Queremos tanto a Glenda

A short story ("We all love Glenda so much") by this Argentine. You can read the original here.

At that time it was hard to tell. A person may go to the cinema or theater, live the night without thinking about those who have already completed the same ceremony, choose the place and time, get dressed and make phone calls, line eleven or five, the shadows and the music, the land of no one and everyone where everyone is no one, the man or woman in his or her seat, perhaps with a word to excuse themselves for coming late, a half-voiced comment which someone catches or ignores, almost always silence, looks directed at the stage or screen, the howling from nearby, from this side. It was really hard to tell, over and above all the publicity, the endless queues, the posters and reviews, that there were so many of us who loved Glenda.

It would be presumptuous to claim that core membership took its shape three or four years ago from Irazusta or Diana Rivero since at the time, out for drinks with their friends after the cinema, they had no idea how they managed to say or conceal things that rudely forged a bond, what we, the core members and the youngsters, all later termed the club. I should say it was not much of a club; the only thing we had was a love for Glenda Garson. This was enough to reduce our numbers to only those who admired her. And just like they did, we admired Glenda, as well as Anouk, Marilina, Annie, Silvana, Marcello, Yves, Vittorio and Dirk, but we were the only ones who loved Glenda so much. This was how the nucleus or core was defined. Soon it became something that only we knew about and we trusted those who, in the course of chats and conversation, came to show that they loved Glenda as well.

Following Diana and Irazusta, additions to core membership were few and far between. The year of The Snow's Fire we must have been barely six or seven. Once The Use of Elegance debuted, core membership expanded and we felt that it was increasing almost unbearably and that we were threatened by snobbish imitation or seasonal sentimentalism. The first ones, Irazusta and Diana, and two or three others, decided to close ranks, to admit no one without screening him first, without a test hidden behind whiskeys and the braggings of erudition (those midnight exams were as much of Buenos Aires as of London or Mexico). When The Fragile Returns debuted, we had to admit in melancholy triumph that there were a lot of us who loved Glenda. We would meet in the cinema, exchange glances at the exit, the women's almost lost air and the men's pained silence a better indication of our confederacy than any insignia or password. Inexplicable mechanisms lured us to the same café in the center of town; single tables began to be put together; and all of this was accompanied by the polite custom of looking each other in the eye and ordering the same drink to preempt any useless skirmishes. And there we found the final image of Glenda and the final scene from the final film.  

There were twenty, perhaps thirty of us; we never knew how many we came to be because sometimes Glenda would be playing in theaters for months at a stretch, and at the same time in two or four. Moreover, there was this exceptional moment in which she appeared on stage playing the young assassin in The Enraptured, and her success broke all barriers and created momentary enthusiasm which we never accepted. Since we already knew one another at that time, many of us would visit each other to talk about Glenda. Initially Irazusta seemed to exercise tacit control which he had never asked for, while Diana Rivero played her slow chess game of approvals and refusals which assured us total authenticity without any risk of spies or fusspots. What had begun as a free association now attained the structure of a clan, and following the initial frivolous interrogations came concrete questions, the stumble sequence from The Use of Elegance, the final retort in The Snow's Fire, the second sex scene in The Fragile Returns. We all loved Glenda so much that we couldn't deal with Johnny-come-latelies or tumultuous lesbians, or those erudite men and women devoted to aesthetics. This included (we'll never know how) our taking for granted that we'd go to the café every Friday that one of Glenda's films was being shown, and that, to give us enough time, we'd move from one screening to another in the neighborhood theaters a full week before meeting up. This was a steadfast rule; obligations were defined without any vagueness; and not adhering to these obligations would have provoked Irazusta's disparaging smile and that pleasantly horrific look with which Diana Rivero would announce both crime (in this case, treason) and punishment. At that time our meetings were only Glenda, her luminous ubiquity emanating from each one of us, to whom quarrels and reservations were alien. Only gradually and at the beginning with a sense of guilt, a few of us dared slide in a few partial criticisms, some disaccord or disappointment in the face of a less felicitous sequence, slippage into the conventional or predictable. We knew that Glenda was not responsible for the weaknesses that clouded at times the splendid crystal-like quality of The Whip, nor the conclusion to We Will Never Know Why. We were versed in some of her directors' other work, the origin of the plots and screenplays; and when it came to them we were implacable because we began to feel that our affection for Glenda went above and beyond mere artistic territory and that she alone could save herself from what others did so imperfectly. Diana was the first to speak of a mission; she did so in that same tangential manner of not affirming what that really entailed, and we saw her double-whisky happiness and satiated smile and knew one thing was certain: we could no longer keep doing all this cinema and café routine, and we couldn't love Glenda so much.

