“Worth watching for the cast (period drama heaven), and the bonnets and cloaks and corsets and all the rest, but it ultimately fails to deliver where it most matters.”…. “Effie Gray can effie off.”
Yup, I did watch Effie Gray on Netflix over the weekend. Another wasted hour plus of my life, though not completely without pleasure given the visual splendor of the scenery in Scotland and Venice, of all places, and the magic of whoever was responsible for costumes.
Or maybe not totally wasted. It did make me think how intelligent people like Emma Thompson (I’m a fan,) who wrote the script and also plays a supporting role in the movie (with more facial expressions in her short appearances than Dakota Fanning, our heroine, musters in the entire film – come to think of it, she had 2, one with tears, one without) manage to ignore the deeper truth while fixating on one that fits with the Zeitgeist.
Ok, that was too long a sentence. Let me be more succinct. Effie Gray (1828 – 1897) was the love interest – at age 12 – of noted art critic, writer and complex human being John Ruskin (1819 – 1900.) Married to him when she was 19. Rejected by him in all and every aspect of marriage for the next 6 years. She rails against his parents who have an unhealthy hold over him (they were first cousins who married each other), and a Victorian-era establishment that tells women they have to accept their lot. She risks the downfall of her bankrupt parents who are dependent on Ruskin’s generosity, and insists on the passivity of a meek adorer, the painter Millais – eventually, in one big feminist swoop she fights for the annulment of the marriage due to her husband’s unwillingness to consummate it.
Success! Against all odds! (Eventually she marries Millais and has 8 children with him and manages his career quite successfully, even getting back into the good graces of the Queen. We are not granted viewing the happy ending in the movie. Nor the comeuppance awaiting Ruskin, either. The movie pretty much bombed, needless to say.)
The whole marriage dissolution was a huge scandal in its time, but the film provides only subtle hints, if that, at what was going on, so little spark in any of the characters, that you wonder what the fuss was all about. A young woman putting her foot down, when most didn’t? Ok.
The problem could be solved by focusing on the real center of the whole debacle – Ruskin – but we don’t want to give much more time to dead white males, do we? So we cast about some pseudo-Freudian hints (his mother gives her grown-up son a bath/ he flees the room when seeing an adult female naked for the first time in his life/ he takes a creepy interest in a 10-year old young sister, etc.) and then celebrate Effie’s courage.
Ruskin’s marriage cannot be understood outside of the context that, after Gray left him, he fell in love, truly, deeply, again with another child, this time aged 9, Rose La Touche. He proposed to her when she turned 18, she had him wait for 3 more years, and then refused. Her early death a few years later threw him into mental illness and steep decline. The whole topic of idealized purity and virginity by a repressed man in repressive times, his longing obsessively channeled into his admiration and support for pre-Raphaelite painting style, and later into religious conversions, would explain so much more than just being depicted as an emotionally frigid villain who is turned off by his wife’s pubic hair.
The controversy over potential pedophilia – biographers and critics at least agree he did no engage in sexual relations with children or, for that matter, anyone else, – distracts from the intellectual riches of the man, also not exactly spelled out in the film. Ruskin wrote hundreds of essays and books, breaking ground both with art criticism and later with radical views on political economy and social reform. He was revered by the Greats of his time, from Tolstoy to Proust to Gandhi, from T.S.Eliot to Ezra Pound; his work influenced Le Corbusier and Gropius, and more painters than I can list. His engagement for workers’ rights (though insisting on continued hierarchical structures of society) was quite progressive.
Not that the courage of the historical Effie Gray shouldn’t be admired. But the complexity of the psychological and societal interactions cannot and should not be reduced to what we are served here.
Should have read a book about Ruskin or Gray instead. Here are some to choose from – take your pick.
Photographs from Venice since they show some of the same views from the movie. Or maybe the building look all alike…..
Millais’s painting of the death of Ophelia from Hamlet is one of the most famous Pre-Raphaelite works. The first music embracing Shakespeare that came to mind was Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Here is the overture, composed ca. 25 years before the painting.
There it was again. Bobbing for seconds above the water, then disappearing, leaving a bunch of seagulls screaming in its wake. The head, then the rump of a sea lion, about 100 miles upstream from where it was supposed to be, surfacing as little speck in front of me in the Willamette river yesterday.
