Rilke, "Wer verzichtet, jeden Gram zu kennen"

A work ("He who forsakes to know each grain") by this Austrian poet.  You can read the original here.

He who forsakes to know each grain,  
That sobs in fonts with gushing force, 
Will not produce the Holy name              
Which touches him and swerves its course.

And we alone shall thoughts express –   
So close were we to her who left,                         
To her whom God's delight caressed –
When life and love from her were cleft. 

The emptiness of our remove,
Dark hours surround in hollow fence,
Becomes but shells in which a fugue
Drones on.  And yet we hardly sense

How in unmeasured time's clear lens
Pipe organs hum, built to be soft,
Cantatas come, an angel bends
To sudden sounds he knew too oft.

Asylum

The history of mental illness is curiously coterminous with the history of psychology, a fact which proponents of such therapy claim is a testament to its importance. Without belaboring the matter, I will say that retroactive imputations of mental illness to famous figures in history is not so much outlandish as proof that this type of approach engenders silly speculation befitting computerized minds. There are some prominent movements afoot that revile psychiatry, and the more one knows of the subject the more one is inclined to heed such warnings. Ultimately, we will have to understand that a small segment of our population – much smaller than pharmaceutical companies and their agents would care to admit – is truly ill and in need of medication and perhaps occasional inspection. The rest of us can jolly well fix our own problems, which brings us to this delightfully gloomy novel.

Our narrator is Peter Cleave, a senior psychiatrist at an asylum redolent of Victorian Gothic and situated in the British countryside. The year is 1959, a watershed for English mental institutions by virtue, we are told, of the passing of the Mental Health Act. The intergalactic weapon known as Google informs me that this piece of legislation trumped the "1890 Lunacy Act" (surely a glorious feat) and more or less provided a legal framework to detain mental patients in appropriate institutions against their will. This stipulation will become important on more than on one occasion in Asylum, but let us briefly step through the brambles of the plot. A new deputy superintendent, Max Raphael, his voluptuous wife Stella, and their plump, generally ignored ten-year-old son, Charlie, have been getting accustomed to life in this dreary if lush pocket of existence. Cleave is skeptical about this arrangement from the very beginning:   

Stella .... was the daughter of a diplomat who had been disgraced in a scandal years before. Both her parents were dead now. She was barely out of her teens when she married Max. He was a reserved, rather melancholy man, a competent administrator but weak; and he lacked imagination. It was obvious to me the first time I met them that he wasn't the type to satisfy a woman like Stella. They were living in London when he applied for the position of deputy superintendent. He came down for an interview, impressed the board and, more important, impressed the superintendent, Jack Straffen. Against my advice Jack offered him the job and a few weeks later the Raphaels arrived at the hospital. 

With this unsubtle introduction, it is clear that we will soon encounter someone who is Stella's match, and probably also Max's opposite. This task falls to Edgar Stark, a large, muscular psychopath who fancies himself to be a bit of a sculptor (what he did to his wife, a disgusting crime that landed him in lockdown, will tell you all you need to know about his artistic capacity). In any case, Stark is certainly attractive in a brawny, Lord Byron sort of way, and Stella has been "more or less celibate" for the last several years. How does a "cultured, beautiful woman," who also appears to be a fine cook and homemaker, end up so neglected that she confesses her feelings at a dinner party? It is one of the odd conceits of the novel that Max's lack of imagination is blamed; in fact, this lynchpin is so dubious as to cast enormous shadows on all that is to come. To wit, if you have a wealth of ambition and a dearth of sensuality, why would you ever marry a beautiful woman whose curves gain her the nickname from one of the characters of "Rubens"? Not only is her ability to play hostess untested and unlikely, but a buxom bombshell will raise more than eyebrows regarding Max's maturity. And when Stella willingly allows Edgar's advances to conquer her whole, the novel skids down some rather implausible slopes.

