The Persistence of Desire

One of the oldest narrative clichés, and perhaps the most bittersweet, is that of the ex-lovers' reencounter. The scene is not hard to imagine: Paris; autumn; late afternoon or early evening; a café half-empty and half-asleep; a large cup of steaming coffee, perhaps an ashtray stabbed to death; and upon the awning, pellets of rain messaging your most intimate thoughts. You have been away from the one you loved – the only one to whom that amazing verb has ever truly applied – for a couple of years, but somehow a part of you has remained with that person, you are not quite sure what part. Since your torrid months together you have considered her a little more than occasionally, yet your impression is that these considerations have been dwindling and will soon approach zero (zero would mean it never happened, which would be the worst of all fates). Your hand slides along the bumps of your leather tote and you recall when your hand used to caress her hip, as if to ask for her consent, and you decide with a heavy heart to gesture for the check. As you look up to find the garçon, your eyes – which have never stopped lingering on every doorway, every passing cab, every theater crowd – fall to someone who cannot be what she is indeed. You may ask yourself how destiny could have orchestrated such a moment; then again, you may be scared to think that you'll have nothing to say. You move towards her, as you always have been, and she moves towards you, or at least you think she does, and once identities are confirmed other facts must be verified as well. Most of us do have a little speech rehearsed, having practiced a few million times in our heads, and yet speeches have that unfortunate way of sounding as rehearsed as you make them. For a number of reasons, however, this brief description should not detract from our reading of a story in this superb collection.       

Our protagonist is Clyde Behn, a name that suggests a brewer or a rugby player, not a silly, sensitive family man with chronic twittering of the eyelid. We find Behn at the offices of an ophthalmologist called Pennypacker (no more needs to be said) as well as in the midst of a full-blown mid-life crisis. The thing is, although Clyde has "middle-aged eyes," he is still quite a young man, maybe short of thirty-five, as evidenced by the fact that Pennypacker has been his "aloof administrator of expensive humiliations" ever since he can remember. His trip back to his hometown flickers with old indigenous memories, precisely the ones you hope to relive by chance, meaning that you have actually made a conscious decision to increase their probability by coming home. It is quite possible that Behn does not see things as such – he doesn't see well to begin with, a point Pennypacker will underscore in more than one way – but let us not hastily omit Clyde's past in favor of his present.

While waiting in one of those anodyne waiting rooms that seem to presage only death and pain, Clyde reads that "the cells of the normal human body are replaced in toto every seven years" (a figure that coincides nicely with that popular barometer of adulterous impulses, the seven-year itch). The woman he has been waiting for is Janet, who dutifully appears in time before his appointment as to allow for more than a bit of casual conversation. She is a plump, pleasant woman now married to a career serviceman and freshly returned from several years in Germany. After an awkward exchange, he sketches for himself her husband's portrait:

Clyde had never met him, but having now seen Janet again, he felt he knew him well – a slight, literal fellow, to judge from the shallowness of the marks he had left on her. He would wear eyebrow-style glasses, be a griper, have some quite negotiable talent, like playing the clarinet or drawing political cartoons, and now be starting up a drab avenue of business. Selling insurance, most likely. Poor Janet, Clyde felt: except for the interval of himself – his splendid, perishable self – she would never see the light.

You will be hard-pressed to find a better summation of all jilted lovers at all times than this last sentence. Clyde makes his move, desperate yet sincere, and gathers a hoard of mixed signals for later decryption. Finally he is granted access to Pennypacker, "a tall, stooped man with mottled cheekbones and an air of suppressed anger," and, for once, takes a close look at his tormentor:

Pennypacker moved to the left eye and drew ever closer. The distance between the doctor's eyes and the corners of his mouth was very long; the emotional impression of his face close up was like that of those first photographs taken from rockets, in which the earth's curvature was made apparent.

There is more to Pennypacker than this; but Clyde, perhaps adhering to staunch habit, refuses to see what else he might learn from one visit to an eye doctor since, of course, he has already found the reencounter he had long sought.