Sea lions are driven upriver by hunger, and find a veritable feast in salmon that return to their spawning grounds. To protect the fish whose numbers are in dire decline due to human intervention, people now kill the sea lions, whose numbers are on the rise, due to human intervention.
“Sea-lion populations were once declining, too, but they have rebounded under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Such is the challenge for humans trying to manage vast, interconnected ecosystems. Put a thumb on one part of the scale, and something somewhere else goes out of whack. Try to correct that, and you create another problem. Eventually, you end up with a policy of fisheries managers killing sea lions.” (Ref.)
Walking downstream, my thoughts stayed on hunger. A passage from the book I am currently reading, Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann, had uncomfortably lodged in my brain. It described a man condemned to die for witchcraft having the first real meal ever – soup, meat, cake – as his last meal. He realizes then that he has been hungry all his life with no exception, an awarenesses only revealed in the hours before his church tribunal – imposed execution.
Put a thumb on one part of the scale, and something somewhere else goes out of whack. Set in early 17th century Europe, in the wake of the disastrous 30 Years’ war (1618- 1648), the novel weaves a tale with the help of its protagonist, the trickster Tyll Ulenspiegel (Till Eulenspiegel,) that draws us deeply into a world of hunger, catastrophe, superstition, religious fervor and conspiracy theories. In some ways, one might argue, not quite unlike our own.
It was Emperor Ferdinand II, a staunch Catholic, who put his thumb on the scale, trying to force his religion on the uneasy detente of Europeans states that had emerged after the upheavals of the Reformation. Hell ensued, and as with all catastrophes in human history, drove people into ever cruel and persecutory forms of thinking and behavior, seeking salvation in authority, often church-associated, and scape goats often linked to the devil and magic.
Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World, a small novel linking the 19th century explorer and mathematician Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Gauss respectively, was a literary sensation. When it appeared in 2006, it replaced Harry Potter and Dan Brown from the charts in Germany, no small feat for a historical novel. It had to do something right, given that it elicited major praise across the literary reviews of the globe and major condemnation by the folks at the American Mathematical Society.
The book delivered easy-access, colorfully wrapped, inventively speculated bites of historical facts. You felt smarter afterwards without having to stretch your brain all too much. Tyll, I have to say, is much different. Although it echoes Kehlmann’s earlier writing with its reliance on wit and comical relief, it is much darker, much more opaque, and in some ways much smarter in its subtle ways of drawing parallels between a world from the past and our own. It makes your brain work, while your heart beats faster, more defensively.
A smart review in The New Yorker spells out the focus on magic and survival. It links to historical views of Tyll Ulenspiegel as “a dangerous vagrant, a folk hero, a journeyman magician, a bawdy circus performer, a jester and prankster who, like the Shakespearean Fool, recklessly needled those in power into looking honestly at themselves.” It also provides a perceptive enumeration of all the interesting characters populating the novel, testament to the author’s depth and breadth at this go-around, since historical sources to fall back on are much sparser.
My own reading was hooked more by the narrative line throughout the book of how unequal distribution of riches and power – from the village level to the international state players, the intra-religion conflicts to those between world religions, between emerging scientific rationality and religion-fervored superstition – affect human behavior and its psychological consequences.
Hunger creates catastrophe, a hunger driven by the inhuman conditions of a world divided into those who hold the goods and those who fight for daily survival. Without giving away too much, the small child Tyll, during a traumatic event, is driven by hunger to sacrifice the only thing he is attached to. The psychological consequences forcibly stamp out what we call conscience. Tyll, for no fault of his own, morphs into an amoral and untrustworthy hero, so vividly imagined and described that you see the world through his eyes, and blanche.
How many children are driven by hunger, by daily experience of unfairness and injustice, into life paths that end in catastrophe? Finding the escape as a jester (or a tycoon, a rap star or a sports hero) is the exception to the rule, thus making it into the canon of cautionary or triumphant tales, I gather. Well, here is one number: 13.9 million children in the US alone lived in a household characterized by child food insecurity as of late June. School lunch programs were already struggling to meet rising demand before the pandemic. With COVID-19 now keeping children out of school, many don’t have access to school lunches at all. (Ref.) And we don’t even know the dark numbers, or what it will look like when people start to be evicted from their homes by the end of the year. Nor can we wrap our minds around the likely numbers in even poorer parts of the world.
