mtmurmur

A Night in Chile / Roberto Bolano

2010-05-09T19:05:00.001-04:00

For me, “A Night in Chile” is extremely resonant with Azuela’s “The Underdogs” in its overt and complex statements about a particular historical situation and its participants, real and fictional (though certainly, Borges’ “Deutsches Requiem” and Carpentier’s “The Chase” must be included).

In some sense a hero—any hero—is, by definition to his or her enemy, a villain, and vice versa. That individual (or group) may have particular characteristics, such as being more or less formidable for various reasons of, say, intellect or charisma, but they are essentially the “other” solely by contrast—whether that is defined by ideology, physiology, or which side of the street one lives on, and independent of whether those differences are perceived as real or known to be imagined.

“A Night in Chile” is especially compelling in the directness with which it addresses not so much (though neither so little) who is a hero or villain, but how the world goes so utterly and quickly astray. To pick only one small yet vital piece from the story, the section on Fr Antonio and falconry seems a perfect example. Problem solving, devoid of the time-consuming and difficult consideration of context (in its broadest, ever-changing, yet simplest implications), is inherently amoral, for it suggests an obscene equality among all possible responses and all possible situations. (An editorial in the N Y Times on Friday, 7 May 2010, about a young man who ran onto the field during a major-league baseball game and was stopped—instantly—by the police with a stun gun/Taser, asks the same questions about the relation of force and action.) The possible next step into immorality can be so transparent as to be invisible, and inevitable, and to appear, as the narrator at one point says of his own action, necessary—justifiable.

To kill all the pigeons and doves in the world if they threaten the physical well-being of the architectural structures of the Church (historic and aesthetic considerations included, as well as the recollection that “the Church” is, in its own definition, its adherents, not its buildings), is to vacate any understanding of the sacred aspect of life, and, if one so believes, in God’s creation. Fr Antonio’s doubt, fear, and pain at this expedient measure rings through the whole book, as does recognition of the value of the creation of art, of which the churches mentioned and the novel itself are exquisite examples.

The narrator has tried to avoid any real or meaningful probing of his own life and actions not so much by residing in a realm of culture apart, or because he too is a limited and flawed individual, but by being ever willing and ready to look no further than a solution to the next “problem.” He cannot even recognize that Mr Raef and Mr Etah are Fear and Hate in their most banal modern guise, at once backward and efficiently all business.

Pedro Paramo / Juan Rulfo

2010-03-22T07:41:00.001-04:00

Notes on “Pedro Paramo”

On my first reading of “Pedro Paramo” my impression was of a marvelous and very dark enchantment; after my second reading, I was disappointed with the work as a whole (and I deeply regretted having that reaction); after a third reading I was left with both responses, each stronger. That said, my very strongest reaction to Rulfo’s work, however, was its difference from the other works we have read. Cautions are, of course, in order. This work was created after the Mexican Revolution; after the first World War; after the second World War and the dropping of atomic bombs.

All of the other works have a shape of completion or fulfillment as works that is different from “Pedro Paramo” stylistically and essentially; each author may tell tales that are more or less cryptic and magical, but the voice from which they speak (if not necessarily what they mean to say) is essentially immediately comprehensible from a general Western European cultural perspective.

For want of any other way to describe it, I would have to say that “Pedro Paramo” is a cultural shock. Certainly, Paramo and Susana could be seen as Titans involved in their titanic journey, regardless of the mere mortals or half-mortals who block their essential being, and the endless sufferings and movements of the living, dead, or not-dead is similar enough to stories of the Greek and Roman afterlife. But this work feels essentially Latin/Hispanic in contrast to the others, where Latin and Hispanic issues seem to be largely, though not entirely, the material but not the pattern from which they are made. Obviously, this is an over-statement meant to highlight a point.

However I may want to feel about it, I don’t believe in ghosts, or that I could run home and remind my—waiting—dead spouse to put in a good word when she gets to Heaven for Ines Villalponda. In English there is only one term for the verb “to be;” in Spanish there are two: one for essential characteristics, and one for temporary states. Death, like Life, is considered a temporary condition; this seems simultaneously Christian, primordial, and similar to what some contemporary physicists and scientists hold to be possible, if not exactly true. “Pedro Paramo” is full of strange vitality and horrifying permanence, and, for me, its real and magnificent force is that it is entirely serious, earnest, and desperately human.

Pedro Paramo / Juan Rulfo

2010-03-22T07:38:00.001-04:00

Notes on “Pedro Paramo”

On my first reading of “Pedro Paramo” my impression was of a marvelous and very dark enchantment; after my second reading, I was disappointed with the work as a whole (and I deeply regretted having that reaction); after a third reading I was left with both responses, each stronger. That said, my very strongest reaction to Rulfo’s work, however, was its difference from the other works we have read. Cautions are, of course, in order. This work was created after the Mexican Revolution; after the first World War; after the second World War and the dropping of atomic bombs.

All of the other works have a shape of completion or fulfillment as works that is different from “Pedro Paramo” stylistically and essentially; each author may tell tales that are more or less cryptic and magical, but the voice from which they speak (if not necessarily what they mean to say) is essentially immediately comprehensible from a general Western European cultural perspective.

For example, Azuela’s “Underdogs” could equally well have been written to take place in late medieval or renaissance “Italy;” Borges’ stories are deep philosophical (and comical) ontological musings; Bioys is timeless and entirely modern simultaneously, taking place on an un-located deserted island within the invisible dominant culture of post-industrial Europe; and Bombal’s characters are burdened with culture like window-dressing: individual, cosmopolitan, and ultimately psychological, they could be bourgeois gentry in the south of France or the smaller German states, anywhere.

For want of any other way to describe it, I would have to say that “Pedro Paramo” is a cultural shock. Certainly, Paramo and Susana could be seen as Titans involved in their titanic journey, regardless of the mere mortals or half-mortals who block their essential being, and the endless sufferings and movements of the living, dead, or not-dead is similar enough to stories of the Greek and Roman afterlife. But this work feels essentially Latin/Hispanic in contrast to the others, where Latin and Hispanic issues seem to be largely, though not entirely, the material but not the pattern from which they are made. Obviously, this is an over-statement meant to highlight a point.

However I may want to feel about it, I don’t believe in ghosts, or that I could run home and remind my—waiting—dead spouse to put in a good word when she gets to Heaven for Ines Villalponda. In English there is only one term for the verb “to be;” in Spanish there are two: one for essential characteristics, and one for temporary states. Death, like Life, is considered a temporary condition; this seems simultaneously Christian, primordial, and similar to what some contemporary physicists and scientists hold to be possible, if not exactly true. “Pedro Paramo” is full of strange vitality and horrifying permanence, and, for me, its real and magnificent force is that it is entirely serious, earnest, and desperately huma

The Invention of Morel / Adolfo Bioy Casares

2010-02-28T21:33:00.001-05:00

My initial response to “The Invention of Morel” by Adolfo Bioy Casares was a desire to defend it. As the work of a gifted 26-year old writer, “Morel” is extremely impressive, even powerful. I found it marvelously clever, at times deeply perceptive and very funny, and also prescient regarding technology and science, and contemporary societies’ obsession with these related features as carriers of the ideas of salvation and redemption, and the un-life-like aspects of life itself (such as the “consciousness” of chemical processes and certain machine functions). I was both tired of the tedious recursiveness and moved by the over-stuffed emptiness. I did not find it satisfying, but I do not believe Bioy intended that particular effect. It is haunting.

It would be unfair and, I believe, incorrect to compare Bioy with Borges, though it is hard not to. Borges comes from a full world and describes the myriad ways in which totality/the incomprehensible expresses itself and in so doing connects to the living, and the living to each other; Bioy represents a stunted and fractured dystopia, alienated beyond the possibility of—or belief in—connection; sentimentality is something to aspire toward, so lost or inconceivable is any greater image of emotion.

Compare Bioy’s country-club set eternally eating the same lunch after a morning of tennis (in real-life or simulacra) to Borges’ character Pierre Menard. Menard chooses to devote himself to an incredibly rigorous, albeit apparently (and necessarily) absurd, task that can have meaning only to him, through his own eyes, which Borges shows the reader via the narrator’s incomprehension. Morel’s companions never do anything unexpected—they are already mere conventions.

Bioy’s creation (and that of his narrator) is, however, not unrelated to Menard’s (certainly the title is a pun intended to point to an “entire” invention of the narrator’s mind). The narrator is, of course, a writer and his dilemma is creation itself, alienation and the isolation and justification of existence, and the question of whether there is any reality apart from that isolation and acts of creation. What Menard and Bioy’s narrator are doing is essentially the same: creating something that can show—especially to themselves—that they are not just reflections or reiterations of some ancient dream or act of chance—that they live. If making oneself into a simulacra can demonstrate that one actually “was”, it is the same as Menard.

In Bioy’s world, Malthus’ prediction has unfortunately proven to be un-true, or too slow: over-population does not necessarily “create” the checks of war and famine, or these checks cannot fulfill their purpose, and the result is misery and a world that is over-crowded such that there is no place, no order for anyone to fit into, except in the tiresome tyranny of clubs and institutions where individuality is entirely lost; indeed almost all relations seem to drain away the possibility of individual personality and liveliness. Without room or connection in the real world, they hope to find a place and partner in eternity.

Borges, The Aleph / House of Asterion

2010-02-20T12:11:00.004-05:00

At the risk of being so reductive as to be nearly meaningless, I offer a few comments about how these stories struck me. Every story seems to describe a point on a continuum that alludes, nonetheless, to all the rest: the abstract and particular in constant inescapable union through alternations that naturally entail the themes of reflections (including references), complements, and the inability of anything to fully describe its source. Everything becomes its opposite, one story proceeds from another, complicating a theme or redirecting it altogether, or falls back on itself just as it seemed to go off in an entirely new direction—which, of course, it does.

Though Borges accuses literature (and language) of being incompetent, in his hands it is anything but. A crashing and conflicted cosmos is ever at hand, pre- and post-Big Bang, simultaneously, as some physicists would agree. Emma Zunz is a marvelous contradiction/conflation of fact and point of view, both true and false at the same time, vengeful and redemptive. The Dead Man gets to live because he is already marked for death, therefore his actions do not matter (who is not marked, eventually, for death?) Flaminius Rufus realizes that he and the troglodyte (who will turn out, perhaps, to be Homer, more or less) have identical perceptions, but that they “live” in different universes: they coordinate and construct the same perceptions differently, in ways incomprehensible to each other.

I was very touched by one of the shortest stories: The House of Asterion. The progression of the story re-envisions a mythic tale and imaginatively evokes the budding awareness of a growing child. Asterion claims indifference to literature and words of any kind, but he is not entirely fulfilled in pure, marvelous, and unrelenting action and being. His favorite pastime is engagement with imagination, in which he envisions his “other” self.

Asterion is also a perfect image of the human experience: half beast, half human (drawing energy and substance from the organic element, controlling and developing its application with intelligent thought and intuition), these two forces must work together to create a whole, civilized being.

Borges marvelously involves the dissimilarities of belief and knowledge, how Asterion has come to understand that one thing in the world is singular—therefore outside the world, and alone—himself. Having been told, Asterion believes that he knows that his redeemer will come, a word he cannot (or could not previously) conceive, that corresponds to a feeling he has: weariness at the endless multiplicity of his world, and his own solitariness. He yearns for reduction--a return to the simple innocence of the un-self-conscious world: the garden of Eden, or, further, immersion back into the god-head itself.

Though he is “ready” for his redeemer, Asterion has no idea of what form it might take. This shapeless readiness without pre-figuration is an essential element of redemption. He gives himself to Theseus, and we cannot know if he was wrong. Did Theseus slay the minotaur or did the minotaur find redemption in Theseus?

The Forest

2010-01-30T23:46:00.001-05:00

I love the forest—the smell of eucalyptus, the sound of bird wings rustling into silence like a deck of cards shuffled in one hand, and the scattered shimmer of light: long, bright blind fingers reading their way across the moss-covered floor. She is at my side, or I at hers—either way we are together.

Harder and harder, we pedal up the hill and turn to the right, but the bicycles veer off to the left, into the courtyard of a beautiful church, long abandoned.

We enter the open door. The floor is checkered in huge black and white tiles that slough fine, grey dust in long narrow mounds that look like rows of curving dunes on a sea-less shore. An elevated pulpit curls out from the sculptured wall like a pale orchid blooming on the side of a rock. I climb the winding stairs and step onto the little balconied stage whose floor is a jumble of broken slats.

In praise, jubilation, or mere readiness, my arms shoot up from my sides, pointing to the windows and choir that are not there.

“Look! Here I can be myself,” she calls out to me from the center of the darkness below.

Peeling off her clothes, she crawls onto a low wooden crate. Her whole body glows like a jellied candy held up to the sun. She brushes the back of her hand against the nape of her neck, lifting her dark hair in a long arc that spills back over her shoulders. Her arm descends, unfolding outward into another arc, finally pointing to a painting framed in gold—it is a landscape of the same forest just outside the church.

Her shadow rolls across the floor, up the wall, and settles into the shape of a dark doorway leading into the painting of the forest. Entering this doorway, I see the stairs straight ahead, running deep into the moist red soil, farther and farther from the last glimmering light that quickly disappears behind thick branches and masses of bruise-black leaves.

The darkness bristles with gunfire. I lift my rifle toward the enemy hiding behind the huge fallen oak. My aim is sure. One by one each of them startles upward and pirouettes to one side before tumbling forward over the dead tree, like a puppet whose strings have been suddenly cut by a sharp, swift breeze or the silver edge of an outstretched wing.

“You cannot win,” the last one calls out, already dead.

I lift my hand to check my cards. The ace of diamonds slowly turns from red to black.

How will I explain, and to whom, that it is still the ace of diamonds. I want to check the hearts to see if they too are black, or if the spades and clubs are covered in blood, but the alarm rings out: the castle’s on fire. It’s time to leave—run over the dark lawn, through the colorless shrubs. I must scream and yell—call for help as if I mean it.

Outside the beautiful gate, five men walk toward me, unarmed except for long coats with high velvet collars. Across the square in the building on the corner she is waiting, and something to eat is laid out on a table. From there it is a short walk back to the forest.

Recipes

2010-01-30T23:24:00.002-05:00

The grandmother liked to sit at the foot of the long walnut table in the dining room at her daughter’s house, in the chair closest to the door. She liked to come and go as she pleased, constantly threatening to arrive or disappear in a rhythm all her own, punctuated by the jingling keys always in her hand. This freedom was a luxury she had come to know only late in life and, among the unexpected joys of widowhood, gave the most pleasure.

Perhaps she should have been a lion-tamer, a white-collar criminal, or a card-shark in an old frontier town. A small, comfortable life in southern California had allowed her only to be bossy, and invariably correct—if not also often wrong.

Among her family, conversation was almost entirely unknown. So unlike herself, her descendants resembled sea urchins or beautiful, pale underwater corals, crusted around the edge of the dark table. As if moved by an invisible current, they seemed to sway and interact in arbitrary and impersonal patterns that described the merely physical laws of cause and effect—attraction and repulsion—more common to plants than to people. They nibbled at life, like goldfish, or pigeons endlessly pecking at one dry spot or another on an empty sidewalk, too stupid or never hungry enough to move on.