Yet this is again to the credit of McGrath, who excels when he writes about his native England, but is far less successful with his American-based works (despite that he has long been a New World resident). Stella and Edgar fornicate, spend hours thinking themselves unwatched amid the sprawling hospital gardens – or, I should say, Stella alone believes this nonsense – and enjoy probing each other's physical and emotional limits. Then one fine day, Edgar has the impudence to seduce her on her own bed then make off with some of Max's clothes. Escape from an asylum, observes the usually purblind Max, requires two things: clothes and money. How nice of Stella then, when Edgar asked a week or so before, to have "given him everything she had in her purse." Edgar, to no one's surprise except Stella's, absconds to London where the second act begins, with Stella joining her lover and the latter's henchman Nick in an urban warehouse loft she will come to fear. Here we get scenes as plebeian as the raw and unfinished surroundings, and it is also here that Stella tries to refashion Edgar – who has hitherto come off as merely an unctuous, self-serving beast, at least to us – into the lover she really craves, not unlike Edgar's desire to sculpt her head:

She knew the thread was unbroken; even in his worst fits of aggressive jealousy she felt him straining for her, she felt the passion, only it was confused and misdirected, it was as though it had been shunted off down some passage from which it emerged monstrous and unrecognizable. This was his illness. And she said that it was during the two days she spent with Nick that she attempted what she called her heart's prompting: she tried for the first time, not intellectually but emotionally, to separate the man from his illness, and yes, she could do it. Oh, it was easy, she was more than equal to the task: she imagined him clutching his head as the storm raged in his poor benighted mind, but the storm wasn't him! The storm would pass, he would recover, he would be himself again. But for his sake she must avoid him while he was mad; later she would go back to him.

As Cleave duly notes, Stella has learned little from living among psychiatrists. Her few weeks in London are Bohemian in that very banal manner so commonly incident to lesser novels – which seems precisely like what has entrapped Stella. Edgar's "benighted mind" eventually gets the better of him, as it always has, and Stella makes her fallen way back to the familial country home alongside the titular institution.

Although I have not seen all of the doggedly faithful screen adaptation, I will permit myself use of its less complimentary reviews. While the film has been loathed in particular for Stella's abrupt stupidity, the novel's original improbabilities are greatly magnified by the casting choices, especially with this late actress as Stella. Richardson is sadly ten years too old and, unfortunately, not enough of a bimbo to make this work – and herein lies our greatest trouble. Our narrative, while gripping, will evolve in guarded steps; indeed, McGrath has never written more beautifully or more accurately. The premise of its stemming from the pen of an elderly psychiatrist bestows the semblance of an ornate clinical report. What happens to Stella and Charlie and Max in the third act, which begins in some downtrodden Welsh village called Cledwyn Heath, indicates that Edgar is not the only ailing soul among the dramatis personae. Max, as usual, does not quite catch on:

The house seemed too large for them, and they drifted about it like strangers in an empty hotel. Max was unable properly to begin his punitive campaign, perhaps, she thought, because the magnitude of her guilt awed him. That she should still eat, and drink, and move from room to room, burdened as she was with sin, this struck him dumb with amazement and even a sort of admiration. He could not quite believe that she wasn't crawling about on her hands and knees, begging his forgiveness.

Stella does nothing of the kind, and Max keeps her around with the old excuse that a child needs a mother. Now, a child certainly does need a mother, but not one like Stella. Not one who has succumbed to "those large emotions that by their very nature tend to blaze freely and then die, having destroyed everything that fed them." Well, almost everything.

Juan Muraña

A work by this Argentine from one of his later collections, El informe de Brodie.  You can read the original here.

For years I stated that I had grown up in Palermo; now I know that this was mere literary braggadocio. The fact is that I grew up on the other side of a long wrought-iron gate of spears, in the house and garden and library of my father and grandparents. Palermo of the knife and guitar would linger (they assure me) around the corners. In 1930, I consecrated a monograph to Carriego, the singer and preacher of our local slums. Chance led me, a bit later, to Emilio Trápani. I was going to Morón; Trápani, who was next to the window, called out to me by name. I didn't recognize him right away: so many years had passed since we shared the same bench in a school on Thames street. Roberto Godel might have recognized him.

We had never been fond of one another. Time had separated us physically but bound us in indifference. I remember now that he had taught me the rudiments of our waggish Buenos Aires slang. We started up one of those trivial conversations so insistent on finding useless facts and resulting in our discovery of the death of a classmate who was now no more than a name. All of a sudden, Trápani said:

"I borrowed your book on Carriego, and you keep going on and on about thugs ... Tell me, Borges, what could you know about thugs?" He looked at me with some kind of holy horror.

"I researched the matter," I answered.

He didn't let me continue and said:

"Researched is the word. But I, you see, I don't need any documents. I know these types of people." After some silence, he added, as if bestowing upon me a secret:

"I am the nephew of Juan Muraña."

Of all the knife throwers of Palermo up to the nineties or so, Juan Muraña was the most talked about. Trápani went on:

"My aunt Florentina was his wife. The story might interest you."