And no Willamette to fish from…..
Time to think seriously about forms of re-distribution.
Instead of a poem I am posting a short essay today, found here, in Vanity Fair of all places, a publication that has soared lately with progressive editorial decisions. My choice is not coincidental. Kiese Laymon‘s books, Heavy – An American Memoir, and How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, an amazing collection of essays, are already wrapped on my desk, waiting to be delivered come Hannukah and Christmas. (Note the website link offers alternatives to Amazon: Black-owned bookstores.)
Laymon’s descriptions bring us to places located within our own country yet utterly foreign to the privileged existence. They educate and enchant with a brilliant mind, and a gift for story-telling that matches the greats in the literary history of this country. Crystal vision originally referred to hippies or a free spirit doing their thing with the crystals; I like to think of his writing as a gaze penetrating through the opaqueness of the glass, willing a view into clarity.
I also was captured by the video mentioned in the essay below, when it first appeared on my feed, soon to burst into variations across the globe. I knew the Fleetwood Mac song by heart all those decades ago…) That explains today’s musical choice. Photography covers street performers and musicians in Louisiana since I never made it to Mississippi.
Early this morning, my mailman read me a story. Two stories actually. I met my mailman, Shawn, in July. While sitting on my porch, Shawn had walked up and asked if Biggie Smalls was my favorite MC. Before I could answer, Shawn said he noticed the portrait of Biggie in my sunroom. Shawn placed my delivery on the steps and asked why I had so many books delivered. I told Shawn I was a teacher and writer. Shawn told me he’d never taught but that he was a writer too. I sat out on that porch listening to Shawn rap one and a half songs about his “old life” in Kansas City and recite the synopses of two projects he needed to finish.
“I’m not sure if they’re screenplays or novels or short stories,” he told me.
This morning, I listened over speakerphone as Shawn read the first five handwritten pages of the two stories he started on my porch. I lay on my bed, the back of my head buried deep into a down pillow that 10 minutes earlier I held like a soft someone I hoped would not leave. I never dreamed that my mailman asking me about the most effective use of third-person point of view would be what pleasure on a summer Sunday morning felt like.
Like so many of my friends, my past eight months have been spent dodging death, mourning the dead, creating art, and loving Black people. I’ve lingered in socially distant conversations with strangers. I’ve cried and laughed at what made me cry and laugh. I’ve made recipeless meals that were so nasty, all I could do was giggle in the middle of every bite. I’ve tenderly touched parts of my body I’d forgotten. I’ve found that pulling the hairs out of my corona beard is actually soothing. I’ve reread, rewritten, revised. I’ve done all of this not simply in the hopes of feeling good, but because I long to feel less like we are going to die tomorrow.
I am a Black southern writer from Mississippi. That is my superpower. Aloneness is our fuel. Loneliness our fire. But this, whatever this is, hurts in a new way. Folks across the political spectrum have talked a lot about normalcy this year, prognosticating when and how we’ll get back to it. In response, there have been heaps of brilliant essays, speeches, and webinars about how the obliteration of an inequitable normal is the first step in creating a place where abusers of power are held accountable and the vulnerable actually have equitable access to healthy choices and first, second, and third chances.
When this new normal is created or accepted, I wonder what will happen to sentimentality—that gorgeous monster James Baldwin called the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, the mark of dishonesty—in art, artists, and the audiences who give us life. How will we distinguish what feels good from what is supposed to feel good when all of our skies are orange and every stranger’s touch is a violation?
After not having touched another human for over three months, the night before I talked with Shawn, I drove to one of the only restaurants in town that still only offers curbside service. I touched the finger of a masked woman who brought Thai fried rice with tofu level 4 to my truck. I tipped her as much as the meal costs and thanked her for committing to curbside. She put the tip in her pocket and thanked me for committing to her restaurant. There’s a sentimental version of this story where, exploitation be damned, we both wait until we are out of each other’s sight to clean our hands, take off our masks and nod our heads slowly up and down at the grit, grind, and grandeur of Americans.
I did not live that version of the story. The kind woman who accepted my money went directly from my truck to the car next to me. I cried alone in my truck.