If Julie was to become one of them, she too would have to learn to meander in the slow-motion selvage of purposelessness, whatever she might actually think. Paul’s grandmother was at the center of this universe, not so much because of the power of her attraction or force, but for the laziness of all the others, who circled in predictable orbits, like marbles around the rim of a big platter. It didn’t really matter if there was anything at the center, but for the sake of form, as an idea.

“We had a wonderful dinner last night at Café Verdi—linguini with lobster and saffron sauce.” Julie put her hand on Paul’s shoulder as she spoke to his grandmother. She was only trying to be polite. Of course, these people could be crowding around her little kitchen table whenever they want, if she marries Paul. The grandmother rustled her pearls, planning the attack she could neither admit nor resist.

“A million years ago, I used to cook lobsters. Finally, I couldn’t stand the noise.”

Not known for her prowess in the kitchen, the grandmother’s idea of cooking included mashing fresh strawberries and whipping heavy cream for pastries that came in a box from a bakery. Anything to which she applied heat experienced a transformation far more alchemical than culinary and produced relics rather than meals.

For Julie, cooking was also little more than a bothersome concept: she subsisted on steamed zucchini, dressing-less salad, and English Breakfast tea. She was better read, and much less daring than the grandmother, and believed that the lobsters must have made some terrible screech as they were plunged into the boiling water.

“Is it a high-pitched sound? It can’t go on for that long, can it?”

“No, dear… it’s the tapping.”

“Tapping?”

“Yes, you just can’t imagine.” The grandmother repositioned her eyeglasses, like a gunner setting her sights. “Everyone loves to eat lobsters, but no one thinks about the cook who first has to get them all into the oven and then must listen to their relentless tapping on the glass of the oven door, until they’re cooked. Silence is the only way to know they’re done.”

Was she simply lying? Was it possible that, from cruelty or kindness, no one had ever countered this woman and told her how lobsters are cooked? Paul must have heard this story a million times, but his face was as pure and blind as a crystal paperweight. He looked straight ahead at the ugly credenza loaded with china dogs, and his shoulder dipped slightly, away from her hand.

“What are your other favorite recipes?”

Paul’s mother finally spoke, “Who wants more iced tea?” The grandmother rattled her keys.

Chekhov & Marx: the Riddle of "A Woman's Kingdom"

2009-06-07T23:08:00.001-04:00

Chekhov’s stories and plays transcend any single point of view or system of analysis. Much, however, can be gained from the application of a particular lens toward organizing a pattern of understanding and focusing details of content and structure, attitude and atmosphere. A “Marxist” lens applies in many ways, from the simplest fundamental agreements in both men’s observations of their complicated and fast-changing world, to a deeper and more enigmatic probing of how this ideological mechanism operates at all levels of existence, especially through the choices and actions of the individual. For both Marx and Chekhov alienation is the primary effect of the reigning system of capitalism and it is characterized by volatile and shattering contradictions that result in suffering.

Many of Chekhov’s titles appear at first to highlight in a literal sense some obvious aspect of what the stories describe. Afterward, the seemingly straightforward title can be understood as a contradiction and comment on the previous understanding and its inherent assumptions, becoming the instantiation of an entirely new and different point of view.

For example, in “The Russian Master,” Nikitin is master in name only—simply from marrying a girl with a substantial dowry. He is not a master within his profession, of any of his slighter interests, or of the wife he thought he controlled. He briefly imagines himself to be the author of his own fleeting happiness. By the end of the story he is so little master of himself that he begs to be overwhelmed by something that would render him into a better person—by which he means relieved of his suffering.

Chekhov repeatedly refers to Nikitin as acting and appearing young—too young. It is a device to hide the character’s immaturity in plain view, Nikitin’s concept of sufferingis also too young—immature—he is as yet unable and unwilling to comprehend or instantiate the idea of suffering except through external conditions, Nikitin stands at the great threshold of Chekhov’s rich cosmos, ready to tke the first steps in once he sees the pointless contradiction of blaming the world for being itself.

Olenka, the “Darling” of the story of the same name, is in fact a vampire—sucking the life out of those she claims to adore, taking on their attributes of character and interest as the metaphoric stolen blood courses refreshingly through her own body. Her ‘goodness’ is entirely self-serving; she is destructive primordial unconsciousness. She never suffers; it is those upon whom she settles her draining gaze who wither away and die.

“A Woman’s Kingdom” will turn out to be anything but for Anna Akimovna, the young and beautiful heiress who discovers the true nature of the world she appears to own and the painful limits of her ability to make demands of life or of herself.

In each case, title and story are much more than merely ironic. Reality itself is turned on its head. The reader’s awakened consciousness, not a proverbial happy or sad outcome, is the goal of Chekhov’s masterful efforts. A conventional ending is never possible. Chekhov exploits the very idea of convention and ordinariness and does so with characters and settings so seemingly unexceptional that this very aspect is the means by which the extraordinary is hidden in plain sight. The stories articulate the contradictions, uncertainty and arbitrariness of the foundations of what is perceived as real and meaningful, illuminating Marx’s contention that the perception of reality is the result of the social relations of a given time expressed through that era’s mode of production. These social relations are what Anna Akimovna cannot overcome. She, like everyone, is caught in the alienation that makes each of them a commodity and player in the game of social reality, simultaneously sincere and false.

In Marx’s description and prognosis for the capitalist system, an increasing few, like Anna Akimovna, own and control the means and materials of production. The worker is separated from the meaningful pursuit of work related to his/her own existence, environment, personal needs and individual abilities; s/he becomes a means to an end. Reduced to a wage earner, the worker’s value resides in the value of his/her labor; surplus value—production and profit beyond the necessary amount to maintain life—is the property of the capitalist. No matter how much product the laborer makes, s/he earns no more, though earning less is certainly possible and likely.

It is in the interest and within the ability of the capitalist to increase the amount of production by improving the system of production—specialization and technology—in which s/he is willing to invest. This, however, invariably results in the ultimate decrease of the exchange value of the product made and a decrease in the wages earned by the laborer. As Marx predicted, the result is increasingly violent alternations of plenty and want, ever more unevenly distributed. The only things shared by all under this system are alienation and the loss of personal expression and freedom. Chekhov is clear in his depiction of these ruinous forces running rampant through all levels of society.

By the end of the 19th century conditions were such that it was already evident that Marx’s assessment of the capitalist system was correct in his description of its failure to address the spiritual, political and economic needs of a rapidly increasing and vastly more interconnected modern population.

Chekhov saw in his own family the entire spectrum from boom to bust, the exceedingly uneven distribution of the few benefits and enormous losses. His grandfather and father were serfs, his father had managed to purchase his freedom prior to Alexander II’s Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861 (Chekhov was thereby born “free” in 1860); the father became briefly a successful lower middle-class shop merchant. Yet before Chekhov had completed High School his father had gone bankrupt and fled to Moscow to avoid creditors. From an early age, Chekhov would spend the rest of his life supporting himself and his family with the proceeds from his writing. Independent of the errors Chekhov’s father may have made to contribute to his own ruin, the system itself was proving to be anything but a dream come true. The volatility of the markets predicted by Marx had encouraged many factory owners to torch their own establishments in order to collect insurance money and offset losses from speculation. Before the glistening benefits of mass-production, the wide distribution of products and education to improve life had time even to begin to tarnish, the system was already in decline.

In “A Woman’s Kingdom,” Anna Akimovna already knows that the industrial empire created by her uncle and overseen by her father is falling to pieces under her tenure, though not specifically from her neglect or personal error—she still employs the same managers as her uncle and father to operate the factory. But they are mostly corrupt and she neither knows about nor likes the business from which she derives her enormous income; everything about it is abhorrent to her. More and more money is spent each year on the maintenance of the workers’ lives and living quarters, yet whose sorry lot nonetheless continues to deteriorate.

In this detail Chekhov resonates with the Marxist belief that this system itself cannot prosper and endure. Within this story is the ironic detail that the only representative group that thrives and endures are the Chalikovs, the impoverished unemployed clerk/charlatan/beggar, his numerous progeny and yet again pregnant wife. Had Chekhov lived longer he might have written of Chalikov’s eventual victorious emergence as a financial services scam artist or some other of the forms of business characters made possible at the ragged margins of the destructive course of capitalism.

Ostensibly, “A Woman’s Kingdom” centers upon Anna Akimovna’s awakened desire for love and a family of her own—the kingdom she desires is the realm of the hearth, not the huge industrial enterprise of which she is mistress by the accident of inheritance. Regretfully, she imagines other women her own age from more modest backgrounds who are happily exhausted and abundantly fulfilled in the loving work of raising children; she does not consider the one-sided and idealistic viewpoint entailed in this dream. A chance meeting reveals a man, Pimenov, upon whom she can project her fantasies of simple and uncomplicated romance, but he is far beneath her station. In fact, he is a foreman at the factory she owns. Over the course of two days—the day before and, principally, Christmas Day and its “two” dinners—she will test the limits of her resolve and the world’s compliance and will end empty-handed and alone, despite all her wealth and privilege. Several compromises will be offered to the terms she dictates, but it will be she who cannot say yes to life, who cannot imagine a life outside of the conventions that she obeys without believing in.

Chekhov employs his usual cunning in introducing Anna Akimovna in the middle of a quandary that subtly suggests that we sympathize with her plight. She is young, attractive, rich and idle; she is not without awareness or conscience, yet her actions never correspond to what she presumably knows to be true and right. Chekhov constantly contrasts characters and situations to amplify the mystifying uncertainty and violent oscillations that correspond to the manifestation of alienation within oneself.

Early in the story Anna Akimovna looks down from her window on the numerous factory workers, bareheaded in the snow-filled courtyard of her palatial house, pleading her forgiveness. These employees were fired by her manager for absenteeism. Anna Akimovna is too ashamed to go out to them and instead lets them be driven away like dogs, into the darkness and cold. Later, in her widowed and childless aunt’s downstairs domain within the huge house, she will participate in the charade of censure for the drunken driver whom the aunt will pretend to dismiss and then quickly forgive and re-integrate into the familial feudal realm of the lower floor—all done with a pointless wink to Anna as the true sovereign of the new order. Yet she has had no say, one way or the other.

In the description of the house itself Chekhov subtly incarnates the contrasting social orders. The vibrant remnant of the feudal, integrated past lives out its last glimmerings in the downstairs quarters where the old aunt resides with a cozy and populous entourage within a strictly defined hierarchy. The palatial upper rooms were originally built and furnished only for use as an entertaining stage for special guests and the social scenarios that are part of the script of the successful life of a wealthy capitalist. In these glittering and sumptuous upper rooms Anna Akimovna now lives, alone with her servants and chef.

Chalikov and his family live far away in a poor old house divided into numerous overcrowded apartments, reminiscent of the humble world into which Anna Akimovna was born. Chance and fate brought her early in life to the palatial house and her role as mistress. She cannot justify her two realms, she longs for the simplicity she imagines was present in her humble past, yet is entirely a creature and product of her position and wealth.

Chekhov creates a stunning opposition in the characters of Chalikov and Anna Akimovna’s lawyer, Lysevich, one of the principal guests at her French Upstairs dinner. Both are devious; both lie; both want money. Ultimately it is Chalikov’s style that offends Anna Akimovna; he is cloyingly ingratiating and too knowing to play his part as supplicant innocently and well. Despite the actual reality of his need she ends up not giving him the large sum of cash that has happenstancely fallen into her hands at the opening of the story. Instead, she gives the money to Lysevich, who is independently wealthy and has no need for the money, yet asks for it in a manner that is subtly humiliating to Anna Akimovna, implying that it is she who has been cruel and neglectful. Ultimately it is Lysevich’s style that pleases Anna Akimovna, and she pays up knowing it will contribute toward nothing of worth.

One of Marx’s contentions about the lives of all under a system of alienation is that the final redoubt of action devolves to the animal necessities: eating, drinking and the acts of reproduction—sacred or profane. Chalikov is always eating or bringing more impoverished and needy souls into the world; Lysevich is a glutton, though only for better cuisine; Anna Akimovna is consumed with a desire to express her true feminine nature, but not willing to pay the price. In all of Anna Akimovna’s tiny, glittering realm no one can generate a literal future: there are no children. The guests at the upstairs dinner are old or impotent disinterested men; the women at the downstairs dinner are also old and well past the prime of life and the few men are drunkards or servants. What Anna Akimovna’s class is good at bringing into the world are the products and displays of culture. Though this is not without meaning, it is not what she actually desires. Anna Akimovna knows that it will be her fate to fail at her last attempt to enter into the continuum of life.

Pimenov becomes the object of her re-awakening. Chekhov shows how this man alone among all the other characters has managed to retain some hold on his own integrity, the integrity that Marx declares is nearly if not entirely impossible to maintain in the awful distortion of economic exploitation. Chekhov refers often to Pimenov’s great physical strength—presumably an emblem of his potential to fulfill Anna Akimovna’s feminine desire, but his greatest strength is seen in the clockworks, watches and tools neatly and lovingly preserved in his simple room. These are the symbols of his re-unification with self, work he does from love and interest and not solely for someone else’s profit. It is not facetious or for show, as with Chalikov and Lysevich, when he tells Anna Akimovna that for her he will make an exception and offers to repair her elegant watch.

In this sense Pimenov is “rich” and Anna Akimovna is “poor” because the supposedly valuable treasure and commodities that compose her world have no exchange value for that which she actually desires. It goes without saying that, in this story, Pimenov’s humble worthiness is not to be rewarded and that Lysevich’s elegantly entertaining unworthiness is promptly, and handsomely, paid for.

At the downstairs dinner an old crone called the Beetle along with all the other women lament the waste of Anna Akimovna’s youth, beauty and wealth, explaining how she might have the experience she desires, even if that should include marrying a simple common man like Pimenov. In a short-lived and convulsive rush of false freedom Anna Akimovna consents to the Beetle’s offer as matchmaker.

The great sadness of this story is that Anna Akimovna is not blind to Pimenov as a man; it is in considering him as a husband that she cannot keep her strength of will and all her money is of no avail. Pimenov is not acceptable to those who inhabit her world, both the born residents like Lysevich and the other upstairs guests or even her own servants, who co-operate with the punishing system of appearances and raise the price of her desire beyond her understanding.

It is her own simpering butler Misha who acts as tutor to his wayward mistress who momentarily forgets the rules of the game and imagines that she might be able to find happiness in a union with the man she imagines her own father might have heartily approved. Misha “reminds” Anna Akimovna that Pimenov would be a frightening sight at table among the highborn guests, trying to figure out exactly how to hold a dinner fork properly. Surely, it was all a good joke, he cajoles—but his tone is not really that of a question. Yes, of course, is her only possible reply: a joke.

This leads to the strangest and most startling realization, both from the perspective of Marx and of Chekhov. Why is it that Anna Akimovna is so powerless in the pursuit of happiness? In Section 4 of the first volume of “Capital”, Marx describes the extraordinary and enigmatic power of commodities within a capitalist society. It is almost identical to the misleadingly seeming ordinary aspect of Chekhov’s stories:

“A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”

As Marx describes, the fetish power of commodities is not located in our minds but in the social relations themselves comprised within capitalist society. Therefore, despite knowing in our minds that a commodity has no intrinsic power or value, we not only act “as if” it does, but must honor that known misperception—we cannot separate ourselves from it as if it were a mere idea any more than a fish could imagine living on land—because our participation within the dynamic of the entire system is that from which we derive our sense of reality, our sense of self.

