what surfaces in six years of contemplation and regret?  It is always important to understand why we treat people a certain way, why we are friends with some and not others, and such insight can be gained through close scrutiny of our own mores.  If a person loves money and sex, he should not be astonished that he has little truck with his family and that his friends turn out to be a group of selfish hedonists who can never seem to quench their desires for pleasure; if security and his own personal space make him most comfortable, he will probably wake up one day and find himself completely and utterly alone.  Between these two easy and cowardly extremes lies the essence of our existence.  Xavier pursues Celia insofar as he understands that he can never have her; he looks at Martine, who is annoying yet principled and beautiful (a rare combination), and foresees a steady life devoted to the betterment of the planet and the plainness of his soul.  He travels as so many of us have traveled through the cultural paradise that is Europe looking for the face, the smile, the connection to end all connections.  Russia, as the other, the huge, looming and generally inimical beast that guards the most mysteriously gorgeous women the world has ever seen, becomes for him as a Frenchman an oddity, a disarrangement in his plans.  He looks at William, a simple lad who has always partied harder than anyone else, and sees a young man now intractably spellbound.  And he beholds this ballerina, perhaps in the classical sense the epitome of grace and idealized form, and sees a doll.  Yes, a doll.  The famous nested matryeshki that line every tourist trap in Russia, often with political leaders replacing the kerchief-garbed charwomen of the classic model, these now assume new meaning.  We all want to know, he muses philosophically standing in this famous St. Petersburg street, who that last and tiniest doll is, the one that is neither hollow nor contains anything apart from herself.  When do we end our search?  Would the results be any different were we Romantic souls not so enticed to circulate from wondrous European city to wondrous European city and gaze at every lovely young woman with a certain curiosity? 

While the details of Russian Dolls are hardly novel, the metaphor is both salient and extraordinary in its simplicity.  Duris has a middling command of English, which lends him a certain patheticness that is put to good use in emphasizing the fundamentality of his questions; he is, in other words, neither overly privileged nor overly gifted, and while not ugly, his appearance suggests warmth rather than gratification.  We are neither intimidated by his ability nor scornful of the success he does enjoy, especially with Celia, a witless stunner who leaves a bar when she fears to be seen only with him by some of her, ahem, hedonistic acquaintances.  That Celia would seduce her biographer so as to augment his retrospective affection for her (as well as her glory) is such a logical premise one wonders why it didn't occur to us from the very beginning.  But then again, if we knew everything from the beginning we might just peel off all the dolls but one.

The Temple of Death

There is an inherent facetiousness to reviews that begin with the platitude "if you're like me, then you know" (as well as some grammatical ignorance, but that's another story), and the facetiousness lies in an attempt to win over the reader.  Not the ideal reader who remains the target of every writer of talent and ambition, but as many readers as possible.  Whatever one may think of art, it is certainly not a popularity contest.  Art is an understanding of the beauty and justice of the world – often conveyed in hideously damning portrayals of their opposites – through moral values.  If that doesn't make sense to you step back and consider what you think about when you think of art.  Is art a gangster movie in which everyone betrays everyone else, four simple words cannot be strung together without an obscenity, and the only things that matter are money and power?  A political allegory with animals being slain and people exchanging sly looks over superficial chit-chat about second-rate philosophers?  A schmaltzy love affair of two hearts separated by choices but destined to find each other so subtly spun that we can almost hear the maudlin soundtrack that is supposed to steer our emotions like a rose-covered leash?  If you answered in the affirmative to any or all of these questions, I'm sure cyberspace has more hospitable places for you than these pages.  But if you're like I am – ahem, if the same look of utter disgust wandered across your face upon reading those three capsule summaries, I would recommend perusing the collection of these forgotten authors, and in particular this tale.