Until his death five years ago, Updike was probably the greatest living American writer for a good three decades. His greatness is overshadowed by his voluminous production, usually indicative of mediocrity, and by his unflappable desire to be American and nothing less or more (one supposes that most writers of his talent would have erred towards the more). That is not so much a criticism as a compliment: only an American could have written about suburbia and the desires that bubble beneath its bourgeois sheen, and only a great writer could have chronicled such mundane crimes in a style both riveting and complex. So when a meticulous, professional Pennypacker "insolently raked the lights back and forth across Clyde's face," and his patient becomes "blind in a world of light, [afraid] that Pennypacker was inspecting the floor of his soul," we smile and wonder about that purportedly happy soul that has little if any happiness to share with the two people from his old life. We smile again when Pennypacker asks him whether he was "using his eyes a great deal," to which Clyde replies, "no more than I ever did." And we haven't even mentioned Clyde's eyelashes.

Heine, "Lady Macbeth"

An essay by this German poet on one of the most exquisite literary works known to man. You can read the original here.

From among the actually historical dramas I turn to those tragedies whose tales are either purely contrived or hewn from old Sagas and narratives. Macbeth transports us to these compositions in which Shakespeare's great genius may unfold his wings most pertly and freely. The contents are borrowed from an old legend; they do not belong to history. Nevertheless the play makes some claim to historical beliefs since in it the forebear of the Royal House of England played a role. Macbeth was staged during the reign of King James the First, who is famously said to be descended from the Scotsman Banquo. In this regard the poet also wove into his drama a few prophecies about the reigning dynasty.       

Macbeth is a favorite of critics who see it as an opportunity to promote as widely as possible their own views about the the ancient "drama of fate," in comparison with the concept of fate possessed by modern playwrights. On this subject I will allow myself only a passing remark.

Shakespeare's idea of fate is different from the idea of fate in ancient times in the same way that the soothsayer women, who meet Macbeth in the old Nordic legend with prophecies of the crown, differ from any sisterhood of witches one sees in Shakespeare's tragedies. These wondrous women in the Nordic legend are apparently Valkyries, frightful goddesses of the air who hover above the battlefields, decide on victory or defeat, and can be seen as the actual levers of human fate when the latter were initially dependent on the outcome of sword fights. Shakespeare transformed them into trouble-making witches, stripping away all the awesome grace of Nordic sorcery. He made them into androgynous miscreations who knew how to summon monstrous phantoms and fomented decay out of malicious glee or as bidden by Hell itself. They may be but the servants of Evil, yet whoever allows himself to be fooled by their words will be destroyed in body and soul. Shakespeare thus translated the old pagan goddesses of fate and their venerable magic into Christian terms, and the downfall of his hero is therefore no longer something predetermined and necessary but something as avoidable as ancient fate. Yet it is indeed the consequence of the temptations of Hell that so knows how to entrap the human heart with its most intricate nets. Macbeth falls under the power of Satan, the primordial Evil.

It is interesting to compare Shakespeare's witches to the witches of other English poets. One notices that Shakespeare cannot quite free himself from the old pagan point of view, and his coven of sisters is therefore noticeably more grandiose and respectable than the witches of Middleton who possess a more distinctly evil hag nature and play petty tricks. They also only damage the body: they have little sway over the spirit and can do no more than incrust our hearts with jealousy, resentment, prurience and suchlike leprosies of feeling.

The reputation of Lady Macbeth, whom one had thought a very evil person for two centuries now, has improved in Germany the last twelve years to her benefit. The pious Franz Horn, as it were, made the remark in the Brockhausen daily that the poor lady had been hitherto wholly misunderstood, that she truly loved her husband, and that all in all she possessed a lovable disposition. This opinion Mr. Ludwig Tieck then sought to buttress with all his science, erudition, and philosophical depth.  And it did not take long for us to behold Madame Stich upon the royal stage in the role of Lady Macbeth cooing like a turtle dove, so that no heart in Berlin could resist these tender tones and many a lovely eye was overcome with tears upon seeing the good Macbeth. This happened, as mentioned, about twelve years ago, in that gentle time of restoration where we had so much love within us. Since then bankruptcy has spread, and if many crowned persons do not enjoy our effusive love, then the guilt lies with those people like the Queen of Scotland who during this same restoration period thoroughly exploited our hearts.   

Whether Germany still advocates such amiability towards the aforementioned lady, I cannot say. Since the July Revolution our views on many matters have changed, and perhaps even in Berlin one may come to see that the good Macbeth was a rather foul beast.

Damnation

We must return to beauty ... to the joy of important things, to the taste of victory and success.