Marx offers an “explanation” as to why these characters cannot act in their own best interest and it is far more potent and mysterious than the force of social pressure in the common or naïve interpretation. It is a powerlessness and blindness inherent to the very “rules” of the operating system. These characters are intrinsically divided within themselves owing to their very participation in a particular unavoidable cultural interpretation of “reality” which Chekhov so masterfully weaves into an illuminating and sorrowful work of art.

Blue

2009-06-05T09:53:00.001-04:00

When I feel ‘blue’ I wonder what shade it might be.

In a museum, in front of a small immaculate landscape painting, a man I did not know turned to me and said, “In Russian, we have more than forty distinct and separate words describing the color you call ‘blue’. Other people think we are very sad, but Mother Nature makes these words in snow and ice and mist, water and sky. Look!”

Why me? Despite the paltry offering in my native tongue of words describing blue, I know all too well what the Russian is talking about. And, frankly, he is a little sullen, if not altogether sad, but this I also understand, or think I do.

I have excuses or reasons for why I linger so long in all things blue: it is easier on the eyes and there are more colors (and moods) with blue than without; their variety is a delight to discern.

A color wheel is like an upside-down arch; its keystone is the truest blue, betraying no tendency toward yellow or red. Two arms reach up from the blue core, one becomes green on its way to yellow, the other turns purple midway toward its red palm. Above, a narrow slice of blue-free color stretches from pure red to pure yellow, an orange filament of pure joy whose entire expanse is one third of the total wheel. Two thirds of all colors contain some amount of blue; too much of life to ignore.

As night follows day, blue is rest and repose from the exhausting and gorgeous delirium of the brightness that burns out fast, yet lingers in traces like shimmering light on a watery surface, the glimmering turnings of shiny fishes or the fluorescent glissandos of unnamed creatures burrowing deep into the couch of vibrant darkness.

The Kitchen

2009-04-11T18:31:00.007-04:00

* * * * * * *
“…angels have no memory...” “Margaret, he has no eyes, no eyes!” “They’re closed.” “Do they have feet; do they need them; his wings don’t move; how will he get around to do his miracles? How will he know where to go if he can’t see?” “Roberta, they’re angels; they just know.” “Why isn’t there a button to bring back the color?” “Stop it, Bertie; it’s an OLD movie; it’s IN black and white.” “Margaret, I can see that, but why isn’t there a button to bring back the color?” “It never had color.” “What does that mean? How could it never have color?” “Because its black and white; now stop it, I can’t hear.” “How are we supposed to believe he’s flying if his wings don’t move?” “Bert, it’s a MOVIE.” “So?” "…to us there is no evil…” “In old movies they don’t have color and there are lots of things they don’t show.” “…we love everyone, equally…” “Why, Margaret?” “I don’t know.” “Well, did they paint everything white before they made the movie? Is that because it’s an angel movie?” “Yes, that must be it. Now will you stop?’’

* * * * * * *
I didn’t really mean ‘right now’ when I said we could bake cookies; I meant ‘someday’. I was hungry—not enough to go downstairs. Bert wouldn’t be stopped. She is a short, scrawny, almost-eight year old, quick and resilient as a tiny steel spring.

At the green marble island in the middle of the kitchen she is a mad scientist, or maybe a pale pigmy conductor, arranging her deaf and dumb orchestra. She stands on the little pink step stool dad made for her in his weekend woodshop class. Bowls to the right; both bottles of that awful organic goat milk and a tin of olive oil in front with all the butter and eggs; and sugar, flour, oatmeal, cornmeal, corn flakes and shredded wheat in a clutter to the left, scattered with raisins, lemons and jars of jelly and jam. Bertie waves tireless, coaxing signals to the uncomprehending boxes, bottles and jars, certain they will become something if only she tries harder or figures out the magic sign.

* * * * * * *
Except for her red sneakers and red hair, everything Bertie has in the entire world is pink. I love pink, though not so bright. It looks very good on me, not like on her. I mix it with white or navy blue, or beige. Maybe, for me, it’s really an accent. It looks more elegant that way, more attractive and, well, I am a blond and, obviously, that makes a difference.

What can she do with red hair and skin so pale and fine? Whenever I bring Bertie along to the market I try to keep her away from the fish counter. Under the fluorescent lights she looks just like the uncooked shrimp and, then, she is so small. It's ridiculous, I know. Bertie is too short to see the shrimp herself and she wouldn't think anything or care, but I worry that other people might notice. Her eyes are magnificent and scary: deep turquoise, and splintery like the inside of diamonds and bright as her hair, which usually sticks straight out, all over, very soft and thin; and though I love it—the way it feels—of course, it will never work when she is my age; she will have to do something.

“Blood is thicker than water, Margaret.” She likes this kind of phrase, but, to me, it makes no sense. Who doesn’t know that blood is thicker than water? And what does she mean? She is too young to ‘mean’ anything. Blood is blood and water is water, and you can’t be a human being and not need both.

“You don’t put olive oil in cookies, Roberta, and we don’t need all these eggs or the milk, put some of this back—and no cereal.”

“Margaret, what do we need? What?” It is a reasonable question, or should be; but it makes me angry—for a moment. We should be looking in a cookbook or something. I can’t remember ever making cookies; people do, I know. I must have, sometime, with my mother. I’m not sure how that makes me feel.

* * * * * * *
“What can I do for you today, Roberta?” “If you don’t know, Mr. Phillips, then why am I here? Waste not, want not.” “No, I mean, you know, Bertie, what would—is there anything you’d like to talk about today?” “Nothing, nothing, nothing.” “All right, we can just sit here, together—I like your sweater, Roberta. Are those flowers you’re drawing?” “No………..They are birds. On little strings. That are very strong. And they are trying to fly away as fast as they can. That’s just what they do.”

“Roberta, I got a special pillow for you, it’s pink.” “I have eyes.” “Yes, Bertie, you do; and I have eyes, too, so I can see you still like pink. It’s a pretty pillow—don’t you think? And you can take it with you or leave it here, if you like.” “I’ll leave it here. I have pillows at home.” “What are you reading?” “A book.” “Yes. Of course. It has a pretty cover; what’s it about?” “Places…Far away places.” “Is there some place you’d like to go, Bertie?” “I want to go home.” “Well. Yes, of course. And it’s all right, Bertie, if you actually want to leave… you don’t have to stay. I’ll call your mother, she’ll be glad to come get you; you don’t have to stay.” “No, I…it’s OK. Mr. Phillips, I don’t… know, I mean they’re shopping. For clothes. Margaret needs new clothes for school and they like to shop.” “Your mother won’t mind at all; neither will your sister.” “I know.” “Margaret is going away soon—to school, to college.” “Everyone says so. I’m going to school too.” “Yes, but Margaret is going away to school-- she won't be living at home, and she won’t be back until Thanksgiving. You’ll miss her, won’t you?” “She’s so much older now. Her hair is so long she looks just like the picture of her mother and daddy.” “Yes, Margaret looks very much as her mother did.”

* * * * * * *
“Blood is thicker than water, Margaret, blood IS thicker than water.” She wants to reach over and flip on the water—to prove her point, I guess—but she can’t without moving the step stool, and, really, that would lose all the effect. She looks over to the sink, and starts laughing when she sees that I notice.

“All right, honey, it’s OK. Put the jelly on top, but make a little dent first.” “You won’t like them.” “Yes I will.” “It’ll look like blood, Margaret. The cookies will look like they’re bleeding.” “Ewww, Bert, that’s awful, it’s raspberry, not blood.” “It still looks a lot like blood, Margaret, really.” “They’ll taste like raspberry; like little linzertortes.” “Linzerwhats?” “Cookies, Roberta, just little cookies, with cute red dots on them, just like you.”

* * * * * * *
“But I don’t look like anyone. Not daddy or mom or Margaret.” “Roberta, you look like you, and Margaret didn’t look so much like her mother when she was a girl your age.” “But she had blond hair.” “Yes.” “Mr. Phillips, how do you know?” “Bertie, I’ve told you. I knew your father before he was married to Margaret’s mother.” “I know she’s dead, but where is that, where is she?” “I would say heaven but you never like that word, or, that’s what you said last week.” “How can you believe it when the angels never move their wings and they don’t have feet?” “I see what you mean, I do. I never thought of it that way, but it doesn’t mean you can’t believe in heaven. Where do the little birds you draw go?” “Far away, far away.” “Maybe it’s the same.” “But they have very, very, very strong strings so they can’t go that far away, they can’t, even if they do.”

* * * * * * *
“Of course I want to go to school, Roberta. It’ll be fun, and everybody has to; how else will I get a job? When you’re older you’ll understand. And you’ll go away to school too.” “That’s not it, Margaret. That’s not it at all, not at all, nothing.” “What then? Where’s the timer, Bertie? We don’t want them to burn. I’m not going away forever and I’m not even going that far.” “But you won’t be here, Margaret, here. HERE.” “Yes I will, when I come back.” “But how?” “I’ll drive.” “No Margaret, I don’t mean that. Did your mother ever come back… just for a visit?”

“Honey, they don’t have anything to do with each other. I am going to school—to college, Roberta—I’ll be back, you’ll see. And…I know this sounds terrible—I was younger than you are now—but, I don’t remember my mother. I remember us. She didn’t live here, with us, with daddy and me. I mean, mom didn’t live here then either, well, obviously, you know, and you weren’t even born. She did live here—my mother—she must have. I guess she was in the hospital most of the time. And when I look at the picture of her and daddy it’s strange, more like me, older, with some boy who looks like daddy, or only just a little. She never looked like that picture—maybe when she was young. She didn’t have any hair. And it’s awful, Bert, and we shouldn’t talk about this at all and you shouldn’t think about this. I don’t know what to say. She put her arm around me, or, well it wasn’t… daddy had to help her.

She gave me the gold barrette, the one in the picture. She tried to put it in my hand. It almost fell. Her fingernails were too long, and sharp. Maybe it was at the hospital—the floor, everything, everything was white. She was sitting up in bed, very high. It must have been morning because it was so bright, the window behind her, the barrette. She told me to look underneath; she said it was our names: 'Anne' and 'Margaret', but I hadn't known her name was Anne; she was my mother. The letters were carved so thin and small, but they sparkled in the light and I could read them. She looked at me for a long time—I mean, I think it was a long time. I can see her now. But it has nothing to do with mom or going to school or you. You shouldn’t think about this, sweetheart. I’m sorry I’m going away, I mean, not really. You’ll see. It will be all right.”

On Chekhov: The Russian Master

2009-04-11T18:29:00.002-04:00

On 'The Russian Master'

By the end of Chekhov’s “The Russian Master”, Nikitin is disgusted, essentially, by the same people, situations and things that he found desirable, touching, endearing and amusing—beautiful, even—at the start of the story. His only constant dislike is for the ‘pet’ animals at the Shelestov family estate. One can only wonder whether his disdain for these creatures doesn’t stem from their inferior ability to dissemble, delude and pretend.

The banality Nikitin claims to deplore to the point of escape was present from the start. The first indications we have of his beloved Masha, the youngest Shelestov daughter, are of a petty, controlling, demanding and jealous young woman entirely fulfilled and consumed within the repetitive routines and most basic patterns of a privileged but simple, mundane provincial domestic life.

Nikitin truly believes himself to be in love Masha; though this is entirely possible and initially simple enough to imagine, Chekhov embroiders this romantic idea with an abundance of contradictions that are anything but innocent.

Out riding on a lovely summer afternoon, Masha’s first comment to her husband to be (he alone, it seems, does not guess the certainty of his future status) is a command about how to control his horse and advice not to take its demeanor seriously—that the beast is only ‘pretending’. Masha is as simple and uncomplicated as the other household pets. Though she and Nikitin appear on the surface to be polar opposites, they share a common strategy toward life of ignoring unwelcome evidence.

No amount of information informs Nikitin’s ideas of world or self; “...anything that happened to clash with his own convictions he found naïve and touching.” Both Masha’s father and Nikitin’s friend Ippolit warn him about the seriousness and changes that marriage entails; he hears the words, but not what they mean.

Nikitin thinks that he lives by the laws of logic and boasts that he is the creator of his own happiness and, therefore, its rightful possessor. The minute that reality and the limitations of shared life impinge on his fantasies of freedom and potent creation, he nosedives into an about face and becomes the absolute victim of the dreadfulness around him. He imagines himself to be consumed with a burning desire to become a factory worker and “to exhaust himself with work, to suffer.” Nikitin believes that a laborer treasures every kopek he earns simply because he is a worker, not because he is able, independent of social status, to appreciate his circumstance.

As for work, he has still been unable or unwilling to find the energy, effort or direction even to read Lessing, so how could he actually enter into labor when he can barely get up off the sofa? Nikitin also does not consider that he need not go looking for the suffering he desires; he has it already. He longs for ‘something’ to overpower him, make him oblivious of his own existence, indifferent to his personal happiness with all its limitations, and yet he reserves the right to select this power, thus sentencing himself in his own pettiness.

Chekhov creates and examines with clinical clarity; he seems often to be weighing how different people are from objects, to what extent they are active or passive within the drama of life and free of the overwhelming realities of mere chemical processes, chance and the Siren call of illusion. Were Nikitin merely a self-deluding fortune hunter, our interest would wane, but he is not. Rather than viewing him as a scheming materialist, one can also see him through the lens of science: osmosis.

The poverty, struggle and isolation of Nikitin’s early life are like a dry sponge immersed in the vital waters of the Shelestov family life. From a scientific standpoint, no matter what he were to tell himself were his reasons or how much he might prefer one liquid to another, he cannot stop the process of absorption that will continue until the sponge is entirely saturated. Then it may loathe its soggy state and entertain fantasies about being dry again, as Nikitin ultimately imagines his final salvation in a trip to Moscow, alone, to visit the poor old rooms he inhabited when he was a struggling student.

By the story’s end it is perfectly clear that we can have no idea of what, exactly, Nikitin is ‘master’. He is self-deluding, though not entirely in the dark. He can make effort until he cannot; he can see this, but not that; in short, he is human and subject to the paradox of a nature that is generous and destructive, entirely indifferent and absolutely selective. Chekhov would endorse work. That may be all one can attempt; certainly there will be scant results without it, but no certainties either because of it.

Re-appearance

2009-04-11T18:28:00.004-04:00

Let’s face facts: 9 times out of 10 it is simply easier to talk to dead people. First of all, they don’t care if I like them, and second, neither do I. Dead people never worry about how they’re dressed or if their hair looks better this way or that. That is, if they have any, and, really, who would notice?

Also, they never show up unless they have something to say—no one is less likely to be interested in killing time. Being dead is itself a full-time job. Just ask any old person-- Where did the day go? Time flies by faster and faster; they become slower and slower. No matter how bad it may seem, it is much easier and far less time-consuming to get around and do the simplest chores when at least you’re still alive.

On the other hand, it’s true: dead people can be difficult to understand, even if you know who they think they’re talking to. It only makes sense that I should try a little harder and make the extra effort.

X must have become restless about being dead. He always liked being on his own so, naturally, it took a while. And it wasn’t exactly that he missed being alive—his marriage was killing him, but then so was so much else: high blood pressure, sclerotic sinuses, achy joints, people who rang the doorbell. Everything, really. She was definitely part of the problem and one of the reasons we’d grown apart from the start. But that’s not fair of me, their thing began long before we met, and it wasn’t as if he’d been poisoned or murdered: X died of Old Age (and after a very good dinner).