The setting is the early period of Christianity when it was still known as "the new faith" and held by many with the same contempt that is directed to other movements in our day.  Unlike some of these waggish variants on an old theme, this was the age of a true watershed for mankind – or, at least, that is the impression one might have given the context of the story.  Paullinus is our hero and he bears resemblance to the Everlasting Man he worships:

He was a young man, a very faithful Christian, and with a love of adventure and travel which stood him in good stead.  He carried a little money, but he had seldom need to use it, for the people were simple and hospitable; he did not try to hold assemblies, for he believed that the Gospel must spread like leaven from quiet heart to quiet heart.

Were you to ask me for the definition a true Christian, I would use this last phrase.  Unlike today's pantomiming pulpiteers that try to convince that "God wants you to be rich" in the same breath as they condemn anyone who disagrees with them or does not plate their sterile excuse of a church with gold, the passing of true faith has little to do with power or persuasion.  Like parenting, friendship and romantic love, faith is a slow revelation of a hidden truth that when hidden seems unattainable and when revealed seems the most obvious fact of our existence – but I digress.  Paullinus meets villagers and scattered folk alike and in due time – this is, after all, a tale of horror – an old man gives him the warning we know he will not heed:

'Of one thing I must advise you,' he said. 'There is, in the wood, some way off the track, a place to which I would not have you go – it is a temple of one of our gods, a dark place.  Be certain, dear sir, to pass it by.  No one would go there willingly, save that we are sometimes compelled .... It is called the Temple of the Grey Death, and there are rites done there of which I may not speak.  I would it were otherwise, but the gods are strong – and the priest is a hard and evil man who won his office in a terrible way and shall lose it no less terribly.  Oh, go not there, dear stranger,' and he laid his hand upon his arm.

There are two types of warnings in life: those we give for the benefit of others and those we give for the benefit of ourselves; which one this may be is not immediately evident.  Paullinus bids farewell and finds himself intractably drawn to these very woods.  Admittedly, there is said to be a village in the woods that serves as a sanctuary to travelers, and there is where Paullinus convinces himself he can reach with a little bit of divine providence.  He wanders his way through as night falls and comes across a lone man, "of middle age, very strong and muscular," yet "undoubtedly he had an evil face," and pauses to think where he might have seen him before; but what he doesn't realize is that there is something about his grim savagery that reminds Paullinus of a portion of his own soul.  This is explained by the simple yet magnificent phrase upon discovering a fork in the road: "he felt a certain misgiving which he could not explain."  There is another fork, all around "a strange snarling cry some way off," and Paullinus's only wish is to clamber up a tree and let night and its minions forget all about him.  Yet that is precisely what it does not do.

Of course, Paullinus will not find the village but something else far less comforting.  The forest, as we know from this work, has many allegorical aspects, not the least of which are man's inferiority and susceptibility to the feral creatures that lurk therein.  As with its more tropical counterpart the jungle, forests are the epicenters of activity outside human law.  It is both the site of the most abominable devilry and a perfect representation of what may lie in the heart of many of us who fall prey to dark suggestion.  Someone or something had to put these trees, in their brutal denseness, on the earth, and a person whom Paullinus encounters understands this event as not the work of a Christian deity:

'The god who made these great lonely woods, and who dwells in them, is very different.' – he rose and made a strange obeisance as he talked.  'He loves death and darkness, and the cries of strong and furious beasts.  There is little peace here, for all that the woods are still – and as for love, it is of a brutish sort.  Nay, stranger, the gods of these lands are very different; and they demand very different sacrifices.  They delight in sharp woes and agonies, in grinding pains, in dripping blood and death-sweats and cries of despair.  If these woods were all cut down, and the land ploughed up, and peaceful folk lived here in quiet fields and farms, then perhaps your simple, easy-going God might come and dwell with them – but now, if he came, he would flee in terror.'

Whether the "new faith" accepts this challenge may depend on the reasons why there is always one priest at the Temple and why, occasionally, he must be replaced.  And that story may remind you of yet another, much older one about a brother and his keeper.

Baudelaire, "Le vin de l'assassin"

A drinking song of sorts ("The assassin's wine") by this French poet.  You can read the original here.

My wife is dead, and I am free        
To give myself to thirsty night!         
Yet when flat broke I'd seek alee,   
Her cries would rip my fibers tight. 