Certain rhetorical emphases and longer phrasings led me to suspect that this was not the first time he was telling this tale.

"My mother, you see, was always disgusted by the fact that her sister joined her life with that of Juan Muraña, who for her was a cruel, heartless being. For my aunt Florentina, however, he was a man of action. Many stories have circulated about the fate of my uncle. One very popular tale was about how one night, after a few drinks, he fell out of the driver's seat of his car trying to pass on the corner of Coronel, and how stones shattered his skull. It is also said that the law pursued him and he fled to Uruguay. My mother, who could never stand her brother-in-law, never explained the matter to me. I was very young and retained no memory of him.

"During the centennial we were living in Russell passage in a long and narrow house. The back door, which was always locked, gave out onto San Salvador. In the attic lived my aunt, already along in years and a bit odd. Bony and gaunt, she was – or at least she appeared to me to be – very tall and frugal in her words. She was scared of being outside and never went out, nor did she want us to enter her room. More than once I caught her stealing and hiding food. Around the neighborhood it was said that the death or disappearance of Muraña had driven her insane; I always remember her in black. She had acquired the habit of talking to herself.

"The house was the property of a certain Mr. Luchessi, owner of a barber's shop in Barracas. My mother, who was a seamstress of some corpulence, was going through a bad time. Without understanding all that was going on, I heard the stealthy words: law enforcement official, eviction for default of payment. My mother was the most affected by all this; my aunt repeated obstinately: Juan would never allow that wop to throw us out. I remembered the case – which we knew by heart – of an insolent bastard from the south of Buenos Aires who had dared to challenge the courage of her husband. Juan, as far as I know, paid his way to the other end of town, sought him out, fixed him with a dagger, and threw him in the Riachuelo. I don't know whether the story is true.  But what matters now is that the story is told and believed.

"As for me, you could find me sleeping in the holes of Serrano street begging for alms, or with a basket of peaches. I tried anything to free myself from going to school.

"I don't know how long this foundering went on. Your late father once told us that time could not be measured in days, like money was broken into cents or pesos, because the pesos were equal and every day is different, perhaps even every hour. I didn't quite understand what he meant, but the sentence remained etched in my memory.

"One of those nights I had a dream that became a nightmare. I dreamt of my uncle Juan. I hadn't had a chance to get to know him, but I imagined him Indian-looking, hefty, with a sparse mustache and long hair. We were heading south, between the large quarries and the undergrowth, but these quarries and weeds were also Thames street. In my dream the sun was high. Uncle Juan was in black. He stopped next to a type of  scaffolding in a narrow pass. He kept his hand under his jacket at the level of his heart, not like someone who was about to pull out a gun but like someone who was hiding one. In a very sad voice he said to me: I have changed greatly. He took out his hand and what I saw was the claw of a vulture. I woke up screaming in the darkness.

"The next day my mother ordered me to go with her to Luchessi's. I knew that she was going to ask him for an extension; doubtless, I was taken along so that our creditor could see his negligence. She didn't say a word to her sister, who would not have agreed to debase herself in such a manner. I had never been to Barracas; there seemed to be a lot of people, more traffic, and little wasteland. From the corner we saw guards and a group in front of the number we were looking for. A neighbor was walking around telling everyone that shots had rung out towards three in the morning. He had heard the door open and someone come in. No one had closed the door; at dawn they had found Luchessi lying in the hallway half-dressed; he had been stabbed. The man had lived by himself and the police never found the culprit. Nothing had been stolen. One person remembered that towards the end of his life, Luchessi had lost his sight. Another said in an authoritative voice: 'His hour had arrived.' The report and tone impressed me; and as the years passed I came to notice that every time someone died there was always a sententious voice announcing the same discovery.

"The people at the wake invited us for coffee and I had a cup. In the casket there was a wax figure in place of the deceased. I said as much to my mother, and one of the funeral home employees laughed at me and explained that this figure in black clothing was Mr. Luchessi. I was fascinated looking at him, and my mother finally had to take me by the arm and pull me away.

"For months no one talked about anything else. Crimes were rare then; think about how much talking came from the the affair of Melena, Campana, and Silletero. The only person who didn't bat an eyelid was Aunt Florentina. She repeated insistently in her old age:

"'I told them that Juan wouldn't allow that wop to leave us without a roof over our heads.'