By the time he died I wasn’t paying too much attention to him and hadn’t been for a long time. I was far away. Of course, after he died, X and I could have pretended the way most people do, but, in this regard, we were too much alike. Hell, we both had better things to do, though when he was alive, he would wax sentimental every now and then, usually in some kind of whining rage, and a person could only wonder: what was that all about? Everything, really. He could always find some reason to run off in a huff without leaving the room. He liked being trapped almost as much as he liked being alone. Looking at him you could never tell quite where he was.

The only thing he never complained about, perhaps the only thing he truly loved without reservation, was the daily four-hour commute to work. He was in Heaven—all alone in the car, practically invisible, wrapped inside a cashmere cataract of cigarette smoke so perpetual that the windshield was thick and greasy with tar. And limitless jelly doughnuts, fresh from the little place on La Cienega Blvd. I guess that was my fault. On his own he would never have thought about ‘fresh’ jelly doughnuts, but when I mentioned it he understood the significance immediately and tried inconspicuously to jot a quick reminder in his calendar.

Almost every day, I stopped in at 3:15 a.m. on my way home to the beach from a night on the town spent mostly in recreational exercise of the horizontal variety. At the other end of the radar, on the other side of town and hours later, X had the unexpected treat of adding 20 minutes to his cherished morning drive so that he could be in line, bright-eyed, for the 7:15 a.m. batch straight from the kettle.

I had been very explicit: he would have to wait a little, so the jelly didn’t burn his tongue. The difficult calculation was determining the tiny margin in which the jelly was still warm but the pastry had not yet solidified into just another doughnut; it took skill and training. He liked things ever so just this way, but he was absent-minded. So, of course, I had to stress how important it was to start from the side with the hole or there’d be an unwelcome gusher of boiling red dye #6 jelly all over his pants and, frankly, the car was filthy enough as it was. The diabetes thing, of course, put paid to the doughnuts, but by then, I guess, the commuting was over. I had given them up after a week or two; they made my teeth ache.

To be truthful, I had forgotten about him, except at the barbershop or occasionally while looking in a store window. I’m not actually sure when I last saw him before the re-appearance; I know it was long before he died, and his heart wasn’t in it, even then. He was a bad actor and genuinely enjoyed giving a bad performance and wouldn’t dream of ‘breaking’ character. It was a charade with no clues, no other players and no end. He had chosen the role long ago and mostly it worked—for him, that is. When he wasn’t being an asshole, he had perfect manners; a little too perfect, nothing but manners. He never said anything worth listening to anymore. Maybe I had forgotten how to listen too.

There’s that time in life, oh, it feels like forever, but it isn’t, you know, or, perhaps it could be. You forget and think that what people say is what they’re saying. Stress, overwork, loneliness, the kids; I don’t know. Nothing so interesting; just something always there, in front of everything else: brighter, louder, overdue.

Looking back, I can only imagine that he wanted to apologize but didn’t know how. And it wasn’t his style to just show up and ring the bell. He knew there were reasons a person might not open the door, least of which was the dead thing. He might have thought to bring a box of candy, but he knew he’d just eat it on the way.

He was very smart, in his way, and practical. I don’t know exactly how it happened. I’m not the type to go around cleaning out closets or rummaging in the past. Well, that’s what I say. Anyway, somehow the photo turned up. Oh, it looked harmless and I have to admit: it was very clever of him. Everyone thought it was so cute and artsy: a dopey out-of-focus photo of some building downtown with one of those cookie cutter gingerbready kind of olde world peaks and one very silly tree. But no people in the picture; so, what’s it a picture of, someone asks?

Somebody else thinks it must have been taken from a bus, moving. Hmmm. Just like an Impressionist painting, said someone who doesn’t know Impressionist painting. Daubs and dots of colorless colors scattered with a zillion white speckles: jittery sunshine peeking through a clump of blackeyed green bouncing off of dirt red bricks on a grey day, or just rain on the lens? A darkish line runs up the middle, maybe it really is a tree. The left half of the photo looks like a page torn from a spiral notebook and at the bottom, loopy dents from a ballpoint pen that has run out of ink. No message, just marks from the dry tip trying to scratch something into the paper.

I turn it over. Printed on the back it says, Amsterdam, but the letters bleed into a puddle, apparently illegible to everyone but me. (Once he sent a postcard-- unsigned-- from Hong Kong; it took me the longest time to figure out who it was from.) The photo, of course, is of the building. Alive, he had never known that I had ever been there; nor I he, and, after all, there was such a long time between then and then and now. He probably never went inside, but we both had stood in the same spot, looking at the same thing, light years away.

On Chekhov: Gusev

2009-04-11T18:20:00.005-04:00

On 'Gusev'

It has been often commented that Chekhov’s stories describe “ordinary people, leading ordinary lives and failing even at that.” This is unquestionably a significant and central aspect of the cosmos that Chekhov explores in his depictions of how men and women struggle with fate and nature, society and themselves—in other words, the world. Most characters, most people, do not have the strength, wisdom and/or sheer luck to win at the game of life and it can be questioned whether Chekhov ever implies that this impossible victory matters as much as the act of trying— what he refers to always as ‘work’.

“Gusev” is a story about two characters in the infirmary of a steamship headed home, to Russia. Both men are deathly ill; otherwise, they appear to be polar opposites. Gusev is a recently discharged orderly from peasant stock whose attitude toward life is evident in his easy acceptance of obedience and service to others. His is an existence of deep feeling and simple, modest judgment. In his delirium he imagines his small village, his parents, brother, young nephew and niece; feverish reverie transports him to the vast and harsh winter landscape of home, helping to dispel the torturous heat in the claustrophobic and crowded sick-room quarters below deck in the iron-clad vessel.

The social standing of Pavel Ivanych appears uncertain at first; illness and emaciation have distorted his features and physical presence beyond ready identification. He tells Gusev that his father was a priest— an ‘honest’ one, which earned him no favors with the high and mighty. Pavel Ivanych is an intellectual—cold, harsh and judgmental. He has journeyed through life as cantankerously as possible, making enemies and arguing at every chance. Pavel Ivanych is going home to Russia to spite his friends who bade him never return; he describes himself as ‘protest personified’.

Pavel Ivanych believes that he sees all, like a hawk hovering high above the earth, and that he understands everything. To him Gusev is a pathetic dupe who, one small step ahead of death, was herded like an animal onto the ship, hidden among a group of healthy soldiers so as to keep the regiment’s doctor’s ledgers in the pink.

It turns out, however, that Pavel Ivanych has done to himself what others did to Gusev: he lied to get onto the ship, pretending to be of a lower class because he could not pay the higher fare required of ‘quality’ passengers. Pavel Ivanych thinks that, because he takes a critical attitude toward his condition, he is not really ill like Gusev and the others in the infirmary.

Pavel Ivanych tells Gusev: “You have only one life to live and it mustn’t be wronged.” This line is a key to looking at these characters from a particular point of view. Without question or surprise, by the end of the story both men, first the intellectual protester and then the obedient peasant, will be dead. “Nature does not distinguish between saint and sinner.” It is given that in a certain sense life turns out wrong; we all die. Dreams fade and realities are often mercilessly capricious and absolute. In this story and in this line, there is a different voice and another outcome, less characteristic of the tone more frequently found in many of Chekhov’s works. It is life itself that must not be wronged.

Pavel Ivanych and Gusev are testaments to a kind of authenticity. Pavel Ivanych has been true to his nature as a solitary and ethical questioner of the status quo. He has not sought advantage but, rather, the opportunity to express the life within him. Gusev has also been true to his nature as a connected and feeling supporter of the status quo (even in delirium he imagines his niece so close, so present, that she could bring him a drink and receive his gift; he worries that his brother will not care for their aging parents properly). That each man has faults only makes them more human; as exemplars of destiny they have done what they could without compromise, if not without contradiction; each has paid the price for being exactly who he is.

The story ends with Gusev’s burial at sea. Stitched up in sailcloth and weighted with iron, his body descends deep into the water. His individual life is released from its earthly wrapping and reclaimed into the cycle of life, devoured dispassionately by a roaming shark and witnessed by a shimmering chorus of silvery fishes as ecstatic as the rainbow sky high above filled with colors for which, truly, there are no names.

3 or Less

2009-02-02T23:25:00.006-05:00

Pitch black darkness. I wake up. Vast, warm darkness. Blue tint overhead. Cellphone’s dead. Clock is broken. I simply awaken. No trill binging. No shouting buzzer. No radio rattling. A restful awakening. Eyes close again. Fingers amble closer. Sweet, soft darkness.

Phone rings. (Landline still works.) Stretching into darkness.
“It’s Rob.”
“Hmmmm.”
“Meet me there.” Not a question.
“Emergency Room?”
“Yes.”
“Anything wrong?”
“No.”
“When?”
“Well, one.”
“For lunch?”
“I’ll try….but…”
“I know.”

Open drapes. Winter invades. Nothing in fridge. Breakfast is coffee. Cup is chipped. Yet it functions. Fork tines curled. Everything is damaged.

Patient Lee pleads. “Professor Lee, Speak!” Doctor Lee cares. Nurse Lee inquiring. "Who are they?" One family world? Am I trapped? Am I freed? From what? They’re not related?

Cousins, fathers, sons. Mothers, daughters, aunts. Everyone’s someone.
Desperate, Lee shouts. “Who?”

Cooking

2008-11-22T19:01:00.004-05:00

I do not cook, which is certainly not to say that I cannot cook. Obviously, this statement does not signify either that I have never cooked or that, in future and under certain circumstances, I would not perform the tasks that result in nourishment-- or its minimum approximate, sustenance-- as fashioned of two or more ingredients and altered by heat. That is my definition of cooking, allowing for one caveat: water counts only as a half-ingredient. A potato and water alone do not make vichyssoise. Besides, all food contains water, at least in its chemical nature, even “dried” food like pasta or rice, so the addition of water does not really equal the addition of another ingredient but rather the restructuring by degree of a present element.

Why so complicated, one might ask? Why so many opinions about something in which I claim not to indulge? Clearly, I have lots of thoughts and judgments about food and cooking. Leaving aside these questions and the other obvious one of why or how it is that I do not starve to death, I should amend my leading statement: I do not cook in life, but I do cook, sometimes, in my mind. There is no rocket science, per se, involved, nor any special powers of mystic transmission: long ago for a brief while I cooked a great deal and thereby learned how some things complemented each other, or not, and what happened under particular circumstances.

Unfortunately, disaster was my most reliable dish. Practically everything I made was astoundingly terrible. This sad fact was the inevitable result of then being almost constitutionally incapable of following a recipe. A kind and generous observer might have said that I had a curious mind and that would have been entirely true, though not the entire truth. I would decide to halve the sugar in a given recipe, forgetting that the prescribed amount might constitute a necessary quotient regarding the interaction of other ingredients, something besides flavor; I would “forget” to execute what, for no reason at all, I considered an unnecessary step; I would toss in extra ingredients or extend processes (“whipping” comes to mind without the beneficial association of “fluffy”) which were bound to eventuate in food that was inedible or ugly or would render a texture so awful that despite being tasty (a rare occurrence), the dish was hopelessly unacceptable.

I made many discoveries by making a huge number of mistakes. My fearless or foolish bent for creativity and novelty at least ensured that I did not make the same mistake twice, so, in a sense, I was always learning something new, if only what not to do. Then, I stopped cooking altogether and became an armchair chef, which was different from a back seat driver only in that everyone, myself included, was spared having to eat my cooking. Several friends who enjoyed spending creative and productive time in the kitchen were valiant and durable enough to bear my opining about spices added or subtracted and even more bizarre hunches about “substitution”; to everyone’s surprise my ideas were often good, as long as I was not the one putting them into effect. Cuisine became for me an abstract enterprise. I mentally altered recipes I tore out of magazines and saved in looming stacks or used as bookmarkers, for a while, until I threw them away. Eventually, freed from any active relationship with the oven or stove, I turned to gardening, of a kind.

Last spring I scattered an entire envelope of miniscule sweet basil seeds-- hundreds, maybe thousands, each black dot barely the size of a speck of dust or a particle of mist-- into a narrow plastic box dangling from my fifth floor living room windowsill that I had filled with very dubious looking high-tech potting soil. Could anything really spring to life and grow in this wad of filthy lint that appeared chemically configured even to reject moisture?

I expected nothing, or, rather, I expected to go to the nursery a month or so later when it would be warmer and to buy basil plants for the barren and forlorn box. I did remember occasionally to water the dirt, though this was a gesture that quickly lost any relationship to cause and effect and took on the vague piety and artful rhythms of an atavistic ritual that was in itself pleasing to perform at random frequency. I had almost entirely forgotten about the seeds.

I was neither a faithful nor a consistent caretaker of my modest realm of nature. Despite (or perhaps, because of) my negligence, the little aerial garden flourished beyond imagining. Bushels of intensely fragrant basil characterized by a surprising and pleasing musky undertone of wild ginger perfumed the air throughout the apartment. Inspired, I began to cook, sort of. I thought of making Sweet Basil Iced Tea. Using the crop from my field, as it were, along with water, lemon juice and sugar, someone else followed my suggestions, as I must admit I probably would not have, and the result was delicious.

Venice

2008-10-27T23:31:00.014-04:00

For more than a year, I had been working 18 or more hours a day, usually seven days a week, starting my own business and trying to keep making art at the same time. In my business, I worked with architects and interior designers, creating painted interiors—stage sets for real-life productions-- usually based to some extent on historic European and (what we rather generously referred to as) classical period styles. My fine art work was primarily drawing and painting in abstracted and geometric imagery exploring a fluid interplay of representation and symbol within a framework of architectural and landscape motives. I seemed to work all the time and my long hours were only possible because so much of both endeavors were accomplished in my studio in New York.

A scheduling delay on a large design project gave me the possibility of two very unexpected weeks off. I was exhausted and I was worried about money. But I knew that the balance due on this project would be paid, so I decided to take a recovery vacation and bought a last-minute discount ticket on Alitalia. My one splurge would be to make a reservation at the bespoke Pensione Academia in Venice. I had been working so much for so long (and, when on-site, at projects mostly in South Florida) that I didn’t stop to think that there must be a reason why I got the room on no notice and at a rate more reasonable than I had expected.

Only after the plane had landed in Milan- before dawn, of course- did I realize that it was November in Italy just as it was in New York and, though it certainly could have been warm, or at least mild, it wasn’t. Also, I had decided to go alone to a place inseparably aligned in world consciousness with romance- Casanova, Byron, sad Millie and even sadder Merton from Wings of the Dove- the practical equivalent of going out to dinner at the Rainbow Room by yourself on New Year’s Eve. I was simply too tired to care. I had decided to go to the only place I knew of where there were no cars, where life, if only for now this brief sojourn, could be lived slowly and on foot, neither in nor dodging the noisy machines that ruled the rest of the world.

I couldn’t sleep on the plane and hadn’t really slept properly in so long that I didn’t give my blurry vision, racing pulse and slow reactions any thought until I was entirely disoriented as everyone was directed, upon disembarking the aircraft, to walk across the tarmac to the terminal. I couldn't even see the building. Who knew Malpensa Airport was so small? Arctic-cold wind couldn’t budge the preposterously thick fog hulking at my feet like wads of cotton candy or a cheap special effect from a school play.