Nor did we say anything clear at the time; that wasn't necessary. The only thing we talked about was Glenda's felicity in each one of us, and this felicity could only have been the product of perfection. Suddenly the errors and deficiencies became unbearable; we couldn't accept that We Will Never Know Why ended the way it did, nor that The Snow's Fire contained the infamous poker game sequence (in which Glenda did not participate but which somehow tarnished her like vomit, that Nancy Phillips gesture and the unacceptable arrival of the repentant son). As was almost always the case, it fell to Irazusta to define clearly the mission that awaited us. That night we returned to our homes as if crushed by the responsibility which we had just acknowledged and assumed, and at the same time we were beginning to see the happiness present in an unblemished future of a Glenda bereft of stupidity and betrayal.  

Instinctively, the core closed ranks. The task did not allow for an indistinct plurality. Irazusta spoke of the laboratory when it was already installed on an estate in the Recife de Lobos. We divided up the tasks in impartial fashion among those who had to procure every last copy of The Fragile Returns, chosen for its relatively minor imperfection. It would not have occurred to anyone to think about any money issues: Irazusta had been an associate of Howard Hughes's in the Pichincha tin mining business, an extremely simple means of placing in our hands the power, jets, connections, and financial sway we needed. We didn't even have an office; Hagar Loss's computer programmed the tasks and stages. Two months after Diana Rivero had spoken, the laboratory was equipped to stand in for the ineffective sequence in The Fragile Returns with the birds so that Glenda was graced with the perfect rhythm and exact sense of its dramatic action. The film was now a few years old and its re-release into the international circuit did not engender the mildest surprise: memory plays with its deposits and makes them accept its own permutations and variants. Perhaps the same Glenda would not have perceived the change and if she had, because all of us saw it clearly, she would have beheld the marvel of perfect coincidence with a memory rinsed of its slag, exactly identical to her desire.

The mission was carried out with no respite. Hardly had the effectiveness of the laboratory been assured when we began the salvation of The Snow's Fire and The Prism. The other films entered into the process with the rhythm precisely planned by Hagar Loss's staff and that of the laboratory. We had difficulties with The Use of Elegance because some people from the oil-rich Emirates had retained copies for their personal enjoyment, and certain measures and extraordinary collaboration were necessary in order to steal them back (there is no reason to use any other word), and replace them without the users' noticing. The laboratory was functioning at a level of perfection that, at the beginning of all this, we had thought unattainable – but we dared not say anything about this to Irazusta; curiously enough, the most skeptical of us all had been Diana. But when Irazusta showed us We Will Never Know Why and we saw the real ending, we saw a Glenda who, instead of going back to Romano's house, now drove her car towards the rocky cliff and ruined us with her splendid and quite necessary plunge into the torrent below. Now we knew that perfection could be of this world and that now this was Glenda's perfection forever, for us forever.

Of course, the most difficult thing was to decide on the changes, the cuts, the modifications of montage and rhythm. Our different ways of feeling and sensing Glenda led to some harsh confrontations that could only be alleviated by lengthy analysis and, in certain cases, the imposition of the majority of our core members. And although some of us, defeated, sat through the new version with bitterness in that the film did not in the end match up to our dreams, I still think that no one was disappointed with the work we did. We loved Glenda so much that the results were also justifiable, many times far beyond what we had foreseen. This included a few alarms: a letter from a reader of the never-missed Times amazed that three sequences in The Snow's Fire came in an order that he happened to remember differently; as well as an article from a critic of La Opinión who protested over a supposed cut in The Prism, concocting reasons of bureaucratic prudishness. In all these cases rapid measures were taken so as to avoid possible consequences. It didn't cost much; people are frivolous and forget or accept or are on the lookout for something new; the world of cinema is a fugitive like historical reality is a fugitive, save for those of us who love Glenda so much.