"One day it rained and rained. Since I couldn't go to school I started nosing about the house. I went up to the attic. There was my aunt with one hand atop the other; I sensed that even thoughts were not reaching her. The room was dank; in a corner was an iron bed with a rosary on one of its posts; on the other, a wooden case to keep clothes. On one of the whitewashed walls there was the image of the Virgen of Carmen. On top of the small night table was a candle.

"Without raising her eyes, my aunt told me:

"'I knew that you'd come here. Your mother must have sent you. She doesn't understand that it was Juan who saved us.'

"'Juan?' I managed to say. 'Juan died more than ten years ago.'

"'Juan is here,' she said. 'Do you want to see him?'

"She opened the drawer of the night table and pulled out a dagger. She continued talking softly:

"'Here he is. I knew that he would never leave me. There has never been a man like him on this earth. He did not grant that wop any respite.'

"So I was the only one who understood. This poor unwise woman had killed Luchessi. Driven by hate, madness and perhaps, who knows, maybe by love, she had slipped out the door that gazed upon the south, crossed street after street in the middle of the night, arrived at the house, and then with her great bony hands plunged the dagger into his heart. The dagger was Muraña, it was the dead man that she continued to adore. I never knew whether she told my mother. She died just before we were evicted.'"

Until now I have never heard the story of Trápani again. In the tale of this woman who remained alone and who confused her man, her tiger, with this cruel thing that he left her, the weapon of his acts, I begin to see, I think, a symbol of many symbols. Juan Muraña was a man who walked my streets, who knew what men knew, who knew the taste of death and who then became a knife, and now a memory of a knife, and tomorrow oblivion, collective oblivion.

Christianity and Rationalism

More than a few modern minds have come to the conclusion that belief – and belief's ideal manifestation, faith – could not really be anything more than a neurological delusion of the weak. You will hear these people (they are sometimes loud, especially when confederates lurk nearby) mocking temples and places of worship as dens of ignorance and fear. Those who believe are foolish, backward, and scared of modern science – as if one could really be scared of a movement that spends its time annihilating itself; those who do not believe are brave, intelligent, and progressive. Why do we worship the Cross? Because we are subliminally re-enacting some pagan ritual of the Winter Solstice. Why do we wish to protect the poor, the sick, and the downtrodden? Because such was the hopeful superstition of primitive tribes who did not understand that our world was one of strife and oneupmanship, and we were all fashioned to outdo one another, one long chain of death in which the last to perish will be the most perfect being the world will ever see. Readers of these pages know how I feel about such garrulous twaddle, as morally disgusting as it is uninformed. And readers also know that there has probably been no mind as sprightly or brilliant in the refutation of such nonsense as this author, which brings us to one of his most magnificent short works. 

One consistent myth about Christianity is the notion that Christians are not allowed to enjoy life to its hilt. Christ, we are told, never laughed; the Devil, on the other hand, is often portrayed as cackling in some dark corner or fornicating in ecstasy with as many partners as can be squeezed into one mind's panorama. Laughter and enjoyment, carnal or otherwise, are the marks unique to the Evil One, which anyone of even middling intelligence will tell you simply cannot be. The conclusion? Both Christ and Devil are figments of a primitive imagination shackled to black-and-white opposites and allegorical truths. To control society's natural whims to make merry and engage in salacious activity, Christians have erected their temples to solemn abstinence and asked the same of all their priests. Worship or be damned; fear of fun; laughter is the keepsake of the flagitious – many a motto could be generated along these lines. Yet according to Chesterton, such an understanding stands Christian truth on its happy head:

The Secularist says that Christianity has been a gloomy and ascetic thing, and points to the procession of austere or ferocious saints who have given up home and happiness and macerated health and sex. But it never seems to occur to him that the very oddity and completeness of the men's surrender make it look very much as if there were really something actual and solid in the thing for which they sold themselves. They gave up all human experiences for the sake of one superhuman experience. They may have been wicked, but it looks as if there were such an experience. It is perfectly tenable that this experience is as dangerous and selfish a thing as drink. A man who goes ragged and homeless in order to see visions may be as repellent and immoral as a man who goes ragged and homeless in order to drink brandy. That is a quite reasonable position. But what is manifestly not a reasonable position what would be, in fact not far from being an insane position, would be to say that the raggedness of the man, and the homelessness of the man, and the stupefied degradation of the man proved that there was no such thing as brandy.