I do not remember how I got to Milan Central Station. At that point all I could feel beside the enormous burden of my own very generalized exhaustion was the precise fiery crust of the edges of my eyelids. My eyes felt like two blank targets stapled open at close range.

Someone had told me to hop on the first train- conveniently, if predictably, named after the 18th century painter, the Canaletto- to Santa Lucia Station, Venezia. Thoughtfully, since this was a spur of the moment trip, no one had bothered to suggest that it might help considerably if I learned a word or two of Italian, though I would have to negotiate at least a ticket before any train-hopping could occur.

Somehow, without uttering a single real word in any language (only a half-hearted attempt at some bad high school French that could not make it past the dryness of my lips), I managed to get on the right train with a bottle of water, 2 cappuccinos and 2 ham sandwiches. Little did I imagine that morning that I was establishing a pattern I would repeat at least 3 times a year for more than 2 decades. Nor did I realize for some time that I was beginning a relationship that would embody in every way the kind of knowing that moves through familiarity to infatuation, discovery and disappointment, resignation and gratitude, finally becoming something inseparable from self.

Even then, my guiding memory had been a dream of rest. As a teenager, my first trip to Europe had been a speed-dating package tour of capitals and intermittent rest-stops of cultural interest punctuated midway by two whole days in Venice. Of course, I remembered nothing that was not luminous-- intense, blinding white sparkles ricocheting off the hotel lobby mirrors from the sun-streaked canal beyond the terrace doors, the soft red glow of the endless gilded ceilings of the Doge’s Palace, the silly, thin arbitrary light from a spidery chandelier in my room. Also, how to forget the green glow and surprise of a single small tree, far-off to one side in the stony campo outside my bedroom window? Like a child left behind in an empty field when all the bigger boys have gone off to play or scheme, it was defiantly upright (thirty years later, though hardly any bigger, it still appears to be waiting.)

As the Canaletto sped through the slow morning light I began to recall these and other memories that had been lurking silently or sleeping somewhere just below consciousness for so many years. Going forward, I was also going back, as these almost forgotten recollections began to surface and reveal themselves as the outer planes of something more dimensional, its heart and contents yet unknown.

I sipped my coffee and nibbled at my sandwiches. Gradually, the outer darkness took on a pale and bluish tint in the far-off distance, lightening the slate-black sky in gentle gradations more subtle than the aqueous tones of a Japanese painting. I wasn’t so tired anymore and my eyes didn’t ache to close, though it was impossible to focus on the tiny print of the Blue Guide opened in my lap. So much information, and doubtless many thousands- millions- of people who had benefited enormously from all those words, clues and keys to the kingdom I would soon enter. The book seemed to close on its own, but remained in my lap like an old cat new to me, content merely to sit. I figured that I had planned a long stay in a place where tourists generally spent a day or two at most. I could get around to edification later in the week; for now, I would simply soak in the sights and sounds and rhythms.

Mestre, the Canaletto’s last mainland stop, was choked with people, cars, signs, cement, plastic, steel and glass and looks like the parking-lot ticket booth of a large amusement park or flea market, which, in a way, it was. Once the train entered the causeway crossing the lagoon it began to rock gently back and forth- perhaps just an effect of the angled light bouncing off the water on each side of the low bridge. Despite the cold, the sky was bright and clear, yet changing, quickly and often.

As the train progressed- there is no other word for this particular transition, no matter how many times I have made the trip- the hazy clump at the end of the rail in the middle of the water seemed both too small and too curious to be Venice itself. Small islands scattered along the way, just mounds of grass and debris in the shallow shoals, looked impossibly natural and casual. One or two had scraggly trees or low thickets of scrub brush clotted with trash. It was an unimaginable end to a ride through countryside so carefully and artfully cultivated over so many centuries.

Worse, there was nothing to see but the backs of low crumbling buildings next to an abandoned lot filled with weeds and waterfowl (over the years the crumbling buildings became first an Old People’s Home and then luxury condos.) A chunky multi-storied car park with a dead-end bridge of its own and a shipping container perch set the limit of view to the other side. Except for the dim outline of a crooked campanile here and there, nothing was impressive and nothing was tall enough to stand out. Could Venice really have been hidden behind that puny decoy wall?

Finally, the train rutted into the narrow closure of the terminal and simply gave out with something that resembled a mechanical burp. A few dark glass doors spotted an uninviting cement-colored wall; it could have been the entrance to an abandoned sports arena’s restrooms. Inside was as unattractive as expected, but clean and bright and full of people, like any busy suburban commuter stop with a gift shop specializing in moderne art-glass ashtrays, a newsstand and florist- perhaps there was a hospital nearby. I bought a map and moved toward the doors leading to the caffé where I intended to plot my way to the Pensione, fortified by several cups of strong Arabian coffee with steamed milk and sugar and at least a pair of crispy pastries shaped like molting castanets. Here, I was certain, they would not taste like the boxes they came in, as they did in New York.

The double doors revealed something I hadn’t expected. There was no waiter service section. The bar, where everyone was standing in one thick clutch, was crowded two deep with what must have been a convention of sign-language interpreters frantically decoding the incredible volume of noise. I could see that simply sidling up and coyly gesturing for this or that and then offering a banknote sufficiently large to cover the estimated cost was not going to work. Besides, there was no empty spot to insinuate myself into. My first reaction on seeing the Casse, the central cash register attended by a woman who has seen everything without ever having bothered to look up, was despair. In projected weariness I realized that every caffé would be the same- at least the kind I could afford to frequent. I was torn between the frustration of always having to state-- in advance-- what and how many of something I wanted, and a ridiculous embarrassment that the preferred transaction model for casual public imbibing in this last ruin of an ancient empire most resembled an American charity picnic or children’s dance where one first bought colored tickets to redeem at the buffet or bar. But, clearly, that was the only way I would eat or drink.

I was the only person convinced by my performance of casually strolling over to the bar to peruse the offerings. Desperately, I searched in vain, for some little identifying sign; the glass cases were loaded with trays and plates brimming with pastries and sandwiches-- what were they called? My hoped for sfogliatelle were the only thing I could pronounce and none were in sight. I dragged my way to the register and asked for the only things I could think of: un cappuccino, un croissant. She responded instantly with a number I knew I needn’t bother trying to decipher.

I laid down a 50,000 Lire note (about $25.00 at the time); coins jangled down into the metal bowl as I turned to the bar, forgetting-- though how can one forget something only suspected-- to take my change and the receipt, the carnival ticket to be redeemed at the counter. Whatever sound she made, I knew she was calling me back; and, though I had failed, there was no censure or coldness in her voice. I was just like all the others, Those Who Don’t Know.

I had not even sipped my first Venetian coffee and already I had begun the hard lesson of seeing myself in action. Not an idle reflection to check my jacket or collar, but a real rub against the grain of assumption and habit that would humiliate and amuse me in untold ways for years to come was my reward. That the stakes were so low- a cup of coffee I could easily afford- seemed to be an unexpected gift, balm for the wound: how else could I bear to see just how little, how poorly, I knew how to ask and to pay? I opened the map to check which boat line I would need.

Outside, a stretched-out asymmetrical tumble of spacious stairs lounged across the front of the station's canal-side smoked glass façade. The wide, open pavement was intended to accommodate the incomprehensible number of tourists who would spill in and out of the station all day long. Most puddled in groups, as I had done so many years before, behind polyglot trainers and embarrassing easy-to-identify colored banners, in tow like lines of ducklings. A couple of Venice’s rare trees were kept to one side of the station entrance like trained pets on pedestals, fed by the random generosity of passersby and advertising a zoo that was already long forgotten. But that day, there was no one around, or practically so. The meandering hordes of tourists I remembered or expected were not here, not out in this weather, this time of year, and the hotel hawkers were all inside the terminal, smoking.

The vast expanse of sky was instantly sliced down to storybook scale by the impossibly narrow canal (like everything in Venice, the Grand Canal opens up farther along), its opposite side bordered chock-a-block with short stage-front Palazzi. Directly across from the station, the marvelous stunt of a one-building Greeting Committee (a lanky and lumbering neo-classically straight-faced church, San Simeone Piccolo, with a ridiculously way-too-tall weathered green dome that looks like nothing so much as a Bank with a Hat) gleefully acknowledged my arrival: Benvenuto! I have arrived.

The sky rotates from calendar-blue to a brilliant colorless gray, mopped over with long careless dark streaks of heavy clouds. It is almost raining; the air is heavy with mist that rises up from the canal as much as down from the sky, eminating even from brick and plaster walls like legions of old, unhurried ghosts.

BIGLIETTI. Ahah: at the water’s edge, the silly little hut with the big red letters is the cash register for the vaporetto, the boat-bus, with a tarrif sign that someone must think is in English. A “Carnet” of 10 tickets is an effortless exchange. Gangplanks on either side of the ticket booth lead to large pontoon landing stages bobbing a yard or two out into the water; each has a flat metal roof, wide openings and a glassed-in waiting area off to one side.

The No. 82 glides up and nestles into the platform and I run onto the boat, setting aside one ticket in my top pocket. Having read no guide, I do not know that the ticket is not valid unless stamped. The map, however, has told me that there are three bridges across the Grand Canal: Ponte degli Scalzi, Rialto, Academia; my hotel is a short walk from the stop at the base of the last bridge.

At the prow of the vaporetto, in front of the captain’s small cabin, two benches face outward, forming an enclosed V that cradles a jumble of orange and white life preservers that are not sufficiently convincing in their suggestion of salvation. They are, however, very cheerful and that, perhaps, is more to the point. The low roof of the boat does not quite cover this forward section and the seats are damp. Of course, that is the only reason the best view is available. The vaporetto is otherwise packed. Where did they all come from? I foolishly assume that the station is the “start” of the run. In fact, it is pure chance that I am on the right boat, headed in the right direction.

The route zigzags a lazy touch-tag from one bank to the other as we inch our way along this watery Main Street toward “downtown”. Actually, the boat seems to be going every direction but forward, gently nodding up and down on the tide and curling left and right into the floating-platform stops at each side of the canal where passengers come and go in surprisingly agile and elegant choreography. Nothing, I imagine, could be more exquisite than this languorous glissando, bordered and cheered along by the exotic ruffle and rabble of carved stone and crumbling creamy stucco inset with deep-hued articulations of precious stones and glimmering glass.

Faces are everywhere. A bleacher of renaissance saints disguises the entrance to a church huddled cheek-by-jowl with small, self-conscious follies and grandiose preening palaces. Windows and arches are crested with startled youths, drowsy goddesses or the frozen leer of a craggy satyr. I am inordinately susceptible to the magic of art and craft, water and sky, the innuendos that whisper from alcoves or shout from projections, the maps that chart a path from foreground to background.

Suddenly, the utter utility and dowdy inelegance of the clunky wooden beams that sturdily compose the almost century-old “temporary” Ponte dell’Academia reminds me that beauty is, after all, only beauty, and that sometimes you just want to get to the other side. I am too green to all this to have any appreciation of what a miracle it is that I can find my hotel on the first try. There are no street addresses in Venice.

A charming courtyard with a few roses still in bloom and cascades of deep velvety green leaves sprinkled with ochre and crimson leads to the tiny lobby. In perfect English more elegant than I would have thought possible for such a simple phrase, I am welcomed and told that my room is not ready. However, it happens that the room only needs arranging. If it should please signor to retire to the dining room, they would be delighted to offer him coffee- breakfast, of course, is finished- and, after, it would be their sincere and profound pleasure to convey him above. My small bag is magically transported out of my hands and I am formally tendered into the loving care of an elderly gentleman with beautiful white hair and a supple maroon jacket to walk me the two or three steps to the dining room.

There, I am gently guided as if by a hypnotist into a filigreed chair of surprising comfort. The younger, black-vested waiter asks if monsieur prefers milk with his coffee. Oui, merci, I am so tired I respond without thinking in the international mode. Tilting his head, he looks at me and inquires, Perhaps, Jews? Speaking no Italian whatsoever, I cannot possibly afford to laugh at the delight of his pronunciation since I, at least, know what he means. Yes, thank you. He turns and walks to the kitchen, but stops midway and circles back, scanning me like a doctor who has known me since childhood. He taps his moustache delicately at one corner: Perhaps an egg, as well? It is his assessment, not really a question. Yes, thank you, that would be marvelous. Are we all trapped in a period farce? Now I begin to doubt, wondering what may actually happen once the next scene begins.

Thirty seconds later he carries a linen-covered tray with a small silvery pot of coffee, a steaming porcelain pitcher of milk and a tall glass of tomato juice. Oh. I had imagined orange or grapefruit, pink grapefruit even, I don’t know why. I do not like tomato juice, especially in the morning. Unbelievably, given all that has transpired, it is still morning. I decide to say nothing and drink the juice offered to me so graciously. I lift the glass to my lips and the taste is nothing I have ever known, or, frankly, will ever experience to the same degree again: my first, fresh Blood-Orange juice- impossibly thick, ambiguously sweet, truly voluptuous. I have barely drained the last drop from my glass when the “egg” arrives, a perfect glowing cosmos, wrapped in a tissue of prosciuto atop a sliver of crisp toast in a shallow lozenge shaped dish.

Thirty minutes later I am, indeed, conveyed above into the tiniest perfect room, paneled in dark gleaming wood and outfitted with the care and precision of a fine boat. My cocoon’s window faces out onto the garden below with the paler green band of the canal momentarily translucent in a spotlight of fleeting mid-day sun. I close the shutters, undress and sink into the thick linen and soft blanket-folds of my first adult daytime nap.

Alberti

2008-10-13T10:53:00.009-04:00

The guidebooks call it a faded jewel, worth the little extra money (in its category) for the splendidly detailed, if now slightly shabby, ambiance. The third-floor two star pensione at Palazzo Alberti is owned by two ancient women and a man who seems to have been at one time, and perhaps still is, one of the women’s husband, or, maybe, they are all cousins. Once, they must all have been merely related, each with a life of their own; now, they seem to be literally inseparable, a single soft chatting pile of beige tweed, grey cashmere and comfortable calfskin shoes arrayed across three delicately carved armchairs lined up behind the flat walnut desk in the lobby. As far as I can tell they never get up, but simply disappear late in the afternoon to reappear early the next morning, each with a small cup of tisane from which they never drink.

I say hello and bow to the trio of good luck charms in their chairs as I pass down the hall, through the dark salon with its vague painted ceiling and step into the long, bright breakfast room. Apricot-colored walls and tablecloths are framed in the golden oak of the paneling, shutters and gleaming parquet floor. Opposite the double glass doors four enormous deep-set windows like balconied opera-house boxes peer down into the partially enclosed courtyard, a tentative orchestra with only a few stone benches; a string of chestnut trees draped in crimson and topaz autumn leaves forms the proscenium and curtain of this makeshift theater. An elegant middle-aged woman stands gazing out the window in the far end of the room, hands clasped together under the tip of her chin; cold morning light flickers in sharp colorless notes off the slim gold bracelets jumbled on one wrist and the well-tended cataract of silver-streaked hair hiding her face. She does not notice my entrance.