Later that night, I saw that someone sent me a clip of a brother who goes by the name of doggface208 gliding on a skateboard from the highway on-ramp with a half-drunk 64-ounce bottle of Ocean Spray Cran-Raspberry juice in one hand and a phone recording himself in the other. Sixteen seconds into the video, doggface208 bends at the waist and sings into the air. I watched the clip a second time with sound, and everything changed. I notice doggface208’s familiar nod to us, and really him, is so in the pocket of the song.
As Stevie Nicks sings, “Now here we go again, you say you want your freedom,” I notice trucks, factories, and two tattooed feathers behind doggface208’s ear. I see yellow and white lines marking the margins of the highway. I see how baggy and plush his gray sweatshirt is. I notice the familiar way he smacks his lips, relishing the punchy sweetness.
I feel, with every ounce of joy in my body, doggface208’s acceptance of fear and joy when he bends and lip-synchs the lyrics, “It’s only right that you should play the way you feel it.…” I’d heard, and loved, Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” thousands of times, but I’d never felt the freedom in loneliness I felt when watching doggface208’s TikTok.
The video didn’t make me forget that many of us are dying, dead, or mourning. The clip gave me another portal of entry into pleasure and movement. Doggface208 bended, and really blended, my gendered, raced, classed, and placed expectations of revolutionary desire, and art.
“But listen carefully to the sound of your loneliness,” is the next line of the song we do not hear.
Three mornings later, I am sitting in front of a smudged computer screen. Sixty-eight mostly Black high school students from Baltimore’s City Neighbors High School have invited me into what in 2020 we call a classroom. I am expected to read a chapter from my new book and teach the young people about the multiple uses of point of view in narrative art. I do not want to do what is expected of me because what is expected of me will not feel good to anyone.
I ask the students if they’d rather talk about fear and joy and concrete language. The only rule of the exercise is there are no abstractions allowed.
Two hours later, my computer, our classroom, is closed.
I am on my knees wondering why I am energized, satisfied, but not sobbing. Sixty-eight young people from Baltimore did what our geriatric presidential candidates and moderator could not do the night before. They used word patterns they’d never used. They talked freshly about fear of isolation. They collectively unraveled how capitalism encourages a speed that makes love, pleasure, and actual contemplation nearly impossible. They wondered why school didn’t teach them how to gracefully lose and graciously win. They made critiques of the nation and critiques of themselves. They listened to each other toe the thinnest of lines between yearning for pleasure and aching for escape. They accepted that they are worthy of the most exquisite joy. They argued vigorously about the ethics of seeking pleasure at the expense of essential workers, like many of their parents, who put their lives on the line for a tomorrow filled with remedies to overdue rent, grocery bills, bludgeoning debt. They wondered how to make essential labor into pleasurable labor for essential laborers when the nation insists on treating them as expendable at best, and big-hearted collateral damage at worst.
Those 68 12th graders made themselves feel good. Then they thanked each other for making themselves feel good, all the while pulverizing my understanding of sentimentality.
Later that night, I am sent an essay I read the first time one day after September 11, 2001, called “Blood, Bread, and Poetry.”
“Nothing need be lost,” the exquisite Adrienne Rich wrote. “No beauty sacrificed. The heart does not turn to stone.”
I love Adrienne Rich. I have believed Adrienne Rich my entire reading life. I am not sure I believe this Adrienne Rich passage anymore. Beauty is absolutely sacrificed. Our hearts often do turn to stone. This arduous acceptance is a radical pleasure, a sad but sensuous reminder that we are worthy of looking forward to responsibly feeling good in a world of ruin, where presidents shed their COVID-filled masks, wash their nasty hands of death, and the blood drips from the sky.
When the rain washes us clean, we will know. We will feel so good. I believe that. If we find, however, that the rain has actually left more bruises, soaked us in more sour than we ever imagined, and if that bruised sour feels so good, it is then that the pleasurable work actually begins. Many of our hearts are stone. Much of the beauty here has been sacrificed, and most of it stolen. There is no commercial, doctor, or wellness regimen to smudge that truth. Home is gone, but there is responsible pleasure to be found in the wreckage, in the pathways of the wrecked, and in all the goodness beyond where we’ve been allowed to discover.
Everything, finally, is lost.
Music today from the album Rumors.
Here is the original TikTok clip mentioned in the essay, featuring Nathan Apodaca, who is half Mexican, half Northern-Arapaho.