Much more fundamentally dangerous were the polemics that emanated from our core, the risk of a schism or diaspora. Nevertheless more than ever we felt united in our mission. There was one night when analytical voices infected with political philosophy were raised, and they discussed – in the middle of our work – moral problems; they asked whether we weren't deceiving ourselves in a series of onanistic mirrors, in engraving overelaborate madness in a tusk of ivory or grain of rice. It was not easy to turn our back on these voices because only our core members could carry out their work like a heart or plane carries out theirs, throbbing in perfect coherence. Nor was it not easy to hear the criticism accusing us of escapism, which suspected a squandering of deviant forces from a more pressing reality, a reality more needed for competing in the times in which we lived. But it wouldn't be necessary to squash this heresy hardly sketched even if its protagonists were willing to limit themselves to a partial reservation; all of us (they and we) loved Glenda so much that over and above the ethical or historical arguments, there reigned the feeling that would always unite us, the certainty that the perfection of Glenda was making us and the world more perfect as well. We were even splendidly rewarded by the fact that one of the philosophers reestablished the equilibrium after having overcome this period of inane scruples. It was from his mouth that we heard that every partial work was also history, and that something as immense as the printing press started out as the most individual and parceled out of our desires, that of repeating and perpetuating the name of a woman.

Thus arrived the day on which we had the tests for Glenda's image projected now without the slightest frailty. The screens of the world would render her the way she herself – of this we were sure – would have wanted to be rendered. And perhaps it was for this reason that we were that surprised to learn in the press that she had just announced her retirement from both the stage and the silver screen. Glenda's involuntary and marvelous contribution to our work could have been neither a coincidence nor a miracle, but simply something which she had obeyed without knowledge of our anonymous affection, and from the depths of her being came the only answer that she could give us, the act of love that covered one last handover, that which the profane would only understand as absence. We lived in the happiness of the seventh day, of the rest on the heels of creation; now we could see every work of Glenda's without the hidden menace of a tomorrow plagued with errors and stupidities. Now we could meet with the lightness of angels or birds in an absolute present which perhaps resembled eternity itself.

Yes, but a poet beneath the same skies as Glenda once said that eternity is enamored with the works of time, and it fell to Diana to know this and inform us a year too late. Usual and human: Glenda announced her return to the screen. And the reasons were the ones always given: the frustration of the professional with nothing but time on her hands; a role that was on her level; filming that was about to begin. No one would forget that night in the café after just having seen The Use of Elegance which had returned to the theaters of downtown. It was almost unnecessary for Irazusta to say what we all were experiencing like the bitter saliva of injustice and rebellion. We all loved Glenda so much that our despondency never reached her. What guilt did she have in the matter, being an actress and being Glenda? The horror was to be found in the broken machine, in the reality of figures and prestige and Oscars entering like an overlapping crack in the sphere of our hard-won sky. When Diana placed her hand on Irazusta's arm and said, "Yes, it's the only thing left to do," she was speaking for all of us without any need for consultation. Never had the core possessed such terrible strength; never did it need fewer words to set it in motion. 

We split up, devastated, experiencing what had to occur one day which only one of us would know of in advance. We were certain that we wouldn't be meeting up at the café, that henceforth each one of us would conceal the perfection of our kingdom. We knew that Irazusta would do what was necessary; there was nothing simpler for someone like him. We didn't even say goodbye as was our custom, with the fluffy security of seeing each other again after the cinema, that night of The Fragile Returns or The Whip. It was good to turn our back on all of this, under the pretext of its being late, of implying that we had to go. We left in our separate directions, each one bearing the desire of oblivion, of having everything consumed, and knowing that it wouldn't be so, that we wouldn't even be free of opening up the newspaper one morning and reading the announcement, those stupid phrases of professional consternation. We would never talk about this with anyone; we would politely avoid each other at the theater and in the street; and this would be the only way for the core to maintain its fidelity, to keep in silence its completed work. We all loved Glenda so much that we were offering her a final inviolable perfection. In the intangible heights to which we had exalted her we would preserve her from the fall, and there her faithful could follow her in adoration without incurring any harm. And she would never descend alive from a cross.   