Trying to preserve the silence in the room, I tiptoe over to a small table under the nearest window. Before I sit down a large uniformed waitress appears, more sentry than serveuse, pointing to a different table. I look around, there is no one but we three-- surely, my gesture inquires, I can sit by the window? Her strong, crisp voice fits the room perfectly, like another chandelier, illuminating the quiet without disturbance. --Non; prego, signor. It is not a request. She points again to the table along the wall, smoothing her pale green linen apron with the back of her other hand. As if I cannot be trusted, and here she is correct, she walks to the table and waits-- glancing at the floor, the meter running-- until I relent and follow. As I sit down feeling the injustice of my circumstance and the probability that all Americans must feel that way any time the slightest freedom is curtailed, I notice a small dark handbag hanging from a chair at the neighboring table.

On her way to the kitchen for coffee and rolls, the waitress pauses, whispering something to the woman at the window, who turns and thanks her, Maria, by name. Gliding to her table, the one next to mine, the woman inclines her head to one side: --Bonjour, monsieur. --Bonjour, madame. -- Ah, you speak English; she cracks the spine of the napkin into her lap and snaps her head the other way, ready to spar. --Where are you from? I am from… Chile, my name is Clarice. I tell her my name and that I am from New York, which is accurate, for now.

The extent to which Clarice is rapidly calculating her moves and making allowances for much more than just my age shows only in the piercing sparkle of her eyes but does not alter her expression of her mouth, which is hard and beautiful; she is used to higher stakes and more refined circumstance. Smiling, she enunciates with razor clarity a long sentence in Italian that I cannot possibly comprehend, no matter how slowly she might speak. -- Sorry, I don’t speak Italian. -- Surely, some? Of course, we could just practice simple phrases? Her language skills are so refined that she can speak in English but use the Romance syntax to confirm her rights as the Lady of the house and imply that I am witholding something I posess. -- I’m terribly sorry, but I don’t know Italian at all. There is really so little I do know except that Clarice is looking more familiar and more American by the minute; she is accustomed to getting her way and I want to get away.

Clarice begins a sentence in French, with which she needs no practice, and I must again suggest that, if she wishes to speak with me, it must be-- je suis desolé, madame-- in English; my simple and fragmentary French will wear out long before the first cup of coffee is finished. I am as humiliated by this as is she. As if to the empty cup in her hand: --Ah, yes, American. But her voice no longer carries the electric shocks of challenge and disapproval by which she hoped to snap me to obedience, if not attention. She softens and an almost imperceptible sigh lingers in the curve of her lower lip. I wonder what on earth she is doing in this place.

To me she is already suspect because of the reference to Chile- I don’t know the details or what to think, and it will be years before I understand how the dictator she approves was first installed. For now, no matter what we each may think or want, Clarice and I are the only people in this room, about to break bread together. For what I suspect might be very different reasons, or not, we both relent: she will ask for less and I will offer more, each in our own way.

--As a girl, I would come here with my sister and mother, to buy clothes. I am even staying in the same room. Then, Maria’s mother oversaw the Dining Room and, sometimes, Maria and I would wander in the little garden there below while the grown-ups had tea and drinks; my sister was always ill and rarely left our room. My sister is still ill, and living in Rome where I must now go, too.

My Street

2008-09-21T23:55:00.003-04:00

In theory, my street- the street where I live- should comprise eighteen blocks; in fact, there are only six or seven, depending from which side one counts. Hardly a long street by New York City standards, especially considering that it is, at least nominally, an avenue. Nonetheless, this slight, two-lane artery of urban life strings together at least four or five aspects so different that a casual twenty-five minute walk from one end to the other can feel like a day of unmarked, and possibly illegal, border crossings. It begins at the base of a precipitous rocky hillside traced by a looping road forever jammed with too many cars going in too many directions at speeds much too fast for such a small intersection- that is, when the cars are moving at all.

At its southern end, the avenue stretches up a small hill no steeper than the arch of a grown cat’s back and then flattens out entirely, shifting what little variety it encompasses from a lazy vertical climb to a horizontal meandering, like someone who has fallen asleep with their legs dangling over the side of the bed: feet flopping toward the floor, hips sunk flat, the upper torso- shoulders, arms and head- rotated right, to the west. In the short, slim midsection that would be the sleeper’s waist, the buildings that line the lower stretch suddenly disappear, replaced by two parks squeezing together, one from each side of the narrow avenue-in-name-only. The sleeper’s arms akimbo describe a vast oval of lawn and track, edged by a distant rising thicket of elm, oak and pine. Behind the sleeper, on the eastern bank of the avenue, a gaggle of trees swoops down a sheer incline and hovers over the tilting curb, like a gang of schoolchildren huddled impatiently, waiting to cross the street and charge onto the playing fields on the other side.

At this point the avenue is the official line of demarcation between two different parks and the shrubs and trees, even the animals, seem to respect the legal limit and opposite purpose of each side. Once the leaves fall and the grass loses its color, the western field disappears into an unrecognizable absence, becoming only the distance toward the far-away hill, an upward rumble of crusty russet lace and jumbled sticks. The gray horizon signals through to the true crest of the hillside itself, as if arguing against the questionable feint and simplistic obviousness of the upper edgeline of bare treetops.

The narrow ridge above the east side of the avenue cascades in an assortment of tossed timbers, some huge and towering, stuck haphazardly into the muddy slope- it is hardly believable that they will leaf again next year. These trees have been pruned, if at all, by the random effects of lightning; neglect has allowed them to form into shapes that defy gravity and decorum, like halting scribbles drawn by children who do not yet know about balance and support. Fallen branches, an abandoned litter of thick-sliced trunks and erosion around the massive knots of long-exposed roots all create homes and hideouts for the remaining wildlife: a few robins and starlings, pigeons, of course, and the many gray and black squirrels who never give up their optimism that, today, I may have remembered to bring along something for them to eat or bury.

Farther up, past the respite of park and the last signal light, the avenue runs a final course, short and straight, through a small cluster of chunky apartment houses shouldered together like a double row of spectators at the finish line- an indistinguishable, thin cross-street where the avenue simply and quietly ends without expectation. So far past the moment of competition themselves, these buildings are all old, yet determined and earnest; some stately, mostly tired from patiently waiting the long intervals between intermittent opportunities to show off their prized treasure to the occasional passersby who might take notice.

Don’t you see? They are too polite to point; besides, they have no hands or arms, no fingers to force anything. It is here, right here between us. Look, and look again. Suddenly the rough brick buildings are the knit-work of a dark open collar, the emptiness at the end of the street is a pale throat leading up to the radiant face of pure, endless, changeable sky.

Film/ Pasolini: Teorema; Porcile; Salo'

2008-01-16T20:38:00.001-05:00

Pasolini- A Proposed Trilogy

Pier Paolo Pasolini made one trilogy- The Trilogy of Life (Decameron, Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights) and intended to make a Trilogy of Death. Salo’ is the only completed film from this intended trilogy. For me, an unintended trilogy shaped itself while viewing Teorema, Porcile and Salo’ at a Pasolini retrospective at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center.

Each film is a masterwork on its own, yet combines with the others in surprising and, perhaps, unexpectedly obvious ways, to create a full and complex vision saturated with Pasolini’s exploration of the nature, boundaries and interpenetrations between the religious and the human. The films also describe an arc of stylistic progression: Teorema is a mythic tale, as pure and stark as an early renaissance mural cycle by Bellini or Carpaccio; Porcile is a time- and world-traveling double story juxtaposing mercantile contemporary sophistication with a 16th century fantastic fable; Salo’ is an anti-tale 3-ring circus from Hell, its cinematic artistry conspicuously inept and fragmented, entirely stylized and utterly without stylishness.

Part One, Teorema

Teorema begins with a desolate and otherworldly rock-strewn landscape seen from high above through a thin scrim of rapidly shifting clouds that look and feel scratchy, harsh and dry. Dividing this wasteland is a jagged line that could be a road; if so, it is a forlorn path toward and from nothing imaginable. Perhaps it expresses division, boundary, a marking of this from that.

Cut to a contemporary documentary-style Interview in which a journalist questions the workers at an Italian factory that has just been “given” to them by the owner: Will it, by default, make them all into bourgeois capitalists? No Comment, the reply. The recollection of this prologue echoes at the end of the film creating a non-existent Epilogue that entirely repositions the premise of the journalist’s question.

Three is a charm: Flash back, now, to the beginning of the mythic tale in its 1960’s setting. The “king” is the factory owner and father. His royal family (the mother, son and daughter) is augmented by the faithful housekeeper, Angelina. Their realm is an exquisite and fully modernized Palladianesque villa with a vast walled garden outside Milan. Though beautifully appointed, it is a sleek and desolate home of icy precision. Even the kitchen is untroubled by any signs of food or use. The sumptuousness is entirely contained in the endless and expensive proportions of smooth polished surfaces.

An unappreciated and imperfectly cherubic messenger of the gods brings a telegram to the gated domain: Arriving Tomorrow, it states. An unexplained and somewhat mysterious attractive, blue-eyed young man arrives the next day and all the pent-up or unacknowledged energies of Eros begin to stir in this household. First Angelina and then the entire family, including the father, succumb to this Adonis’ physical charms. Then, just as suddenly, the messenger arrives with another telegram commanding the mysterious young man to depart the next day.

The royal house is collectively and individually shattered. The divine itself is brought into question: the young man is barely more than a handsome cipher, but one that can intuit and actively respond to the deepest needs of the others.

After the young man’s departure it is again Angelina who is first to respond. She sneaks away from the villa, going home to the countryside. Silently she sits on a bench, eating nothing but nettles, becoming a quasi-pagan proto-saint spectacle for the local peasants who can only understand her gestures in the imagery of the church. She fulfills the faith they invest in her by healing a leprous child and floating in the air.

Eventually she comes down from the sky and beckons an old woman to follow her to an empty excavation site for a new apartment house complex where she buries herself in the soft dark earth. I will not die, she says, signaling for the old woman to shovel more dirt on top of her. Angelina folds herself back into the earth from which she has come and of which she is still a vital part; her separate and temporary individual journey has come to its fulfillment and she reunites with her own earthly essence like a drop of rain falling into the ocean. Streams of tears flow from her eyes not from grief but as the much-needed sustenance for what is yet to come.

The daughter falls into a coma, her right hand clenched as if on the memory of her encounter with the young man, literally trying to hold time still. By refusing to awaken and acknowledge the movement of time, of life, she exists only in the past, trying to make even the future into the past.

The son imagines himself an artist and propels himself out into the world, alone, though obviously generously funded. His stance is a false obsession with futurity and a prideful compensation for what he sees as his shameful recognition of being different, needy and incomplete. He attempts to create a new and perfect world that is little more than attractive formal obfuscation. The illusion of sui-generis expressionistic art cannot hide the reality that all his efforts are guided by the literalized image of the beloved and are an attempt to regain something lost and irrevocably outside himself, not an exploration of anything new. He has not taken in the gift of the divine and therefore cannot create anything from it. Though he convinces himself he is moving fearlessly forward, his gestures are empty and angry.

The mother tries to keep the fire of the divine eternally alive in the present by re-living the act of corporeal love with other young men, picked up randomly on street corners. Her conscious and voluntary degradation ultimately leads her to a decaying and nearly abandoned old church. She understands her dilemma to be religious- a search for meaning that, for her, previously did not exist. She has no illusions about the absence of dimension in her life or the limits of her own capabilities. The encounter with the young man and her subsequent attempts to recreate it simply made her aware of these truths. In honoring that awareness and her own limitation, she at least finds the humility her children lack.

The film’s ultimate scenes with the father are perhaps the most startling, complex and original cinematic evocation of a complete shift in consciousness. The father searches to comprehend the significance and ramifications of his encounter with the young man. He is the only one not entirely enthralled by the idea of revitalization through the erotic aspect, knowing that it alone cannot be the portal to a new dimension. Like Angelina in her very different way, he knows that sacrifice, giving away all that he has gained and achieved- the factory to the workers, his very self to the cosmos- is the only means to achieve an essential freedom from the trappings of persona that limit not only what he sees but how he is seen.

The father enters the train station; where is he going? He sees a beautiful young man, who imagines, as we might, that the older man is looking for sex and cautiously acquiesces to the unspoken request by going into the Men’s Room. But that is not what the father is looking for. He turns away; a young child with its mother wanders by and he kneels down and lovingly smoothes its blond hair and, rising, slowly begins to take off his clothes in the middle of the station.

His action makes him invisible to the outside world. It makes him, for the onlookers, into a “crazy person”. Either way, the result is that he is no longer recognizable, even to himself. The scene shifts abruptly to the wide empty desert terrain where the father, nude as a new-born and equally as defenseless, stumbles across the dusty plain under the searing glare of a harsh noon light, trying to determine a course, a direction, some meaning, anything. He falls into the parched bleached earth and, lifting himself up, screams.

It is significant that no one in the film is evil. The preconceptions and limitations of persona show, except for the father and Angelina, a missing of the message transmitted by the erotic.

Part Two, Porcile

Porcile (Pigpen), the second feature of this proposed trilogy, begins with a view of the same dry, colorless vista that opens and closes Teorema, except that now the rocky landscape is alive, heaving with smoky volcanic activity. A butterfly appears suddenly- a surprising vision of life: colorful, beautiful, and fragile. Equally unexpectedly, a hand darts out trapping the delicate insect and stuffs it into the mouth of a ravenous disheveled young wanderer dressed in the tattered rags of a 16th century European peasant.

Is he the new incarnation of the father from Teorema, reborn in that vast wasteland as a scavenging savage? He hurls boulders at the ground, stalking and killing a gyrating snake, tearing into the warm scaly half-alive flesh with his bare teeth.

Woven into this soon to be far more outlandish fable is the contemporary story of an enigmatic young man, Julian, his crippled father and Julian’s bourgeois fiancée, who coolly and intellectually considers the appropriateness of their intended coupling from a mercantile perspective of increasing profit and multiplying shares.

Porcile is a complex double parable on the theme of blind ruthlessness, seen in two very different environments. The contemporary story is, perhaps, the continuation of what might have happened after the factory of Teorema has been given to the workers. A battle of greed narrows the field to two operators- Julian’s father, a cold buffoon of calculating avarice and entitlement who represents the ostensibly more rarified and retreating modality of bourgeois pretension, and his rival, a jaunty plastic-surgeryed shape-shifter who does whatever is necessary to get what he wants and is aligned with the future, powered by the expedients of science and technology and ornamented with the heartless prejudice of easily distorted data.

These characters are each one side of the same coin and their world is a cold, dead parody of life predicated on the ceaseless flow of product and consumption which is mirrored in the lingering scenes of the huge, bored omnivorous pigs cramped into their compartmented pens, ultimate consumers waiting to be fed until they, in turn, are slaughtered and fed to others.

The 16th century fable centers around the young wanderer who is not just a ravenous scavenger killing and consuming the few living things he encounters, but, it turns out, a cannibal as well. A strange logic and precise rituals, however, guide his actions. When he kills the first of his human victims, a foot soldier straggling behind his troop, he cuts off the dead man’s head and throws it into a smoking orifice in the rocky hillside.

Next we see the cannibal eating the dead man’s roasted flesh, but- miraculously? - at his side, also consuming what would be his own body, is the soldier-victim himself, now regenerated (-from the severed head tossed back into the smoky mouth of Mother Earth?)

The cannibal and his resurrected soldier-victim go on to attack and consume others, always first enacting the ritual of cutting off the head and offering it back into the earth, thus mysteriously increasing the size of their band in direct proportion to the number they kill and consume.