We are reminded here of Chesterton's definition of marriage – which involves forsaking all the women of the world for one woman, and, of course, considering yourself the victor – but something else is worth mentioning. The arrogance of the modern mind steeped in its fossils and galaxies is the claim that our forefathers were bound together in falsehoods. True, Chesterton quips, we may now possess such vital knowledge as "the four-hundredth accurate origin of protoplasm," but such information does not really mean much to anyone except the protoplasm and its conqueror. That so many people believed in something they could not see or touch, that had no mathematical formula or shape, that provided us with everything in the way of hope but left us with nothing in the way of proof – all this is used by Christianity's enemies to denounce it as a fraud. And it can be used without changing a syllable by Christians who proclaim it to be our Salvation.

One by one, the most common complaints are summoned. Christianity has led to endless 'wars and persecution,' but no mention is made of how much war and persecution has been undertaken solely for the wealth and power of a greedy monarch or a wicked prince. Nowadays, we do not have really have many kings in gene and lineage; their fiefs have been usurped by the economic elite whose lavish and unrepentant greed is so eerily reminiscent of the decadence of pre-Revolutionary France that one wonders why we do not simply commit them all to a bloody end. Since the European-based wars of the twentieth century demonstrated how atheism and political doctrine, when misapplied, can be just as wicked as any religious fervor, modern minds have relinquished this territory of debate. Instead, they have marched on to the theory that because Judaism and then Christianity (and, as it were, Islam) were local phenomena, they must have simply been expansions of pagan expression. Nothing, we are told, could be further from the truth:

For if there really are some other and higher beings than ourselves, and if they in some strange ways, at some emotional crisis, really revealed themselves to rude poets or dreamers in very simple times, that the rude people should regard the revelation as local, and connect it with the particular hill or river where it happened, seems to me exactly what any reasonable human being would expect. It has a far more credible look than if they had talked cosmic philosophy from the beginning. If they had, I should have suspected "priestcraft" and forgeries and third-century Gnosticism. If there be such a being as God, and He can speak to a child, and if God spoke to a child in the garden the child would, of course, say that God lived in the garden. I should not think it any less likely to be true for that. If the child said: "God is everywhere: an impalpable essence pervading and supporting all constituents of the Cosmos alike" – if, I say, the infant addressed me in the above terms, I should think he was much more likely to have been with the governess than with God.

We still adhere to such a paradigm when we examine an allegedly haunted house or sacred site (the fact that many of these latter-day spooks turn out to be hoaxes lies more with the investigators than the investigated), but this is yet another example of modernity's insufferable egocentrism. How could God, should He at all exist, appear to some simple shepherd and not to the head of a philosophy department, someone, in other words, who would know what to do with Him? Perhaps because although philosophy departments may know how to do certain things, confronting things that they cannot explain through their philosophies has never been one of them. Belief starts in the mind of a single person, who finds it rather amazing that someone else who has had a very different life believes in precisely the same thing – but I think here we are getting far too ecumenical for modern tastes.     

Bookworms often daydream as to which author they would select if stranded on a desert island (never mind that desert islands do not tend to promote literary pursuits), and I wonder whether I wouldn't choose Chesterton. In the history of English literature, which should without fear of perjury be considered mankind's most glorious tradition after this one, there may be no one as talented or consistently accurate. His accomplishments are even more impressive in view of his prodigious output, and perhaps the one book that does not enthrall the reader is the one book that needn't have been written, since a writer's true autobiography is necessarily the sum of his works. Chesterton, like all great geniuses, is at his best when he can refract his wisdom through something other than himself – be that subject a fictional plot, a political debate, a book review, or an essay on why he believes that we are immortal. And if eternal life remains our most irrational thought, a rationalist would then conclude that we are all merely at various stages of pre-death. And if that doesn't make sense to you, then Christianity's nonsense has never seemed more sensible.   

Mallarmé, "Le sonneur"

A work ("The bell-ringer") by this French poet.  You can read the original here.

And while the bell awakes in clearest chime,  
Against the limpid, pure, deep morning air, 
A passing child will humor Sunday's care,       
By angelus in lavender and thyme.  
 
Grazed by the bird he lights, the ringer waits,   
In saddest wheeze of ancient Roman plots, 
Astride the stone that holds the layman's knots,              
And hears a faint and distant ring abate.   
 
I am that man.  Alas, from wanton night 
Comes the Ideal in cables black and blue,                        
And from cold sins there frolics plumage true.  
 
This hollow voice I hear in fragment's flight! 
One indistinct tired day, I'll yank the stone,   
And on the gallows, Satan, end my moan.