An Episode of Cathedral History

Superstition reveals its advantages, I suppose, in finding creative ways to manipulate younger souls. The logic behind such an assumption is quite primitive: these souls are deemed too callow to remain within reason's boundaries, and must be scared into doing unwittingly what they would not do if they had their wits about them. Hence the little child placing a tooth beneath his pillow, the avoidance of leaning, forty-five degree ladders, and that old chestnut about a nosey cat. Superstition is not coterminous, however, with the notions of faith lumped together unceremoniously under the rubric of organized religion. In part because organized religion for all its faults was never meant to scare anyone except those who fear things they cannot know (we have other terms for these miscreants), and in part because religion and its edifices, when used correctly, are supposed to imbue us with hope not frighten us into slavery. Which brings us to this splendid tale.

Our protagonist is a certain Mr. Lake, "a learned gentleman ... deputed to examine and report upon the archives of the Cathedral of Southminster." Yet this delightful task is mired with difficulties. Upon arrival Lake is immediately shown an unmarked tomb about which his guide, a Mr. Worby, promises him a tale he shall not soon forget. It so happens that as a child Worby and the village of Southminster were plagued by what may be exaggerated into a mild form of the plague. During a span of several rough months, hundreds were stricken with viral infections of every kind, with the most senior residents subdued into the grave. What was the nature of this so-called plague? Something that can only be hinted at:      

The season was undoubtedly a very trying one. Whether the church was built on a site that had once been a marsh, as was suggested, or for whatever reason, the residents in its immediate neighbourhood had, many of them, but little enjoyment of the exquisite sunny days and the calm nights of August and September. To several of the older people – Dr. Ayloff, among others, as we have seen – the summer proved downright fatal, but even among the younger, few escaped either a sojourn in bed for a matter of weeks, or at the least, a brooding sense of oppression, accompanied by hateful nightmares. Gradually there formulated itself a suspicion – which grew into a conviction – that the alterations in the Cathedral had something to say in the matter. The widow of a former old verger, a pensioner of the Chapter of Southminster, was visited by dreams, which she retailed to her friends, of a shape that slipped out of the little door of the south transept as the dark fell in, and flitted – taking a fresh direction every night – about the close, disappearing for a while in house after house, and finally emerging again when the night sky was paling. She could see nothing of it, she said, but that it was a moving form: only she had an impression that when it returned to the church, as it seemed to do in the end of the dream, it turned its head: and then, she could not tell why, but she thought it had red eyes. Worby remembered hearing the old lady tell this dream at a tea-party in the house of the chapter clerk. Its recurrence might, perhaps, he said, be taken as a symptom of approaching illness; at any rate before the end of September the old lady was in her grave.

The time is 1840 and the mood is definitively Gothic; so claims at least Worby, who remembers the Dean of the Cathedral as "very set on the Gothic period." We may conclude from this fixation that the Cathedral, which exists as a monument to an Entity both palpable and intangible, reflects the fears and concerns of the villagers insofar as they are prisoners to their past. And in their past, the fifteenth century to be precise, a tomb was carved, laid, and left unencumbered by an eternal epithet. 

Lake, who has some qualms about the methods of restoration in the village, decides to let Worby keep talking, at which point he relates other disturbing details. Firstly, some of the villagers share the same nightmares. One comments that he slept poorly because of the visual enactment of this Biblical verse; screech-owl, as some versions have it, or not, Worby's parents impute the noises to cats. Secondly, there is the matter of the unrest shimmering under the placid surface of rustic life. One morning in particular remains in Worby's memory:

That was a funny morning altogether: nothing seemed to go right. The organist he stopped in bed, and the minor Canon he forgot it was the 19th day and waited for the Venite; and after a bit the deputy he set off playing the chant for evensong, which was a minor; and then the Decani boys were laughing so much they couldn't sing, and when it came to the anthem the solo boy he got took with the giggles, and made out his nose was bleeding, and shoved the book at me what hadn't practised the verse and wasn't much of a singer if I had known it. Well, things were rougher, you see, fifty years ago, and I got a nip from the counter-tenor behind me that I remembered.

There is also the matter of the dress of the wife of a visiting Fellow of this society, and what happens when a pair of whippersnappers decide to cram some sheet music into one of the shoddy tomb's crevices – but these things can be discovered by the curious reader. 

