Baudelaire, "La corde"

A brief tale of horror ("The rope") by this French man of letters.  You can read the original here.

To Édouard Manet
   
"Illusions," said my friend, "are perhaps as unlimited as the connections between one person and another, or between people and things. And when the illusion disappears – that is to say, when we see its being or fact as it exists outside of us – we experience a strange feeling, a complicated mix of regret for the departed ghost and surprise in face of such novelty, in face of the real. If there is one phenomenon that is evident, trivial, always likely, and of a nature from which it would be impossible to be fooled, it is maternal love: a mother without maternal love is as difficult to imagine as a light without heat. So is it then not perfectly acceptable to attribute to maternal love all a mother's actions and words that relate to her child? This notwithstanding, listen now to a little tale in which I was singularly mystified by the most natural of illusions.  

"My profession as painter routinely obliges me to pay close attention to faces and physiognomies that appear on my routes, and you know what joy we derive from our faculty to see life in more vivid and vital colors than what others perceive. In the remote quarter where I live and where vast lawns still keep each building at a distance, I often observed a child whose ardent and mischievous physiognomy attracted me more than all the others. He posed for me more than once, and I transformed the little gypsy into both an angel and the Love of mythology. I had him carry a vagabond's violin, a Crown of Thorns, the Nails of the Passion, and the Torch of Eros. From the comic oddness of this boy I took such great pleasure that one day I beseeched his parents – rather poor folk – to let me have him, promising to dress him well, to grant him an allowance, and to give him no other task apart from cleaning my paint brushes and running my errands. Scrubbed and washed, this child became charming, and the life he led at my place seemed like a paradise in comparison to what he had been subjected in his parents' hovel. Yet I have to say that this little man would sometimes surprise me with his precocious fits of melancholy and his immoderate appetite for sweets and liqueurs. And so one day when I discovered that, despite my numerous warnings, he had committed another crime of this type, I threatened to send him back to his parents. Then I left, and business kept me from home for quite a while.  

"You can imagine my horror and astonishment when I returned home only to find the little fellow, my mischievous companion through life, hanging from the side of the armoire! His feet almost touched the floor; next to him a chair undoubtedly pushed away at the last second was toppled over; his head was leaning convulsively on one shoulder; his bloated face and his eyes, open in a frightening stare, first induced the illusion of life. Getting him down from there was not as easy as you might think: he was already quite stiff, and I was overcome by an inexplicable repugnance when I let him tumble to the floor. I had to hold him up with one arm and cut the rope with the other – but once I did this, there was still more to come. The little monster had used a cord so fine as to have wedged it deep into his flesh; and now to disengage his neck I had to look for the rope between the swelling rolls of fat with a pair of small scissors.   

"I neglected to mention that I had screamed for help, yet all my neighbors had refused to come to my aid, faithful to those habits of civilized souls who never wish – I know not why – to involve themselves in the affairs of a hanged man. At length a doctor arrived who pronounced the child dead, apparently for many hours. When we later had to undress him for the burial, the rigidity of his cadaver was such that we had to slice and cut away his clothes, so unable were we to bend his limbs.

"The commissioner to whom, needless to say, I had to give a full report of the occurrence, looked askance at me and said: 'Here's a shady business!' moved, I'm certain, by an inveterate desire to scare both the innocent and the guilty without any distinction.   

"There remained one last task to which I had to attend, and the very thought of it caused me terrific angst: I had to inform his parents. My feet refused to obey my commands. Finally I mustered the courage; but, to my great surprise, his mother was impassive – not a tear oozed from the corner of her eye. I imputed this strangeness to the horror she was experiencing, and I recalled that famous phrase: 'The most terrible pain is pain unspoken.' As for the father, he resigned himself to a certain dreamy dullness: 'It might be better this way after all; he was always going to come to a bad end!'    