Eventually one would-be victim escapes and makes his way back to the city where troops are marshaled and a trap set to capture the cannibal and his band. In chains and under heavy guard the outlaws are brought to the city to await the word of the court.

In the contemporary story the rival forces Julian’s father to acquiesce to a business partnership leveraged in his favor using the threat of exposure of a questionable but accepted rumor implying perverted bestial sexuality to Julian. The titillating rumor is obviously false yet easier to accept than Julian’s un-bourgeois ways and his maddeningly quixotic impartiality. He could be a figure of redemption, of relief for the others who are trapped in stultifying literal materiality, except that they do not experience their limited reality as suffering. Julian’s fiancée leaves him for a more predictably profitable alliance.

The fable continues as the judges emerge from deep inside the medieval citadel while church bells clang riotously, drowning out the actual words of the sentence they read aloud. The condemnation is the accusation of evil; the punishment: to be taken back into the desolate wilds and tied, each limb attached to a stake driven deep into the earth, their bodies exposed, to be ripped apart and devoured by roaming animals.

The cannibal is unrepentant, accepts his lot and declares his crime: that he killed his father; that he ate human flesh; that he trembles with joy. His followers, though already dead and resurrected, cry tearfully and struggle against their death-sentences in a magical moment of cinematic confusion.

In the film’s ultimate scenes Julian quietly leaves his father’s pristine palatial house, crosses the vast manicured lawn and disappears into the pigpen.

A crowd of peasants arrives at the villa as the party celebrating the business merger of the father and rival is about to begin. They ask to speak not to Julian’s father, the estate’s padrone, but to whomever of the two, father or rival, is strongest. Julian’s father readily and happily concedes his inferiority, declaring himself suddenly overwhelmed by a consuming desire for a cream-puff and lurches out of the room on his crutches, leaving the rival, now partner, to negotiate this unwanted and unseemly interruption.

The peasants, cautious and respectful, barely know how to begin their incomprehensible account. The rival taunts them to be quick and not waste his time. One of them explains that had they not seen “it”, they would never have known: Julian abandoned himself into the pigpen and was consumed entirely, even his clothes, by the huge gluttonous animals. They arrived too late to save him, not even a scrap of clothing could be salvaged to attest to the tragedy.

Not a sole of a shoe, the rival demands? No. Not even a single button, he asks? No, not even a single button, they lament. Then don’t say a word to anyone, the rival commands, happy with the good fortune that yet another inconvenient obstacle has removed itself from his path to success.

Part Three, Salo'

Though all three films hold a line of continuity through detail, ideas and form, Salo’ provides the retrospective arc of trilogy for Teorema and Porcile.

In hindsight Teorema becomes a classic and simple legend of small scale and deep resonance. The earthly horizontal plane of existence and the vertical dimension of psychic depth are united and activated in the characters’ encounter with the divine in its aspect of Eros. Theirs is a world and world-view in which the erotic and the divine are still inextricably linked and alive. The nature of each character’s submission to or rebellion from his/her new awareness is fundamentally a religious experience.

In Porcile the depth dimension has been subverted into the service of the earthly plane of profit and technology. The crippled father and his rival still enjoy the benefit of energies greater than themselves and each retains and maintains a sphere in which to act out that power: the father in culture and history, the rival in commerce and futurity. For both, money underpins it all. In a parody of fevered comedia dell’arte bravura, their interactions are fueled by a sublimated and redirected Eros no longer connected to the divine but banished to the Board Room. Julian has the power derived from depth and interiority but in this thin and brilliant world can find no place where and no one for whom these qualities are credited with value or given room to operate. Being neither for nor against the bourgeois principle he becomes irrelevant and disappears without a trace or sense of loss on the part of the others. They are too consumed with success to take notice or care.

Set in the winter of 1944-45 in a Nazi-occupied northern Italian town of otherwise idyllic beauty, Salo’ is the precinct of unbridled power and corruption of four high government officials. They are called the Masters and derive from Porcile by way of the fable's judges and from the unthinking omnivorous pigs that consume everything (including Julian)- either literally manifested in the animals of the pigpen or metaphorically as the father and rival.

The Masters have assembled a collection of Victims, 18 beautiful adolescent boys and girls, imprisoned, naked, in a rural villa that is a gross and deformed extension of the pleasure palaces of the 18th century. Upon these adolescents the Masters act out their sexualized fantasies of rage, domination and filth. A small band of armed young ruffians, accomplices, supports and enforces the Masters’ authority. Four aging Madams are the Storytellers who take turns in nightly performances meant to ignite the lust of the Masters. The sexual perversions are all predictable and banal and include scatology, humiliation and every form of physical torture and mental anguish.

The actor-Victims seem halfhearted, not really “playing” their parts well, or, as the doomed adolescents, not really taking in their situation as the objects of hatred of the Masters, but how could they, after all? When the Victims start casually turning on one another the viewer’s despair sinks another level. Intermittently scored, the sound of aircraft overhead remind us that theirs is a rapidly shrinking world coming to some kind of apocalyptic end.

The final scenes of Salo’ capture the entire story. Each Master, in turn, watches from a throne placed in a second story window as the others torture the remaining victims to death. It looks like a documentary of the Inquisition, madness and lust disguised and channeled with religious zeal, death and destruction eroticized.

Protecting, or merely “attending” the Master-voyeur are two of the armed guards, themselves just boys. They have the means- their weapons- to overthrow the Masters and put an end to this outrageous tragedy, but they do not see the horror around them, their role is, in a sense, just a job. They don’t share the Master’s tastes but won’t bite the hand that feeds them.

They are bored. One turns the radio dial abruptly changing from the liturgical chant that underscored the last scenes of torture. He finds a smooth, slow dinner dance tune. He asks the other boy-guard, who is slumped in an easy chair, his machine gun splayed across his lap, Do you know how to dance? Not really, he shrugs in reply. Well, let’s try, a little. They carefully set down their weapons and start to dance, awkwardly but not unlike a random couple at a county fair killing time until something better comes along. What’s your girlfriend’s name, one asks? Margherita, the other replies- his mind elsewhere, though nowhere in particular, as death rages in the courtyard below.

The depth dimension in Salo’ is not subverted but gone. The world of Salo’ is a chaotic, capricious nightmare of real tragedy in which there is no possibility of meaning, nor is there the ability, or desire, even, to sustain the search for meaning. Eros is shackled to death; there is no sphere of operation apart from destruction. It is an apocalyptic vision almost entirely devoid of hope for it describes a level of pointlessness, stupidity and cruelty that is impervious to awareness or action. This vision bypasses any position in which the notion of transformation as development could take place. It describes a blackness darker even than the alchemist’s nigredo. That is an abstract principle, not a compromised world in which living beings must try to get by, let alone attempt to fulfill some notion of destiny, character or meaning. It is impossible to imagine that anything could re-generate from this level of corruption without first annihilating itself entirely.

Film/ The Education of Fairies (La educacion de hadas)

2007-12-22T23:10:00.002-05:00

"The Education of Fairies" (La educacion de hadas), 2006, by director Jose Luis Cuerda pretends to take place in the present; it is really a wondrous fairy tale. Like all such stories, it offers a warning of the dangers of living in a partial world with a partial view, however beautiful.

Nicolas, a middle-aged toy designer with mercurial sparkle in his eyes, lives in a beautiful and rambling stone casita in the Catalan countryside with his childhood nanny-cum-housekeeper. On a flight to Barcelona he sees Ingrid and her precocious young son, Raul, and instantly falls madly in love with both.

Ingrid, an ornithologist, is conveniently divorced from her son’s now dead father who was a pilot and a Viscount, which makes her the modern equivalent of a princess. She and Nicolas marry and for two years happiness reigns in the secluded domain. Nicolas and Ingrid enjoy a passionate love life and Raul receives a fanciful education on the lives and powers of fairies in his nightly bedtime stories from Nicolas. The stepfather and young boy bond deeply in walks in their own enchanted forest complete with magical trees and a secret hideaway.

Then the magic seems to come undone, the spell broken. Raul will not agree to being adopted by a man with such a common last name. Ingrid wants separate bedrooms, complaining of Nicolas’ snoring, and then threatens a more complete break. But why? He loves her; she loves him; there is no one else. All we know is that Ingrid is a beautiful woman who is about to turn 40 and breaks into tears whenever she looks into the mirror. While waiting for Ingrid to decide, act or explain her withdrawal Nicolas makes too many nervous trips to the local supermarket, where he meets Sezar, the abused checkout clerk.

Sezar, the grandchild of martyred Spanish Republicans, has come to Barcelona from her native Algeria en route to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. She is waiting for her final letter of acceptance. Meanwhile she meets a charming street performer who turns out to be a drug dealer. Molested by her ogre boss at the market, beaten up by two thuggish co-horts of her now-jailed ex-boyfriend, she crosses paths with Nicolas who sweeps her into his vintage white Jaguar Roadster and out of this mess.

He takes Sezar to the secret hideaway in the enchanted forest where he tells her his story- more than he has revealed to Ingrid. The lonely child of an unmarried mother, his only romantic attachment prior to Ingrid was with Beatrice, the discarded last girlfriend of his bankrupted and suicided father. Beatrice died pregnant with Nicolas’ unborn child. Even Nicolas’ glamorous car is second-hand from his father; he and Ingrid and Raul live in the house inherited from his dead grandparents. He lives entirely in the imagination trying to obviate and compensate for a lineage of sorrow and neglect. He has made nothing in life but games.

Raul has received another education, more practical and worldly, from interaction with his classmates and their parents. Moreover, like Sezar, he has a fiery past and a sense of the future. The image of his aviator father disintegrating in mid-air for a noble cause feeds his heroic nature and his practical side knows that he will grow up to be the next Viscount Rocca di Castelgrande. He despairs of the unhappiness in his house but will not succumb in sorrow and dreams. He goes to the magic tree in the enchanted forest and discovers Sezar. He mistakes her for one of the fairies he has been trying to contact to fix the obvious and inexplicable problems between his mother and much-loved stepfather.

Raul has been told that fairies have a kind of amnesia and must be re-educated into their prodigious powers. He leaps to the task with gusto and faith, constantly checking Sezar’s mathematical abilities to verify his progress. Raul and Sezar are kindred spirits, alive to the action of life. Sezar is literally physically scarred by an endless litany of life’s cruel tragedies but she has transformed them into stepping-stones out of the past and toward a new future.

She receives the letter of acceptance to the Sorbonne. Before leaving for Paris Sezar confronts Ingrid, who reveals what she has kept from the others. Ingrid has been told, and tests have proven, that she has an incurable, though not cancerous, lesion in her brain- that she could die at any moment, though she appears radiantly healthy. She has decided, alone and unilaterally, that it will be best for Nicolas and her son if she leaves them now, before the envisioned ugliness and pain arrive. Trapped within the powers of her negative imagination, Ingrid is haunted by the vivid specter of that which is not there and blind to the reality and challenge in front of her.

Sezar is not so romantic and points out that any of them could die at any moment and offers Ingrid her philosophy of active determination and joy, suggesting that Ingrid tell Nicolas her buried secret. Sezar has done what she can and rides out of this story and into her destiny on a modest motorbike. The film ends with Ingrid, alone, pacing back and forth on the balcony, undecided about what to do and unknowing of how to decide.

One wishes for a simple, happy ending for all, but it cannot be so. Nicolas and Ingrid cannot confide in each other and with outer lives of independent ease and comfort they lack a means of connection to a larger world and remain characters in an entirely personal, storybook dimension. In that partial sphere even the blessings of love and kindness are not enough to satisfy and set free real people. Sezar has passed many tests in the world and knows she has the strength to desire and choose life. Raul has met his first challenge on the road to adulthood with courage, ingenuity and humility. She and Raul live outside the spell of romantic, beautiful sadness in which Ingrid and Nicolas are still caught.

Irene Jacob as Ingrid and Ricardo Darin as Nicolas are both superb in capturing the haunted anguish of their character’s inability to mature. Victor Valdivia as Raul and Bebe as Sezar give engaging performances filled with life, hope and joy.

Film/ Prater

2007-11-07T21:07:00.001-05:00

The Merry-Go-Round is the heart of Ulrike Ottinger’s film “Prater”, a remarkable exploration of illusion and freedom, technology and desire, costumed as a documentary-style history of Europe’s original Amusement Park, located on the outskirts of Vienna.

As director, writer and cinematographer Ottinger literally becomes the carousel’s watchful center, a playful detective galloping in place to a frenetic calliope score, her gaze is loving and unflinching, as steady and sure as the slow and predictable path of the magic circle. What, she asks, is really going on here?

Each revolution allows the camera to lingeringly snap up new clues in multiple mug shots, accumulating myriad glimmering impressions interwoven, now and then, with vintage footage, tracking back and forth in time, cobbling together a full-scale portrait of the scene of the crime and its cast of characters- the park’s creators, workers, patrons, destroyers and a vast population of mechanical devices and automatons, old and new, that are the go-betweens, ambassador/guides as it were, to this no man’s land between propriety and imagination, brokered in profit.

The story begins with Nikolai Kobelkoff, born horribly deformed to normal parents in Siberia in 1851, without legs and with only one pointed stub of arm projecting from his right shoulder. Despite these impossible physical hardships and crushing societal and family pressures, a kindly schoolteacher teaches him to write by clutching a pen between his chin and arm-stump. Holding a brush in a similar manner, he learned to paint small landscapes; his proficiency eventually developed such that he could thread a needle.

Entrepreneurship is as old as mankind. Genghis Kahn knew that a worthless trinket from China could become a valuable and rare commodity thousands of miles away. So, centuries later, did the first Dutch settlers who “bought” Manhattan. Kobelkoff’s great vision and act of freedom was in seeing a different future for himself. With his hard-won “ordinary” accomplishments he could make himself into a marketable product; what others had tried to hide away he would parade in front of a clamorous public eager to pay for novelty and escape.

He became rich and acclaimed, married, sired numerous normal offspring and opened shop, as it were, in the Prater. The original display at the amusement park, nestled in a former Imperial hunting preserve, was not so unambiguous. In 1896 an entire tribe of Africans, the Ashanti, was transplanted to a corner of the park with all their worldly goods, including animals, housing structures and every commonplace necessity, recreating the illusion of daily life at their homeland village, exposed 24/7 to the amused, bewildered or startled surveillance of paying patrons.

With the addition of a Lilliputian Venice, complete with canals and campanile, the trend toward virtual travel had taken a new turn. The illusion of leaving home without the bother of packing a bag proved irresistible, and still is.

The park itself became extraterritorial to everyday life. Not only an attraction of exotic “otherness”, it was also capable of being a safety valve for the crushing pressures of an increasingly homogenized and complex urban life. It also served as a world of freedom for the roaming imagination, still sufficiently, if barely, disguised in a cloak of convention proper to its place and time. The discord of place and time creates its own kind of value and interest. Technology is always woefully behind or startlingly ahead, threatening to become old before our eyes as we figure out the illusion, even if we acquiesce willingly to its charms.

In Ottinger’s 21st century here and now at the theme park, African men, perhaps tourists, joyously compete in a toss-ball arcade game that animates jostling mechanical racehorses lurching to a bespangled Derby finish line. Multi-generational Middle Eastern families, posing for group portraits a la 1900, dress up in the colorful costumes of European Empires that oppressed their homelands and ancestors not so long ago.