The setting – an old church, Northern Europe, a hazy countryside of mystagogues and whispered legends – is typical for the stories of this author, long a regular on these pages. James produced tighter and more recondite works, but this thin scrap of fictionalized cathedral lore has all the makings of a cure for restfulness. Particularly unnerving are the description of what is seen emerging from that tomb and what then is finally inscribed on the stone that restrains it tenuously.  Make that very tenuously.          

Denkwürdigkeiten eines Antisemiten

This novel's title was chosen, one may suppose, for its shock marketing value, a gimmick that has repeatedly forced reviewers to justify its inclusion to unknowing readers ("It's ironic"; "Of course, this is the opposite of the truth"; "This is not the memoir of an old Nazi," etcetera). Our climate of political correctness values non-offensiveness over precision – which is another way of saying if you don't really think we were all created equal you had better try and pretend – and we are now unable to criticize anyone with any regularity except white Christian men, that universally acknowledged most fortunate of demographic segments. The matter is ridiculous and exploitable, although quite natural in our development as we globalize, level out, and forget that inequalities can promote cooperation as much as envy. An admirable principle that flickers throughout the life of Arnulf, our narrator.

The novel itself is broken into five easy pieces, all of which can and should stand alone. Apart, they incorporate the changing perspective of one man; together they ache for company and commitment, both of which they do not deserve. Arnulf, who resembles our author in many ways, will begin and end his story with Russian words, perhaps because he secretly believes Russia and Marxism to be the downfall of his childhood home and memories (even the second chapter, Youth, echoes this Russian author's early work). While the final chapter, Pravda, needs little introduction or translation, the first word and chapter, Skuchno, can suggest both boredom and yearning – that is to say, a feeling of not being where one would like to be. From the very beginning, then, Arnulf, who does not give us his first name until the fourth chapter, Troth, feels horribly out of place:

We are all of mixed blood, we Austrians, especially we so-called German Austrians: children of an imperium of diverse peoples, races, religions. If, that legendary imperium having disappeared, we did not still, comically enough, feel Austrian, then we would have to own up to being American ... but we lack the political insight for that. Such is life, alas; thinking is often replaced by moods. They are more durable, they are livelier in withstanding time, and, in fact, the more irrational they are, the better.

Like von Rezzori, Arnulf is of Italian stock but born in Bukowina as the Great War destroys old Austria, an empire that claims to be an heir to Charlemagne. These fantastic circumstances not only make Arnulf a redoubtable polyglot, they also strip him to a certain extent of what all of us need at one point or another, a sense of home. Such moments are easier to abide when one has been raised in a multilingual and multicultural setting, and when travel and movement are as commonplace and tried as one's morning ablutions, the obvious parallel being those with no homeland in particular. Two such nations wandered about Europe in larger numbers up through the 1930s, the Roma people and, of course, the sons and daughters of Abraham. 

Sooner or later – be in a neighbor, a love interest, a rival, or an employer – Arnulf will discover the rich Jewish life that varnished Europe until the evil of the Second World War. He will belittle it, despise it, and enjoy it; but most of all he will quote his own relatives' hatred rather than come up with reasons of his own to feel animosity to these outsiders:

The specifically Jewish quality in Jews had never repelled me so much as the attempt – doomed from the start – to hush it up, cover it over, deny it. The yiddling of the Jews, their jittery gesticulation, their disharmony, the incessant alternation of obsequiousness and presumptuousness, were inescapable and inalienable attributes of their Jewishness. If they acted as one expected them to act, so that one could recognize them at first glance, one was rather pleasantly touched. They were true to themselves – that was estimable. One related to Jews in the same way as an Englishman to foreigners: one assumed they would not act like us. If they did so nevertheless, it made them look suspicious. 

A casual reader may protest the irony of the title, but those who actually finish the novel will be handed a plausible explanation for its use. As layer upon layer is peeled off Arnulf's fantastically rich life, we come to see the designation as that of an opponent in the literal sense of the word. Arnulf's clean-cut Anglo looks, mastery of several languages, sophistication, and inherent restraint allow him to pass for a citizen of any European country ("the biography of a model White European"), including a Jew. As it were, a shallow mind might think Arnulf's cosmopolitan meanderings mimic all too closely the stereotypical restlessness of the constantly displaced Hebrew, making the novel an exercise in self-loathing, but again this approach should be discouraged. We never get anything about his survival of the war because his life was in no danger, nor did he take an active role in combating the forces that wasted a generation. He existed as he always had – for himself and his artistic whims.   