"All this time his body lay upon my sofa, and assisted by a serving girl, I was seeing to the final preparations when his mother entered my small apartment. She said she wanted to see the body of her son. I could not really prevent her from drowning in her misery, or refuse her this last and somber consolation. Then she asked to be shown the place where the lad hanged himself. 'Oh no, Madame,' I replied, 'this would hurt you greatly.' And then, as my eyes involuntarily turned towards that morbid armoire, I noticed with disgust mixed with horror and anger that the nail had remained wedged in the door with a long piece of rope still dangling.  I threw myself upon it to rip out the last vestiges of misery, and as I was about to cast it out the open window the poor woman seized my arm and told me in an irresistible voice: 'Oh, sir!  Let me have this!  I beg you! I implore you!' Her despair seemed to me so unhinged, so mad, that she would now express tenderness for what had brought death upon her son and now wanted to keep it like some dear and horrible relic. And here she grabbed the nail and cord.  

"At last, at last!  It was over. There was nothing more for me to do than go back to work, now with more vigor than before – if but to chase away the little corpse that haunted the creases of my brain whose ghost tired me with his large staring eyes. Yet the next day I received a package of letters: some were from the tenants, others from neighboring buildings; one was from the first floor, another from the second, a third from the third, and so forth, some in a half-pleasant style, as if wanting to cloak with jest the sincerity of the demand; others were cheeky and filled with spelling mistakes; yet all of them veered towards the same goal, that is, to obtain from me a piece of the beatific and fateful rope. Among the signatories were, I must say, more women than men; but not one of them, believe me, belonged to the petty and vulgar class. I kept the letters.

"And then it suddenly dawned on me, and I understood why his mother so wanted to rip off that cord  and with what she intended on comforting herself."

The Jewel of Seven Stars

There is little in the way of evidence that we understand what this ancient civilization truly accomplished. We have disinterred tombs, deciphered a hieratic language of obscure characters and darker gods, and mimicked the Egyptians’ customs and designs endlessly in an array of films and media (to the last any self-respecting horror fan will attest). Yet what we haven’t understood so dwarfs our discoveries that pensive minds tend to consider a rather terrible alternative: the Egyptians were so far ahead of their age as to remain uncanny forever. Canopic jars, thurification that has proven irreproducible, astronomy that may be more accurate than we care to imagine, mummifying techniques never seen before or since – never mind the everlasting monuments that have symbolized the country in our imagination. For a number of reasons the Egypt of today has little in common with its glorious past, but one thing from which it has not strayed is its ability to enchant and attract. One of the prototypes of Egypt’s mysteries can be found in this seminal novel.

Our hero and first-person narrator is Malcolm Ross, a nice name for a nice fellow. He is a single London barrister, quite professional and Victorian in the sense that he feels a deeply rooted repulsion towards the easy virtues that men in his position routinely enjoy. What he wants is a wife, a goddess he can place upon a pedestal and focus his awe upon until his ghost departs. We learn these facts quickly but as sidelights to another tale. A certain Margaret Trelawny, a young, retiring, raven-haired beauty, calls upon Ross to help her tend to her father Abel, who just happens to be a wealthy, world-famous Egyptologist and also just happens to have fallen into an unexplained hypnotic stupor. Ross comes racing in heart and leg only to find a wicked scene: the explorer is unconscious, bleeding from an odd scratch on a bangled wrist, his room of Egyptian antiquities sealed from within; he also lies at a strange angle to a safe whose contents shall remain unidentified for most of our story. A physician, a couple of incredulous policemen, and a band of snooping household staff all combine for a plain body of voices and visions – not one being of any particular interest – yet as a whole they provide a fine chorus for what is essentially a romance cast against a Gothic landscape. In the face of upped precautions the next night the event repeats itself (with the added bonus of a catatonic nurse), at which point Ross, a hopeless Romantic to begin with, now comes to consider that something otherworldly may be the catalyst. The policemen wish to instill in Ross the notion of empirical proof; the servants are aghast at the poltergeist-like attacks and quit in droves. But Ross is in love (detractors may carp that the novel devotes far too many pages to hand-holding and unrequited affection) and nothing on earth or beyond could drag him away from the object of his obsession. That is, until the appearance of a frantic polymath by the name of Corbeck.