It takes three minutes in this film to fade back through a window, to a man shrouded in the dusk's shadows, almost invisible against the bleak portrait of industrial cable cars in the sky. Another minute passes before smoke escapes this shadow and scuds past the window. This is one of the most sensational of cinema's opening sequences, especially because we are entranced by something so plain, so banal, so dreary and everyday. Another minute is spent shaving, a tired, white face encircled by blackness, perhaps by the blackness of nothingness, of distant space, of cold and unnotable death. And the face we see – a bit wizened, well past life's midpoint – has a sheepish crook to it, a despair, a question.

The question is answered by another face who never takes her eyes off the face we just saw. She is a mother and his lover, and their conversation, akin to a speech in mild defiance of a heckler, proceeds through her door chain, with her chin just above it as if the chain were the bottom of a veil. When she mentions that she doesn't want her daughter "to be like we are," a fist slams the chain open to its maximum length. The next scene takes place where nearly all the remaining scenes will take place, apart from one important sequence at a police station: at a bar. Behind a closeup of a pile of empty drink glasses we recognize the voice of our face, and hear another voice addressing him as Karrer (Miklós B. Székely). In a single shot the viewer registers the pervasive alcoholism that tends to plague industrial wastelands such as this Hungarian town, as well as the emptiness of those same souls, taken to drink or otherwise. The other voice emanates from a pasty, bearded bartender (Gyula Pauer) who bears some resemblance to this director, if with livelier eyes. These eyes become all the more extraordinary when contrasted to the sleepy skepticism of everyone else, and these eyes have some advice for Karrer, for whom they do not, however, demonstrate a great deal of respect. The eyes and beard concoct a smuggling scheme, or at least that is the impression we have, and we see his mind calculate a cut for his chain-smoking, recently jilted acquaintance that would leave himself superbly in the black. Karrer attempts to negotiate and is laughed at just like older boys mock younger ones who try to contribute to rule-making of those imaginary games all boys play. Karrer, who will show us on several occasions that he is not above begging for love and respect (although much later, he will display some less kindly traits), can only agree to a plan that would allow him to get the money he so obviously needs to forsake this town once and for all. 

One correction: it is our natural assumption, given the degraded environmental conditions and almost inhuman misery, that Karrer wishes to leave; or that, as it were, he needs or even wants money (he does not seem gainfully employed; if he is, it is probably in one of the toxic factories). In fact, there does not appear to be any impediment to his departure, either politically or socially. Karrer might certainly vanish and no one would notice because we have the distinct impression that no one here has noticed things in a very long time. Yet what Karrer really desires is a woman, the woman behind the chain and behind the veil, a torch singer (Vali Kerekes) who keeps the Titanik bar, a popular drinking hole, more or less afloat. What he sees in the singer is not ours to comprehend. Yes, she is comely, especially when one considers the local skirted alternatives; she is also rather willing, as the scene at the very middle of our film graphically depicts; but she is still married to a handsome rascal (György Cserhalmi) whose financial indebtedness is only surpassed by his bile. One tender moment has the married couple dancing with a fervor they might have felt twenty years ago, but which cannot possibly transport them now, as much as they might hope. After Karrer amidst a morose and all-male crowd attends one of the singer's Titanik performances (a love song whose first words are "it's over"), he is literally and figuratively buttonholed near the cloakroom by her husband. "You misunderstand something," Karrer says to the directive. When the husband asks what on earth that could be, Karrer stares silently and waits for the husband to answer his own question. We need a threat for the men to part, otherwise this would be a moral defeat for the husband; we get the standard issue and are satisfied. In a strange way, even Karrer seems to hope for the threat as well as if to legitimize his own ambitions. But he is not the only one with ambitions. At a music hall, the singer informs him, with the quote that begins this review, that no one is going to hold her back from becoming a star, least of all, it is implied, Karrer. He is further disabused of any delusions when the bartender tells him that, "there's an order in the world and you can do nothing to upset it." Our jilted lover acts upon this last statement as a challenge, but not in any way we could reasonably expect.