I have said little of the plot because the plot, like the dull and darned topicality it wends itself around, is a flimsy clothesline for Arnulf's artistic observations. His peripatetic antics will not strike anyone as particular original or even wise, but their context, and the cultures negotiated for them to take place as they did, are quite remarkable and, with the possible exception of this writer's work, unparalleled in German letters. We can appreciate the novel for exactly these details. A Romantic encounter unfolds as, "behind us the city pinned lights all over itself," while another tryst is stymied as "all the myths of vigorous malehood surrounded me like totem poles." Arnulf has many things on his mind as a young man, and they usually devolve into some need for female attention. As such, the Jews we encounter are purposive in their roles: a prodigy pianist; a lonely thirty-something shop owner; a family of innkeepers and a curious Ladino-speaking guest (another tip of the hat to Canetti); a drunkard with a lame hip resulting from unhappy love and her aforementioned addiction; and then Arnulf's second wife, who hates him for one thing above all:

Already the previous, East Prussian wife had soon discerned his habit of incorporating other people's memories into his own when they were suitable and colorful enough; but she had held her tongue, just as she had held her tongue about everything, especially about her contempt for him; for she had loved him and been disappointed; and to avoid sharing the guilt of this disappointment, she had to keep his defects in mind. But the second, Jewish wife .... his Jewish wife attacked him from the very start for his heedless outlook on biographical property, and she was so rabid about it that he was offended ... He could not understand the vehemence with which she championed authenticity, documentary truth for every autobiographical detail ("Even at the expense of vividness?" he had once asked her ironically, and she had answered like a fanatic, "Yes!  Yes!  Yes!").

Then again, maybe the best method to breathe eternal life into old stories is to make them your own. Even if many of the stories belonged to members of a decimated people who have since forsaken Europe and its hidden hates? Yes, yes, yes, indeed.  

The Great Heresies

Were you to bother researching this extremely learned and extremely opinionated man, you would often find him accused of being a bit too, well, orthodox. Unlike his genial contemporary, Belloc was not someone who made much room in heaven, or, for that matter, on earth, for people who did not share his views on life, God, right, wrong, and a few other important things. He has been charged with antagonizing non–Catholics with his effusive and bull-like prose, as well as relegating non-Christians (a term I use ironically since he insists there is no such thing as a “Christian”; there are “Catholics” and everyone else) to levels of salvation, etcetera, quite below what he expects of himself and others who properly impale heresies right through the sternum. Since I don’t doubt that he would have considered my beliefs to err too greatly on the side of ecumenicalism, it is with a chastened but unscarified eye that I read and enjoyed this book for what it is worth and what it can bring us in terms of historical perspective. That it is one-sided, consistent, and unforgiving, you may rest assured; that it sparkles with radiant insight into many a human topos, you may find more than a little fascinating.

The scope, indeed the sweep of a small work like The Great Heresies cannot possibly detail these alleged crimes with sufficient accuracy, which, I suspect, is one of Belloc’s methods of downplaying their historical vigor. He has other works – especially on his unending nightmare, the Reformation, which he blames for everything and anything – that treat the topics with more academic precision. Apart from a definition of heresy, the current book has a list of the five main offenders: the Arian heresy, Islam, the Albigensians, the Reformation, and what he terms “the Modern Phase,” which is nothing more than the post-Darwinian reliance on empiricism and so-called hard science. But we should begin in any case with that all-important definition. According to Belloc, a heresy is “the proposal of novelties in religion by picking out from what has been the accepted religion some point or other, denying the same or replacing it by another doctrine hitherto unfamiliar" (these days we might say “customization”). If you find something faulty in his reasoning, some gaping hole in his logic, you will be surprised to learn how assailable Belloc’s arguments are throughout his text. He abides by that most commendable of principles that only people who believe in something fully and completely cannot defend themselves with any margin of success. Should you disagree with Belloc’s initial premises, you will shake your head at every single observation that follows; but if you like what you hear, you will be enthralled by the cold logic of his math and smooth pavings of his causeways. Since Islam and Protestantism are attacked unfairly and far too succinctly to justify a rebuttal by me or anyone else, and the Modern Phase has devolved into such flummery that I will let Belloc alone crush it into gunpowder, a brief look at the two lesser known heresies, the Arian heresy and the Albigensians, will give us an idea of Belloc’s style and substance.