Veruschka von Lehndorff, magnificently, if preposterously, garbed as Barbarella in a form-fitting silver and black body suit and blond wig the size of two roaring lions, wins a cuddly stuffed monkey at the Archery Arcade; her aim is true. Inside the House of Mirrors her steady gaze explores every distortion and permutation of form and meaning as her image and that of the toy monkey’s shape-shift, disappear and meld into one another. Oddly, she is the opposite of the 1920’s well dressed bourgeois city swells whose mimed gestures for the moving camera are so predictable and limited they are barely distinguishable from the legions of automatons repeating their tiny range of motion.

Other modern day characters describe varying degrees of personal fulfillment and satisfaction within the collective rituals of a bygone social existence. One woman recounts the delight of experiencing a freedom of thought, feeling and action brought to birth in the generous expanse of the Prater, a keen contrast to a crowded and constrained childhood. All too soon her practical mother sweeps it all away, forbidding her return to the Suspect Realm, fearfully certain that freedom of any kind will not lead to sensible citizenry or responsible worldly advantage.

In 1945 at the very end of the war retreating Nazis burned the Prater to the ground, unable and unwilling even in defeat to allow the existence of a place where races and classes mixed freely and imagination ran free. It was rebuilt with bumper cars and a space catapult ride. The punching bag with the shape and look of a man’s head is still very popular with gangs of young men proving their power and prowess, one euro at a time. The Prater is inextinguishable.

Film/ The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

2007-10-29T20:23:00.002-04:00

“The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”, a solemn and plangent requiem for an era, opens on a closing note: the last pitiful and nearly profitless train robbery by the James Gang, reduced to little more than a rabble of unreliable petty criminals half-heartedly commanded by the famous brothers, Frank and Jesse. Soon after the gang will disband, the brothers going their separate ways.

Frank is an Old Testament thief, patriarchal and practical, yet humble in a way. He sees the world in front of him and opts for retirement when the gold watches and extra cash of bourgeois travelers no longer outweigh the rustling posse always at heel. It is really a business decision; maybe, he says, he’ll try his hand at selling shoes.

Jesse is not free to make such a sensible decision. Outside the law in entirely different ways, ruthless, fearless and driven by more than profit alone, he is keenly aware of and tortured by his dual nature as animal and man. Brad Pitt majestically portrays Jesse James as an increasingly haggard lion, roaming a shrinking plain, worn down yet ever bristling with intuitive insight, animal ferocity and deep understanding.

After the breakup of the gang and Frank’s departure, Jesse’s isolation allows for the entry of Robert Ford- Bob, 19 years old and devoid of any compelling characteristics beside a narcissistic need to be noticed and a blind willingness to believe in traits he obviously does not possess. In an enclosed garden the wannabe gangster flinches uncontrollably at the sudden appearance of two snakes which are already caught in Jesse’s absolute grip and decapitated with casual mastery, prey to be sautéed in garlic.

Casey Affleck has an uncanny feel for these empty and unknowing characters, blind to their own neediness and supposedly ignorant of the destruction they flawlessly execute. With a small arsenal of tics and evasions Affleck draws a brittle portrait of fussy and superficial exactitude that can only barely cover the Black Hole at its core, a compellingly contemporary image in contrast to Pitt’s timeless majesty, cornered and doomed.

The famous bandit is the hero of Bob’s worship and he cleaves to Jesse like a blood-sucking slug. Feeling spurned by Jesse and unable or unwilling to accept his human and subordinate status or the loss of Jesse’s solar radiance, Bob turns in vengeance to the only other authority he knows: the Police. He betrays his former comrades and makes a deal to bring in the Big Man. As an empty coward, his only possibility of heroic stature is a supreme act of cowardice.

Bob raises his gun to the occasion, not considering that it is Jesse who has given him the weapon and offered his unarmed back. Bob pulls the trigger. He denies his action as he runs to telegraph the Governor, delirious with ideas of reward and applause. His notoriety is short and loveless- Jesse is still the object of everyone’s affections and, even in death, it is Jesse’s image that carries imagination and hope.

Bob and his brother Charley- accomplice to the murder- take to the stage profiteering in artifice, re-enacting nightly, the fateful moment. Jesse had once asked a terrified Charley if he ever thought of suicide. No, always something else he wanted to do, was his honest and cautious reply. But it is not too long before these theatrical replays of shame lead him to take his own life. Bob moves on, opening a saloon in Colorado where he will eventually be gunned down by an old acquaintance who is unable to rest with the injustice done a decade before.

Andrew Dominik’s beautiful and stylized film unfolds in post-apocalyptic monochrome, a gothic Book of Hours, all quirky medieval illumination in prairie Sampler simplicity. Heavy blankets of dark clouds bear down on inky black horizons squeezing out the thinnest possibility of escape.

Film/ Into the Wild

2007-10-25T09:17:00.003-04:00

Based on a true story, Snow White goes on an arctic safari, dressed in the Emperor's New Clothes. "Into the Wild" (2007), with screenplay and directed by Sean Penn, the unquestionably sincere humanitarian and gifted actor, is ultimately an unconvincing collection of calendar art and cliche, strong-armed by good intentions into a predictable and neutered propaganda piece of mono-dimensional caricatures.

A Road Film with no journey, just movement, "Into the Wild" is self-defeating in its blinkered view of the young central character who, in all his vast wanderings, seems to discover nothing he didn't already know, thanks to Byron, Tolstoy, Thoreau, et al- except, perhaps, what poisonous plants to avoid.

Sadly, "Alex" comes off as a narcissistic and frozen personality incapable of maturation, of being moved by actual experience. Though his style and focus are completely different, he embodies the same narrow-minded, fixated willfulness and impermeability as his cruel father. Son and father also share an approach to life that is decidedly mental: dad is a genius aerospace engineer- and emotionally sentimental; both blame others for their volatility. The father lashes out at his wife; the son is his own target.

"People" and "Society" are destructive and bad- the young man runs from a truly traumatic and difficult childhood. Luckier than most, he encounters more than a new family's-worth of characters--among them an old widower played with shocking and quiet complexity by Hal Holbrook--all hopelessly honest, loving and generous, but the young man remains unhealed and unheal-able. He can allow that the people and society he meets along the way are good and supportive as long as it doesn't really matter, or change his plans. He appears unable to be touched rather than determined.

He is all blindness and surface. Chock full of childhood hate, disappointment and disillusionment, "Alex" has no courage for inner battles, no room for a different view of himself. Just an outer path whose destination feels certain from the start, and, frankly, would have made a more interesting and challenging film told from that perspective: intentional suicide.

Unfortunately this character does feel all too familiar- a person who attempts to google-away his faults, ignorance, and anxieties, coming up with pedigreed cliches that obviate real scrutiny. He is more un-born than wise, trusting in all the wrong places. His fate is accidental. If this was the intended focus of the film it was unclear, and unclearly represented.

The film itself has a shocking and ethically questionable moment when a scene includes a real-life aged eccentric desert artist recluse who does not appear to entirely understand that he is talking to Movie Stars in a Hollywood Film. From a directorial and aesthetic standpoint it is also a terrible mistake to include this footage. First, it contradicts the film's reductive equation of movement with journey, especially odious in a condescending sermon improbably directed at Holbrook's old veteran to get out and see the world. Much worse, however, the scene takes the viewer out of the point of view of the rest of the film, that instantly becomes even thinner, make-believe next to the raw vitality of a true voyager.

Film/ The Man From London

2007-10-16T13:09:00.003-04:00

"The Man From London", a baleful and beauteous convergence of image, sound and meaning, is the latest masterpiece from the legendary Hungarian director Bela Tarr.

Extracting the "everyman" hidden in the improbable armature of a Georges Simenon detective thriller, Tarr reshapes character and tale into a modern and merciless slow-motion re-enactment of the ancient story of "The Flaying of Marsius"- the mortal presence reduced to a nameless night Watchman whose only claim against the gods will be the mere attempt to act and survive in a hostile and stifling world.

In mythic black and white- geometrical, spare and atmospherically gorgeous- Chance opens the story. Seeping darkness of night ebbs to reveal a tattered old boat; a waiting dockside train; two men; a heavy valise; a ruse more successful than clever; a struggle.

Still clutching the treasured case, one man falls and the sea dinks him in like a drop of ink. The other man stares into nothingness, then walks away, defeated- much too easily and probably not for the first time.

The Watchman sees it all from his cage-like station above dock and rail. Slow, methodical and intent on winning the prize that fate has flashed before him, he descends, grappling hook in hand, confident. Master of this tiny corner, he knows its ways and almost too easily retrieves the valise retreating to his perch. The haul is a shoal of shimmering small banknotes, which he lays out to dry on the old-fashioned stove heater. Not a fortune, it is just enough to be too much.

By morning, his shift over, he ambles down to the dockside cafe and then home. The other man follows, a vague intuition or desperate hope murmurs that there may be something to suspect, but ultimately neither the power nor a direction in which to proceed materialize.

Naturally, Apollo will not deign to show up at this claustrophobic dead-end sea town where even the vast horizon glares into an impassable barrier of blinding, empty whiteness. Enter the god's adjutant-accountant: the Inspector, nearly omniscient, the difference can be calculated in age and bother. He needs no knife to skin his victims, so thin is the worn down layer that life has allowed them.

At the cafe the other man from the night before, Brown- drawn in as if by magnetism- squirms under the Inspector's droning speech that, really, only the money is wanted. In fact, a percentage will be offered for the return of the bulk, no questions asked, no formal charges. We know the pinned man thinks the money is lost into the watery past and has no way to comply.

The prize has already begun its corrosive action: the Watchman flares in the shell of his marriage and rises to the opportunity of protecting his beloved daughter's dignity. He buys her a small cheap fur from the talking heads at the local shop. She knows better than to think of it as a sign on the road to a better or different destiny.

The women strain to comprehend the all too predictable actions of the men, and, why must it always come to this. Why is there so little range, so little opportunity to call forth and nurture whatever humble gifts they might posess?

The drowned man's body has washed ashore. Brown's wife has been summoned in an effort to lure him out of hiding. Even the Watchman is confronted: surely, at the least, he saw something the night of the crime?

The Watchman is in many ways the Inspector's equal and, like him, sees the puzzle taking shape. When his daughter unknowingly delivers the penultimate piece he reads the inverse treasure map and hurries to the spot that he suspects will mark his, and everyone's, defeat. Next, he will bring the valise of money to the Inspector and claim responsibility for all that has happened in the wake of the crime.

Ancient though he may be, the Inspector is a thoroughly modern man and reminds the Watchman that only the return of the money is of significance. Wasn't everything else. after all, just self-defense?

Completing his task the Inspector portions out a very few bills between two envelopes. With the leaden words of tumbled tombstones, he mouths his shock and sorrow at the course of events. As tokens of compensation to Brown's wife and the Watchman, he offers the envelopes, leaving them behind, as he daparts.

Film/ Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia

2007-10-07T14:17:00.001-04:00

Director Ulrike Ottinger slowly pares and burnishes this boisterous fantasy into a small jewel of radiant perfection. "Johanaa d'Arc of Mongolia" opens like a bygone era children's storybook. Paper-thin and somewhat tattered painted stage drops merely pretend to evoke the once-opulent interiors of the Trans-Siberian Railway and the vibrant world outside.

A troop of rambling polyglot charmers jostles amiably in this crowded and mobile house of cards: an uncomplicated and affable Broadway chanteuse; a Baedeker-immersed bourgeois German frau; an exotically dark and beautiful, young tomboyish vagabond; a rich, fat, gay, crooning vaudevillian; an amusingly pompous Russian general and his handsome, straight-faced tap-dancing adjutant.

A sister trio cabaret act entertains in the Dining Car where a small coterie of trolls and ingenious helpers create operatic splendor in this thin environment. Magisterially overseeing both characters and tale, the elegant Lady Windermere (Delphine Seyrig, in her last film role) is a modern-day sorceress and know-it-all MC, unrelentingly cheerful and resourceful.

All too quickly this world of "players and painted stage" attains its limit and the party breaks up, the men shuffling off to repeat performances of well-known roles in familiar locales. Only the women will venture further east. Suddenly the diorama of Act I gives way to a real, dimensional world as they transfer to the Trans-Mongolian Railway, whose accommodations are more substantial if decidedly less luxurious.

A vast panorama of dry mountains and cloudless sky begins to emerge when the train is forced to a halt, ambushed by a Mongolian princess and her Amazonian warriors. The travellers are taken hostage, though the circumstances quickly change, altering their status to that of honored quests.

The opportunity immediately appeals to all except the uncertain frau who must choose between this uncharted experience on the Steppe and a difficult retreat to her urban obligations and hotel reservations. She decides, however, to stay, initiating an astonishing vision of timeless tribal life. The realm of the warrior princess is ritualized in every aspect- even the smallest actions are imbued with meaning and significance, direct lines of access to an ever-present transcendent.

Restless in a tame world, the exotic vagabond seems to find a natural place in this rough and vital community. The sister trio and Broadway star, artists and shape-shifters accustomed always to making their own way in any surroundings, adjust quite easily to this very out-of-town run. Lady Windermere perfects her Mongolian, interprets the archetypal signs and symbols, witnessing and cataloging the spectacular variety of creation and customs as she mediates the two cultures.

The harsh clash of sensibilities falls squarely on the frau when she unknowingly hangs out her laundry to dry and is nearly attacked by the Mongolians who believe the exposed wet clothes will bring threatening storms. She survives this ordeal and in giving up the modest propriety of bourgeois habit opens the way for a different journey. Ambling on the grassy plateau at the edge of a ravine she becomes spellbound with the resonant mandala of a simple white flower and descends a deep cavernous path that erupts into a colorful, shimmering grotto- a benevolent shaman at its potent magnetic core.

Above ground the annual festival of the Mongol tribes unfolds as a vast and varied living artwork- rapturously beautiful, unexpected and dichotomous, reconstructing the object of its inspiration, life itself.

A cycle fulfilled, the festival, season and story come to a conclusion. The women are escorted across the desert to the train that will take them out of this magical realm, back into a sense of time that can only go violently and mono-dimensionally forward. The vagabond has chosen to remain. Astride her pony, costumed in silky vest and fur-trimmed hat, she blends seamlessly into the Mongol tribe, waving her former comrades farewell.

With the reliability and exactitude of a metronome Lady Windermere divines and dictates foible and fact as she sips tea from a lidded cup, ensconced in the Salon Car of her oriental counterpart- a contemporary avatar of the warrior princess, stylishly dressed for the business world of Paris. One last glance back reveals a single horse and rider galloping frantically toward the lumbering train and, with flawless precision, the vagabond leaps into the waiting arms of the knowing Lady. Like the frau she, too, has surrendered to a freeing vision: that it is more important that the dream rings true. She makes the best of it, becoming the manager of a Mongolian-themed restaurant.

Ottinger, who also wrote and filmed "Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia", fashions a creation hard to describe: tender and joyful, funny and knowing, unafraid of darkness, always inclusive. What looks at first like a kaleidoscopic patchwork of infinite detail- from an impossibly heartfelt and campy performance of "So Long Tootsie, Goodbye" to a matter-of-fact on-screen, real-time ritual animal sacrifice in broad and glorious daylight- is more synthesis than collage. Through the prism of Ottinger's unique sensibility the spectrum of discrete elements composing her story co-mingle into a bright and singular vision.