A leather-faced collaborator of Margaret’s father just arrived from an operose three-year excursion on his partner’s dime, Corbeck’s degrees and level of learning are so extraordinary as to broach the inhuman. After some debate on the theft of a set of seven Pharaonic lamps that Corbeck insists are unique, Ross is handed a 17^th-century Dutch travelogue on a tomb, a jewel, and a sinister mummy hand that guards that same jewel outside of its sarcophagus. The hand, you see, has seven fingers, and the jewel it protects contains the constellation of seven stars that appear to compose a sort of mandate from heaven. In time, we hear of a young and beautiful Queen Tera who inherits the throne as very much the envy of a theocratic cabal thirsting for power. We are regaled on stories of the Queen’s innovation and intelligence as our novel progresses, but that is not how the Dutch traveler van Huyn recalls an episode from his journey:

The fellaheen absolutely refused to enter the valley at such a time, alleging that they might be caught by the night before they could emerge from the other end. At first they would give no reason for their fear. They had hitherto gone anywhere I wished, and at any time, without demur. On being pressed, however, they said that the place was the Valley of the Sorcerer, where none might come in the night. On being asked to tell of the Sorcerer, they refused, saying there was no name, and that they knew nothing. On the next morning, however, when the sun was up and shining down the valley, their fears had somewhat passed away. Then they told me that a great Sorcerer in ancient days – ‘millions of millions of years’ was the term they used – a King or a Queen, they could not say which, was buried there. They could not give the name, persisting to the last that there was no name; and that anyone who should name it would waste away in life so that at death nothing of him would remain to be raised again in the Other World.

Ross reads on to find a fantastic sepulcher as well as the sorcerer in question – or at least, the curse that followed the desecrators and their loot. If you’ve seen a couple of mummy movies, the consequences of such greed will be quite clear to you.  As will the oddly parallel lives of Margaret and the much-beleaguered seven-fingered Queen.  

There are a few conclusions to draw about the novel that recommend themselves upon re-reading. We have the very distinct impression that our opening scene may not appear to be what it claims; we also comprehend that a human being who has willed herself seven digits cannot be holy. There is also the not nugatory matter of the novel’s two editions. The original, published to much vitriol in 1903, features an ending quite in keeping with the cataclysmic predictions of the forerunning chapters. It also contains a chapter omitted in the 1912 edition entitled “Powers – Old and New,” that holds forth elegantly and quite reasonably on the implications of the discovery at hand. While the ‘happy ending’ of the 1912 can at best be termed lamentable and at worst incoherent, the omission of the 1903 edition’s sixteenth chapter might be the more egregious sin. It is in this brief chapter that Ross, an introspective and overly sensitive young man, mulls history as a whole, its myths and its gods, the visions of artists who looked askance at the basic notions of divine power and glory:

The whole possibility of the Great Experiment to which we were now pledged was based on the reality of the existence of the Old Forces which seemed to be coming in contact with the New Civilization. That there were, and are, such cosmic forces we cannot doubt, and that the Intelligence, which is behind them, was and is. Were those primal and elemental forces controlled at any time by other than that Final Cause which Christendom holds as its very essence? If there were truth at all in the belief of Ancient Egypt then their Gods had real existence, real power, real force …. If then the Old Gods held their forces, wherein was the supremacy of the new? ….What was it that Milton saw with his blind eyes in the rays of poetic light falling between him and Heaven? Whence came that stupendous vision of the Evangelist which has for eighteen centuries held spellbound the intelligence of Christendom?

This is the precise reasoning of a Christian, but also of any monotheist gazing at the dynasties that allegedly yielded only one ruler who wished to believe in a single universal force. There is, anyway, something more than a little off-putting about gods with the heads of hyenas or birds. Not that you'd ever know that from all their modern acolytes. 

Cape Fear

This film begins with one of the most heavy-handed title sequences in recent memory, proceeds to a narrator who is both unappealing and, frankly, a twit, and then hands off the baton to Max Cady (Robert De Niro). Whenever it is enraptured by Cady's words, the film blooms and glows. We first meet the tattooed back of him (with truth and justice as captions) before an "eight-by-nine" library of a jail cell. On his wall hang pictures of mustached dictators that we would all do well to forget, as well as law books with stipulations and codes that he justifiably cannot. "What about your books, Cady?" asks a guard as he struts out of the Georgia State Correctional Facility and into our camera, literally ramming it with his ground teeth. "Already read 'em," he replies coolly. He has had all the time in the world – fourteen years, to be precise. And it is clear to absolutely every viewer of Cape Fear that after spending a third of his life in lockup, Max Cady is now on a mission.