The Albigensians, now in retrospect the minimus on heresy’s fist, were a mass movement in the mid–twelfth century, the likes of which the Church had not seen in quite a while. There is ample information available on their objections to the Church, as well as the vicious campaign that dammed their rebellious flood. Belloc draws attention, however, to the events at Muret on September 13, 1213:

Muret is a name that should always be remembered as one of the decisive battles of the world. Had it failed, the campaign would have failed. Bouvines would probably never have been fought and the chances are that the French monarchy itself would have collapsed, splitting up into feudal classes, independent of any central lord ... With it our culture of the West would have sunk, hamstrung to the ground.

This assessment, made about seventy years ago, seems overblown even at the time of its publication. But it is indicative of Belloc’s coercive spirit that wants us to know the hardships his faith has sustained to reach through the centuries down at long last to him, its herald. He supports, for example, the First Inquisition, which “arose from the necessity of extirpating the remnants of the disease” of the Albigensian heresy, but acknowledges “the sporadic cruelty of earlier Christian times.” When discussing the Manichean dualism of the fourth century Arian revolt, which appears almost as distant now as Christ’s time itself, he attributes to this movement

The factor which is called today in European politics “Particularism,” that is, the tendency of a part of the state to separate itself from the rest and to live its own life. When this feeling becomes so strong that men are willing to suffer and die for it, it takes the form of a Nationalist revolution.

Catholic, he points out like any good etymologist, is from the Greek word for “general” or “universal,” and it should know no boundaries, be they national or economic. There should be one general and universal culture, as there should be one religion from which “cultures spring,” because “the vital force which maintains any culture is its philosophy, its attitude towards the universe; the decay of a religion involves the decay of the culture corresponding to it.” And the vital force which maintains Catholic culture? A “certain indissoluble Trinity of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness,” which is a nice way of co-opting the Ancient Greeks into our ways and means.

About decay, as about many other things in this book, Belloc is right; he is perhaps wrong in his refusal to broaden his etymology to include other cultures who may not immediately identify with the straits through which his faith has sailed. Belloc is now seen as prescient for his warnings about the modern re-emergence of Islam, to which he claims Catholics have fallen inferior in their faith. Despite that nothing would ever bring him to reconsider the manifestoes of that faith, should one plod on with no corollaries and theorems that might aid in making sense of modernity as reflected through the prism of thousand-year-old truths?  Absorption by acceptance not subjugation; confederacy by trust not loyalty; compassion for differences, not similarities. But I do not want to rewrite Belloc’s book, just encourage its deliberation.

Alien

My antipathy to science fiction – that genre in which technology well beyond the contemporary is the worshiped, unfathomable, omnipotent otherness that some of us still call spirituality – is well-known and the consequences dire. Should we all be simply multicellular specimens evolved from some cosmic catastrophe, then there is little moral fortitude to propel us through the universe; ideally, we should just eliminate anything and anyone that stands in our way. Superior beings should destroy lesser beings so that, over time, only the fittest survive (you may have heard this argument before). My antipathy is well-placed, and yet a few works persist that bypass this mediocre structure to develop along more profound lines. We may have suspended our belief in some abstract Greatness, but we have retained our fears and our trembling. Which brings us to the foreboding evil in this classic film.  