As happy as a king am I:                      
The air is pure, the heavens clear;           
Such was the joyful summer sky       
When I first loved my wife so dear! 

This horrid thirst that cuts me cold,
Can only be relieved with wine.
As much wine as a tomb will hold:
My grave, a massive pit of brine! 

An endless well I threw her down,      
And even sealed her fate that night 
With every stone from that high crown
Forgetting it all if I might!

In sermons of most tender vow,
Where nothing could rend us apart,
To lead through waves our love's bold prow,
So drunk on memory was my heart,

That I asked for a rendez-vous:
An evil eve; a darkened road.
And folly-stricken she came, too!
We all endure sweet folly's goad.

She was quite fine, a beauty spry
If tired now; and as for me, 
I loved her so, too much!  That's why
I bade her from this life to flee!

No one gets why, perhaps one blight,
Among this drunken, foolish crowd:
Could he have dreamt in morbid nights
Of turning wine to blackest shroud?

This blameless crook, as firmly safe
As iron cog with iron wheel;
Never would he in winter's chafe
Or summer's sun know love most real.

With black enchantment and black fears,
His cursed parade to panic's tune,
His vials of poison and his tears,
His rattling chains and mortal dunes!

And now I'm free, single once more!
Tonight dead drunk in my rebirth
Without cold fear or hot remorse,
I'll then lie down upon the earth.

And like a dog I'll take to sleep!
A chariot fast on heavy spoke;
With stones and mud it trudges deep,
This furious coach would gladly stroke

My guilty head into the sod
Or split me into equal parts! 
And I would mock, as I mock God
The Devil and Dee's Table charts!

The Vampyre

There is much to be said for being the first – or, at least, the loudest – in the promulgation of a literary phenomenon.  Considering how briefly these phenomena tend to echo within the captive ears of their readership, a topos that has enjoyed two hundred years of uninterrupted (and rising) interest must be termed nothing less than visionary.  Perusing the annals of Gothic literature – a genre of writing which has always given me a sort of guilty pleasure – one learns that it was this poet who first formulated, in our modern sense, the monster that has dug its claws into every major literary tradition.  Given Byron's elevated assessment of himself that is hardly surprising.  Yet despite a lengthy, somewhat overwrought poem in which the beast is described with gory relish, it was not he who first put the real bloodsucker on the map in the dashing, often noble shape for which he is now most renowned, but this half-Italian writer who also died young.  And if he gains no other readers for his works and short life in the future, Polidori will be remembered until kingdom come for this classic tale. 

Byron made one other contribution to the legend in a "fragment of a novel" that he wrote almost three years before Polidori's story was published in 1819.  A first-person narrator begins to talk about a certain Augustus Darvell, and his attitude is given a curious spin:

He [Darvell] had a power of giving to one passion the appearance of another, in such a manner that it was difficult to define the nature of what was working within him; and the expressions of his features would vary so rapidly, though slightly, that it was useless to trace them to their sources.  It was evident that he was a prey to some cureless disquiet; but whether it arose from ambition, love, remorse, grief, from one or all of these, or merely from a morbid temperament akin to disease, I could not discover: there were circumstances alleged which might have justified the application to each of these causes; but, as I have before said, these were so contradictory and contradicted, that none could be fixed upon with accuracy.  Where there is mystery, it is generally supposed that there must also be evil: I know not how this may be, but in him there certainly was the one, though I could not ascertain the extent of the other – and felt loath, as far as regarded himself, to believe in its existence.  My advances were received with sufficient coldness: but I was young, and not easily discouraged, and at length succeeded in obtaining, to a certain degree, that common-place intercourse and moderate confidence of common and every-day concerns, created and cemented by similarity of pursuit and frequency of meeting, which is called intimacy, or friendship, according to the ideas of him who uses those words to express them.