Tarr's primary method, like that of his master Tarkovsky, is the long take; his skill at it, coupled with his preference to operate in black-and-white, offers at once a more realistic and less realistic perspective. Karrer's life remains colorless, his opinions as piebald as the newspapers inveighing against mankind's wickedness, his panorama of the world always dark, limited, shadowy, and slow-moving, a forgotten moon revolving around a nearby planet. Appropriately, I suppose, most of Tarr's films are about damnation in one form or another (Tarkovsky's works, while even more religiously themed, almost invariably treat of redemption). That is not to say that Damnation is his greatest masterpiece, but on a basic level, it will remain his most characteristic, a code for the rest of his oeuvre. The cast in this marvelous work are already dead even if they may not know it; this film appears to allow a nightmare to become reality, when really the reverse is true; and the eponymous beast of burden in this film has committed a sin for which he and his master and his master's family will all pay dearly in the end. Perhaps this is why after being threatened by the husband, Karrer is lectured mildly by the cloakroom attendant (the late Hédi Temessy) who tells him, "that woman's a witch," and her husband can't get away with his debts. "You're not like them anyway," she adds, "they'll only get you into trouble" – exactly what a mother would tell a child who has been fraternizing with the wrong crowd. Perhaps that is also why she approaches him with her dogs in the endless rain (Karrer's close surveillance of the umbrellaed figure suggests he was expecting someone else) and quotes most of Ezekiel 7. What then of Karrer's odd confession about his deceased wife, whom he clearly deemed far too bourgeois to be left in peace in his realm? Is Karrer right when he avers that "all stories end badly because all stories are about disintegration"? Because if they're not, he adds, then "they're about resurrection." And as we know, disintegration can be just as perpetual and everlasting.    

St. Francis of Assisi

The merely modern mind has justified every detail of its facile existence by the simplest means: we are selfish survivalists whose only real wishes are hedonistic and bestial. Not only is such an approach fatally misconstrued, it also really applies to that subsection of humans who believe that whatever they do is good because they want it, and have the ridiculous idea of calling such desire the power of the will. Modern philosophy, in its efforts to reinvent the wheel, the chariot, and the horseman, has smiled upon the silliness of gratitude, of beneficence, of unwarranted and unreturned kindness as some childish desire to blunt a jagged conscience. Somewhere, in our depths, we are compensating for the evil we have inflicted upon others (the common explanation for those who left a life of debauchery behind in favor of a good and pure existence, such as this Russian actor). But these are modern views to age-old questions. They are necessarily as ignorant of what has occurred over the course of human history as today’s agnostic who claims – in the same timid and wishy-washy way he does everything else – that religion, organized or in riot, has always been the refuge of the poor and downtrodden. A refuge, mind you, designed by the reigning elite to palliate the inequities that reality maintains between the privileged and the very underprivileged. Apart from a story about some birds, that same agnostic may or may not have heard of this Saint; but he surely will know little about the man described in this book.

The argument in such an endeavor does not devolve into what St. Francis set out to do, nor what we should think of St. Francis as a human being; this is not, as it were, the tale of a Nordic explorer. The appearance of the man we now call St. Francis of Assisi cannot and should not be explained away by divine intervention, because there has only been one such intervention in the history of Christianity. No, St. Francis must be explained as a man, and as a man he is remarkable in ways that have rarely been ascribed to anyone else among the ranks of mankind. His way was perhaps the Way of the Cross, but it had not the same ends – nor could it have presumed to have – as what Jesus Christ brought to the world. This oddness, an ascetic strain so restrictive as to seem incredible to the modern hedonist, is appropriately addressed in unusual terms:

The truth is that people who worship health cannot be healthy. When Man goes straight he goes crooked. When he follows his nose he manages somehow to put his nose out of joint, or even to cut off his nose to spite his face; and that in accordance with something much deeper in human nature than nature-worshipers could ever understand. It was the discovery of that deeper thing, humanly speaking, that constituted the conversion to Christianity. There is a bias in man like the bias in a bowl; and Christianity was the discovery of how to correct the bias and therefore hit the mark. There are many who will smile at the saying; but it is profoundly true to say that the glad good news brought by the Gospel was the news of original sin.

On this basis Francis Bernardone, a young Italian who grew up at the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth century, became the most austere admirer of Christian mores the world had ever learned of, and not because he was the most austere of all persons to have ever walked in the massive shadow of Calvary. History is replete with tales of self-flagellating monks, believers burning and starving themselves, in a futile attempt to make up for the sin they feel has made them mortal and wicked. What history lacked before the advent of Francis Bernardone, however, was a soul who committed himself to the trinity that is the vow of the monk – poverty, obedience, and chastity – and did so with such unadulterated and genuine cheerfulness. In a way, Francis was the first among us to divine the teachings of Christianity as the paradoxical amalgam of utter destitution and utter rapture; the first to make happiness and poverty synonymous; the first, in other words, to show us that the meek truly will inherit the earth.