Our vessel, and one of two stages of action, is a spaceship in the distant future named after this novel's title character, and the opening scene is a survey of the purely mechanical as if human life has ceased to exist. Instead of beholding a countryside or beach with all the natural trimmings, everything on the Nostromo has been crafted by human hands. It takes a few minutes before we are shown such hands, attached to seven capsuled sleeping bodies although we only see one completely, that of Kane (John Hurt). The scene resembles a resurrection or a birth, with Hurt's soft skin, almost diaper-like underwear, and dazed and blissful look as he wakes suggesting both naïveté and nativity. The crew assembles around the breakfast table, or whatever they call a meal in the middle of space, and the first thing they talk about is death (as in what Hurt supposedly looks like) and bonuses. The discussants include two women, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and Lambert (Veronica Cartwright), an African-American, Parker (Yaphet Kotto), two natives of the British Isles, Kane and Ash (Ian Holm), and two accurate reflections of the moon missions, white male Americans, Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt) and the laconic Brett (Harry Dean Stanton). Although the chief engineer, Parker stoops to his cultural stereotype and is only allowed to wisecrack and buck the system with throwaway lines such as, "coffee is the only good thing on this ship." The others make the small talk necessary to introduce them to us, as they fit more or less the necessary vitamin balance for an energetic thriller to function. Dallas is the gutsy, macho captain; Ash the overlearned scientist; Brett the straight man for Parker's humor; and Ripley and Lambert represent, respectively, the sexy no-nonsense tomboy and the mildly androgynous, non-descript female buddy. Kane, on the other hand, a bluff chain-smoking Englishman, fits no category yet will become the epicenter of the film's first half. And he owes his primacy in no small part to a radio signal from an otherwise vacuous nearby planet.

As always, the matter is subjected to a few questions. Is it an SOS or a warning? Do we really have to do anything about it? When did we say we'd be home again? Parker comments that the Nostromo "is a commercial not a rescue ship," and we understand that however original science fiction thinks it is, its plots inevitably depict nothing new under this or any other sun – in this case that of the shipwrecked sailor (interestingly, it is an alleged contract stipulation that could threaten their bonuses that is the convincing factor to investigate the "signal of unknown origin"; truer pirates could not have been devised). In a scene much copied in the last three decades, they descend in their shuttle bearing the name of another Conrad novel to the misty and lonely planet. Lambert, Dallas, and Kane are dispatched to prowl about, with the rest staying aboard and watching through the monitors. What is remarkable is how long it takes them just to walk up to the curious horseshoe structure in the distance.  Eventually they penetrate the mist and the fortifications it cloaks and come across an alien corpse past their knowledge and dreams. Kane forges alone down a cavernous shaft, finds what appear to be eggs, incurs a rather violent attack, and is immediately returned to the shuttle after another debate regarding quarantines. Our next and terrifying view is of Kane lying on a medical table with a beast resembling a small octopus masking his face. The creature's blood is akin to molecular acid; it seems to be sustaining him with oxygen while inducing a coma; and it doesn't have any intention of letting go. The positioning is similar to our first glimpse of human life; but now at precisely the halfway point we witness one of the most famous movie deaths of all time, which I won't spoil even if it is so splendidly celebrated. Ash orders everyone to back off the creature, who scampers into the shadows, and the second half of the film begins – a violent, nasty, and agoraphobic foil to the first.

The premise may sound very familiar, but at the time there were few comparable blends of horror and science fiction, and almost none that devoted a whole hour to study the characters it would eventually disembowel. The adventure on the moon ten years before had separated science fiction somewhat from the unreal and imbued films and tales of the beyond with greater credibility, yet here reigns an aura of silence and deadness that is really what we should imagine space as being. The explosions, monsters, and galactic airfights are not what awaits us; what awaits us are the endless shadow, the suffocation of airlessness, and perhaps something from our most awesome nightmares. Apart from the obvious similarities to the slasher genre, as well as this classic horror film, Alien may also be likened to this seminal novel with the exception that we know the identity of the perpetrator. Appropriately, the reactions of the crew members are fear, loathing, and panic. These are not soldiers and they possess neither the drive nor wherewithal to be brave. Another tidbit lost in today's wedding of sex and violence is the age of the crew members, with the youngest being about thirty and the oldest almost two decades more experienced, relieving us of the burden of having to imagine two buxom twenty-three-year-olds as nuclear scientists. Were the film to be remade today it would certainly become a CGI affair of astounding cost, which would, alas, forego the basic premise of the movie. As advanced as the Nostromo may seem, it is but a primitive trap for something as evolved as the Alien; nothing of human invention can stop it from pursuing its will. Even if it is nothing more than a cursed son of Kane.