I include the description in full because the fragment itself is so abbreviated that the rest of it contains but allusions to this primary passage (such is often the case when the germ of an idea has not yet been cultivated into a full-grown flower).  However incomplete the characterization, it provided enough impetus for Polidori to expand the story into a cautionary tale of judgment and imposition, one remarkably acute in its portrayal of human weaknesses.  The weaknesses, as it were, turn out to be all too familiar: delusion, curiosity, and the unforgivable human predilection to cater to those in positions of power.

In The Vampyre, our mysterious stranger assumes the pseudo-Germanic name of Count Ruthven (which may be loosely etymologized as "friend of suffering").  Yet the stage is set not through the third-person narrator, who knows better than to trust such a baleful being, but by the young Aubrey, a naive landed elite:

He [Aubrey] had, hence, that high romantic feeling of honor and candor, which daily ruins so many milliners' apprentices. He believed all to sympathize with virtue, and thought that vice was thrown in by Providence merely for the picturesque effect of the scene, as we see in romances: he thought that the misery of a cottage merely consisted in the vesting of clothes, which were as warm, but which were better adapted to the painter's eye by their irregular folds and various colored patches. He thought, in fine, that the dreams of poets were the realities of life.

We all know an Aubrey or two, and most usually they are harmless sorts who dream of life as much as they actually observe it.  In a society in which little crime or misery can be found, the Aubreys of the world stay sheltered if feckless, and only with time if at all understand that there is more to existence than a lyric poem to the mountains.  We should not be astonished, therefore, at the effect that Ruthven has on a person like Aubrey, nor that Ruthven would not hesitate to identify his mark:

He [Aubrey] watched him [Ruthven]; and the very impossibility of forming an idea of the character of a man entirely absorbed in himself, who gave few other signs of his observation of external objects, than the tacit assent to their existence, implied by the avoidance of their contact: allowing his imagination to picture every thing that flattered its propensity to extravagant ideas, he soon formed this object into the hero of a romance, and determined to observe the offspring of his fancy, rather than the person before him.

This is the most telling passage in a story brimming with niceties and victories of style, and it thoroughly accounts for the horrific sequence of events that follow.  Aubrey and Ruthven become acquaintances but Aubrey still cannot place what about the Count bothers him so; eventually, he goes to Greece and falls in love with a Greek girl called Ianthe who warns him as all good heroines do not to wander through a dark and gloomy sylvan scene.  And like most of the heroes of contemporary horror fiction, Aubrey just does that and comes across a few rather nasty secrets about his former acquaintance.

What obtains through the end of the story is what habitually befalls those who are both outgeneraled and impatient.  The special twist in this case, and one that indicates the demonic origins of the Count, is a promise that he extracts from Aubrey even after the youth has been witness to flagitious displays of his power.  That Aubrey wavers only slightly might be imputed to the hypnotic clasp of his adversary, although a more cynical mind could easily charge Aubrey with too much optimism in the affairs of man and beast.  And Ruthven would surely qualify for both of those epithets.

Rimbaud, "Première soirée"

 A work ("First evening") by this French poet.  You can read the original here.

Undressed was she, O how undressed,                           
As large and shameless trees appeared;                   
Each leaf a window pane caressed,      
With guile and O so near, so near.

Upon my chair she lay half-nude,            
Her white hands softly thus entwined;
Upon the floor, a coy étude:
Her little feet, so fine, so fine.

And I then saw, as bright as wax,
A hidden ray of light repose,
Which flitted in a smile's red tracks
And on her breast, a fly or rose.

I kissed her ankles, and so thrilled; 
A soft and brutal laugh she gave
And stretched in echoes of clear trills,
The lovely laugh of crystal cave.

As those small feet beneath her gown
Escaped, she quipped: "Won't you relent!"
The first bold move had brought no frown,
Just laughter feigning punishment!

And palpitating by my lip,
Her poor bright eyes I softly kissed;
Her vapid head began to slip
Far back: "So better now!" she hissed.

"Now sir, I must reveal this much" –
But then upon her breast I dived
With kisses matched to every touch,  
And laughter that was scarce contrived.

Undressed was she, divine, undressed.
As large and shameless trees did peer
In windows grazed by leaf's caress, 
To us they came so near, so near.