That mission will take us to New Essex, North Carolina, that type of sleepy little town that tends to harbor the wickedest of secrets. It will also introduce us to the Bowdens, "Slippery" Sam (Nick Nolte, who has never looked quite so slick and unpleasant), an attorney, Leigh (Jessica Lange), a designer, and their only child, fifteen-year-old Danielle (Juliette Lewis). Even from the opening vignettes, one has the impression that the Bowdens have seen far unhappier times. Too many of their words seem weighed as if they were all striving not to exceed some invisible boundaries of pain. Lange, for example, is made to look as dowdy as is possible for a woman of her attractiveness (my childhood awe of her in this film has never dissipated). This otherwise inexplicable move serves two purposes: mother and daughter gain a passing resemblance and Sam's roving eye seems extenuated. One June evening a family outing to the movies is tarnished by the maniacal laughs of Cady, who happens to be enjoying a cigar (the camera caresses his bikinied lighter) only a couple of rows in front of them. Our cigar-smoking hyena never even turns to address the indignant requests so Sam orders his clan to decamp. When Danielle eggs on her father in that way we all have of taking pride in those who protect us ("Dad, you should have punched him out"), Sam espies an opportunity for a parental lesson in non-violence. Yet it is precisely here – as if to undermine Sam's credentials as a domestic lawgiver – that Leigh chuckles that Sam should be used to "fighting dirty," a comment at which he takes umbrage.  As he goes to pay for their after-movie snack, however, Sam is informed that "everything's been taken care of." The caretaker? The fellow with the cigar glowering at them from the red convertible in the parking lot. But that person and his car are now gone.

Since Cady is a very recent ex-convict and Sam a criminal defense lawyer, we suspect a vivid back story. We get one, and it comprises the primary distinction between Scorsese's plot and that of the 1962 original. While the first Sam Bowden is scapegoated by a madman whose legal culpability was never really in question, our Sam is not quite as innocent. Once upon a time and place, 1977 Atlanta to be exact, Max Cady couldn't even read the laws he had every intention of breaking, a handicap that obliged his kindly attorney to enunciate every statute for Cady's own frustrated half-comprehension. About the only thing that Sam did not have to dictate to his client was the latter's eventual conviction for the sexual assault and battery of a teenage girl. Events throughout Cape Fear make it painfully obvious that Max Cady is not a good man victimized by an imperfect justice system; in fact, one might properly wonder why on earth we would ever release such a beast from incarceration. Nevertheless, the letter of our imperfect laws was not followed: after Cady buttonholes him in his car and punctuates their reacquaintance with a whisper that sounds a lot like "you're going to learn about loss," Sam confesses his own sins to another attorney. And what was Sam's unpardonable offense? Nothing really if you understand guilt as absolute and not relative to the weaknesses of the prosecution and its toolbox. Looking back at what he did and did not do for his client, Sam cannot help but imagine his own daughter, now the age of the victim in 1977, and consider Cady's disgusting acts in a more personalized context ("If you had seen," he assures the same skeptical colleague, "what he did to this girl"). Sam's moral character is further tainted by his implied escapades with a frisky law clerk (Illeana Douglas, Scorsese's girlfriend at the time) about whom he does not see any need to tell his wife. One evil night, of course, Cady will happen to chat up this same clerk, whose regrettable taste in men turns out to be unwavering. At the precise center of the film, in a masterful scene more suspenseful than anything involving a killer shark or slasher, Cady will also get a crack at sweet helpless Danielle. While Lewis as a sex symbol remains one of Hollywood's greatest implausibilities, she can play rather effortlessly the incipient rebel who might like a little dope and a little of this author. And Danielle has long since determined that her parents are neither soul mates nor entities worthy of their proclaimed authority, which will explain a few minor discrepancies in our story.