The Brothers Minor, an order that still numbers in the tens of thousands, have persisted through our faithless days as a sort of sideshow attraction. Witness the innumerable popular references to the hooded friar in brown garb with a rope as his belt and the soil as his shoes. Many of us think such an existence to denote enslavement – if not enslavement, then a sad and meaningless resort for the desperate – although no one to my knowledge has ever been forced to become a Franciscan monk. Yet the key to asceticism can be elegantly resolved: if you believe the world to be made by laws that do not change, you cannot believe in anything that violates those laws. As such, if you believe that we were meant to live and survive, you can hardly believe in any culture or mores that shorten your life so that you may repent for our collective moral turpitude. For St. Francis, this is precisely what makes the most sense:

It is the highest and holiest of the paradoxes that the man who really knows he cannot pay his debt will be for ever paying it. He will be for ever giving back what he cannot give back, and cannot be expected to give back. He will be always throwing things away into a bottomless pit of unfathomable thanks. Men who think they are too modern to understand this are in fact too mean to understand it; we are most of us too mean to practice it. We are not generous enough to be ascetics; one might almost say not genial enough to be ascetics. A man must have magnanimity of surrender, of which he commonly only catches a glimpse in first love, like a glimpse of our lost Eden. But whether he sees it or not, the truth is in that riddle; that the whole world has, or is, only one good thing; and it is a bad debt.

The use of the term “debt” will certainly appeal to those modern industrial souls who measure every gesture and nuance of speech in light of their financial solvency; but there is more at stake here than pure self-immolation which can easily be interpreted as guilt. One thing that did not plague St. Francis was guilt. He did not feel the burden of the Cross upon his shoulder blades or the Weltschmerz that has made many a philosopher sob in the corner of his private study. His only burden was his clothes, which in a much-belabored scene he quickly shed. He then encountered a peasant in brown habit, begged politely for the most measly and holed garment that peasant owned, found some hemp with which to bind the habit to himself, and the rest as they say is history.

The point of Chesterton’s book, of course, is not history or anything resembling historical fact. That is not because St. Francis is fictive or because what he did and said was attributed to him posthumously in a sort of deifying Festschrift; he did not do or say that much to begin with. If what we know of St. Francis of Assisi is that he loved animals, especially birds, and that novels such as this one continue to depict him as a nature boy with a heart for heaven, our perpetuation of these trusted captions is as much our fault as the fault of those who cannot be bothered to learn about anything outside the lifetime of their grandparents. So why does Francis matter at all? Perhaps because he reminds us in a very distant way of what we have always believed:

St. Francis is the mirror of Christ as the moon is the mirror of the sun. The moon is much smaller than the sun, but it is also much nearer to us; and being less vivid it is also more visible. Exactly in the same sense St. Francis is nearer to us, and being a mere man like ourselves is in that sense more imaginable. Being necessarily less of a mystery, he does not, for us, so much open his mouth in mysteries.

Mysteries cannot come from someone who is ordinary and plain, in the complimentary meaning of both words, and in our world of never-ending doubts, conspiracies and mystifications, we should be thankful for such clarity. But whatever we do in life, we will never be as gracious or as thankful as that young Italian in brown habit.

Briusov, "Возвращение"

A poem ("The Return") by this famous symbolist and translator.  You can read the original here.

From splendid feasts I bid farewell,                  
From maidens' dance, from sense unbound,       
And thither fled where darkness swelled,         
Where hate would reign on unrich ground.        

Alone I wandered wild and free,                          
And melted in the ancient gloom;                       
As cliffs called out and greeted me                 
And eagles in my nearness loomed.                         

My savage visions marked each day,        
Impressions that I still recall,                
As wingéd faces, joyous, fey,                
Beheld me from the ancient walls.           

And wilderness was home for years, 
As I obeyed my lonely dream.              
But then my voice repelled my fears,     
Words' sound and fury then redeemed.      

Anew was I in purple gear,                        
My locks were oiled in tranquil scent,      
And hardly had my pride appeared,          
When feasting voices me Tsardom lent!    

Among the queens in gleeful sway
I could but choose a single form:
Affection's air shall drift this way
With weaknesses of springtime's norm!

And you my valley rose, my sprite,
Just like a stem your closeness gleamed.
And I grew you to fable's height,
You in the flesh, you in my dream.  

But if in fatal moment's course                  
I heard my trumpet's last commands,       
I'd wake and send my answer forth,
And fall from your uneasy hands!