The conclusion to Cape Fear was quickly spoiled by trailers that prove you can't just name a film after a location and not feature its natural obstacles. I remember seeing it in the theater at Danielle's film age and being put off by the utter inevitability of what happens, an opinion I swiftly forsook upon reviewing. As it were, the film's strength is drawn specifically from its irresistible force, from the notion of old sins that recur to the sinner, from the sense of implacable doom. Although not his best role, De Niro immortalizes himself in Max Cady in no small part through his much-ballyhooed fitness and his even more celebrated tattoos, most of which avow Biblical vengeance. Despite this unorthodox appearance, Cady is so smooth, silver-tongued, and terrifyingly literate that at times one forgets his most recent permanent address. Then we realize he has been performing this role, in gradually modulated versions of perfection, for the last fourteen years. His very best monologue is delivered in his convertible before a standing Sam after the latter has just been informed of when exactly Max learned to read in jail and what he chose as his favorite texts. In this scene, if but for one or two seconds, De Niro succeeds in making us pity someone who was, at least in terms of due process, deprived unfairly of his freedom. When Sam interrupts this brilliant flow of details by proposing monetary compensation, Cady simply crunches the numbers and accuses his former attorney of offering him below minimum wage. "Not to mention," he mentions anyway, "the family and respect [he] lost" during his long sentence. The worst sequence involves a hare-brained scheme to lure Cady into a trap in the Bowdens' house, and the less said about these minutes the better. But the finest moments remain those at the film's midpoint between Danielle and Cady. Here several possible, perfectly viable outcomes present themselves, but only the best and, in a way, the most shocking occurs. It is also here that Cady warns the youngest Bowden that "every man carries a circle of hell around his head like a halo. Your daddy, too. Every man. Every man has to go through hell to reach his paradise." And whatever that paradise might entail is not ours to imagine.

Blok, "В день холодный, в день осенний"

A work ("Upon an autumn day so cold") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

Upon an autumn day so cold 
I shall return at last;
Recall sweet springtime sighs, behold
An image from the past.

I shall not cry as my steps near, 
From memories withdrawn.
Perchance I’ll meet the melodies
Of new autumnal dawn.

O baleful, wicked laws of time,  
Which soothe a spirit’s woes!
Yet erstwhile moans will never chime,  
Past howls you’ll never know.

This flame won’t burn my blinded eyes 
In a past dream’s mad flight.  
And soul allayed will realize
That day outdarkens night.

In unserer Synagoge

A short story ("In our synagogue") by this German-language writer. You can read the original as part of this collection.

In our synagogue lives an animal roughly the size of a marten. It can often be quite clearly observed and it tolerates human proximity at a distance of about two meters. Its color is a light bluish-green. No one has ever stroked its fur, so little can be said in that regard; one might even claim that the fur's natural color is unknown. Perhaps its visible color comes from accumulated dust and grout, since the color also resembles the plaster work of the synagogue's interior, only a bit lighter. Apart from its timorousness, it is an immensely calm and sedentary beast. If it did not get roused quite so often, it would hardly change position at all.  

Its favorite place to stay is near the grates to the women's section. With visible pleasure it crawls into the grates' mesh, stretches itself out, and casts its gaze down towards the prayer area. Such an audacious position seems to please the animal, yet the temple's maintenance worker is commissioned to make sure the animal is never on the grates because it would soon accustom itself to this place, which we cannot allow because of the women who are afraid of the animal. Why they are afraid of it, however, remains unclear. Admittedly, it looks rather scary upon first sight: one may find the long neck, triangular face, almost horizontally-protruding upper teeth, and the seemingly hard, light kemp-hair protruding past the teeth, a row longer than the upper lip, particularly frightening. Nevertheless, we are soon forced to conclude how obviously harmless this whole scary business is. First and foremost, the animal stays away from humans; it is shier than a forest animal, and this seems to have nothing to do with the building. In fact, its personal misfortune consists of the fact that this building is a synagogue, which means it is occasionally a very bustling and lively place. If one were able to communicate with the animal, one could at least comfort it by mentioning that our community is getting smaller and smaller with every passing year and is already struggling to secure enough money to maintain the synagogue. One cannot rule out the possibility that sooner or later a silo or something of that nature will be made out of this synagogue, and the animal will get the peace and quiet it so sorely lacks.  

It is in any case only the women who fear the animal, as the men have long since grown indifferent to it: one generation showed it to the other; again and again was it seen; and in the end, one no longer looked in its direction. Even children seeing it for the first time are no longer amazed. It has become the pet of the synagogue, and why shouldn't the synagogue have its own, unexampled pet? Were it not for the women one would hardly know of the animal's existence. Yet even the women are not really afraid of it; it would be too odd to fear such an animal, day in and day out, for years and decades. They defend their position, however, by saying that the animal is much closer to them than to the men, and this is true. The animal does not dare approach the men; no one has ever even seen it on the floor. If one didn't let it near the grates to the women's section, it would still settle at an equivalent height on the opposite wall. There one finds, hardly the width of two fingers, a narrow ledge circling three sides of the synagogue. On this ledge the animal sometimes scampers here and there; most of all, however, it sits calmly in a specific spot across from the women. It is almost inconceivable how easily it can make use of this narrow path, and the way in which it turns back around once it has reached one of the ends of the ledge is well worth seeing. It is, after all, a very old animal, yet it does not hesitate to take the most daring leaps and, what is more, it also never fails. It spins in midair then goes back the other way. Nevertheless, when one has seen this several times one is sated and no longer has any incentive to keep staring.  

It is also neither fear nor curiosity that keeps the women moving; if they stuck to their brooms a bit more they would completely forget about the animal. The pious women would do the same if the others, who happen to comprise the majority, allowed it; these others, however, like drawing attention to themselves and the animal for them is simply a welcome excuse. If they could and if they dared, they would certainly have lured the animal closer to themselves just to be able to get more frightened. But in reality the animal does not approach them at all; when it is not attacked it is as unconcerned about the women as it is about the men. It would probably prefer to remain hidden, in those places it inhabits when there are no services, in all likelihood in some hole in the wall that we have yet to discover. Only when one begins to pray does it appear, frightened by all the noise, wishing to see what has happened, wishing to remain awake, wishing to be free, able to escape, running before us out of fear, making its little capers out of fear, and not daring to retreat until the services are over. It prefers heights, of course, because there does it feel safest, and the grates and ledge offer the best opportunities to flee. Yet in no way does it stay there all the time; sometimes it climbs down, closer to the men. The curtain of the ark of the covenant is borne by a shiny brass rod that seems to attract the animal; often enough it creeps down to it but always sits there calmly. Not even when it is right beside the ark of the covenant can one say that it disturbs us, its blank, always open, perhaps even lidless eyes seem to take in the community members, without, of course, looking at anyone in particular. Instead it only stares at the dangers from which it feels threatened.

In this regard it has seemed not much more comprehensible than our women, at least until recently. What dangers does it have to fear? Who has any intention of doing anything to it? Hasn't it been left utterly to its own devices for many years? The men do not worry about its presence and the majority of the women would likely be unhappy if it were to disappear. And since it is the lone animal in the building, it also has no enemies. It should have very nearly been able to detect this fact from all its years here. And although the services and their noise may be frightening for the animal, they occur every day in such modest intervals, somewhat more often during holidays, with such regularity and always without interruption, that even the most craven of beasts would have long since grown accustomed to such services, especially when it sees they comprise not the noise of persecutors, but that which has nothing at all to do with the animal. And yet this fear. Is it the memory of things long past or the premonition of days to come? Does this old animal perhaps know more than the three generations gathered at any one time in the synagogue?

Many years ago, it is said, one would have really tried to banish the animal. This may well be true; more likely is that we are merely dealing with invented stories. What we can show, however, is that the religious point of view, that is to say, whether one should tolerate such an animal in a house of worship, was investigated at the time. The attestations of various well-known rabbis were collected, and the views were split: the majority wanted the animal's expulsion and a new consecration of the house of worship. But this was easy to declaim from a distance. In reality, of course, it was impossible to drive out the animal.