And here is a report on what dissemination of content on the Internet at times accomplishes. It is actually scary, because it feeds into the “everyone can get rich” myth of the American Dream. It is also encouraging because individual creativity echoes across the globe when it previously would have been restricted to the hard conditions of life on an Idaho potato farm.
I had a strange dream last night. A dear friend finally managed to introduce me to Ursula LeGuin, who was somehow still alive, still subject of my adulation, still looking at me with barely restrained irritation like that time when I asked her a pesky question at a public poetry reading at Broadway Books, years ago. (And no, I don’t remember what I asked.) Here, in my dream, was a chance to start fresh and the most pressing thing that came out of my mouth was: “What do you make of The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again?” Needless to say, I woke up before I got an answer.
The novel of that name was written by M John Harrison, one of the few contemporary authors who I would unhesitatingly put in Le Guin’s league, both as a writer and as someone who dares to jump across conventional genre borders to create amalgams that allow us to see the world from new perspectives. I am currently enrapt by his most recent book, and not alone: the novel won the coveted 2020 Goldsmiths Prize, a prize “that was established to celebrate the qualities of creative daring and to reward fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form. The annual prize of £10,000 is awarded to a book that is deemed genuinely novel and which embodies the spirit of invention that characterizes the genre at its best.”
Like LeGuin, Harrison is a master of mood, a welder of worlds that lure us with similarities and then snare us with differences, a wordsmith of poetic proportions who seduces with gorgeous imagery to have us fall into a hole of cognitive dissonance once the underlying catastrophe claws its way into our consciousness.
The new book, his first novel in 8 years or so, is not for the faint of heart or short of patience, echoes of LeGuin here as well. In turn described as unsettling, uncanny, sinister or eerie, it reminds me most of a German term that is translated into English with all the above adjectives: unheimlich. A literal translation would be not like home, but the word carries the same emotional reference in German as its English familiars, something dangerous, creepy – as so many unfamiliar things are perceived.
The brilliance of the novel lies in the fact that it manages to mirror “home” after all, despite or because of all the strange things going on, a home that itself has become unheimlich. The narrative follows a number of characters in an England under the Brexit spell, or perhaps beyond it, fallen out of time, a country paralyzed, disturbed and given to conspiracy theories. Are the strange, aquatic/human things believed to rise their head (again) and enter the land from sunken places, products of the heated imagination of a country in decline or are they all too real? Are they echos of reactions to loss of imperial status, or psychological responses to a system that has turned a threat? Fishy, in every meaning of the word.
Creatures with a watery provenance who slither half-way visible through the English landscape link, of course, back to traditional English fare, The Waterbabies, a book that is prominently represented in the novel and its dedications. The Reverend Charles Kingsley’s 1862 novel about the young chimney sweep, Tom, who finds redemption from the horrors of his work by means of becoming an aquatic creature (really he drowns and joins a fairyland of dead children), was dealing with social Darwinism, class divisions and health issues, including child labor. (Despite its vanguard open-mindedness towards science, it fell eventually into disrepute because it had large streaks of anti-Semitism, and anti-Irish/Catholics/Americans sentiments.)
It is these issues that the Sunken Land tackles, issues rising up again in a world wrecked by increasing divides between the rich and poor. The novel does so in less didactic, moralizing way than the 1862 predecessor. We have to figure it all out ourselves, tangentially reminded of the dilapidated state of the world, while we follow two hapless protagonists who are adrift, quite literally unmoored, in the real world, while the conspiratorial world splashes and gurgles against their habitat.
If you think that all sounds too depressing, let me assure you, it is not. Well, it is intermittently only. It is a rollercoaster of wit, detailed observation, clever mystery and something that the author could not have anticipated during the time of writing: a perfect description of how it feels to be stuck in isolation limbo within the Covid-scenarios. The fluidity of time and space, the feeling of suffocation, the sense of coincidence defining the remaining options, all captured to a T. Elements that are paralyzing and elements that are freeing mix and mingle, and much human contact is enacted through remote means of communication.
Every bit of ill-at-ease that you experience when reading The Sunken Land is counterbalanced by language so powerful that it makes you jittery. Well, that is so for me, when I read yet another chapter at 2 in the morning with my own sleep disrupted. The language is like the water that is source of so much speculation in the book: at times slow-moving like a mud-filled, sluggish southern waterway, at times peaceful like a forest pond, at times sparkling like a fresh brook in the Cascades, always fluid, always moving us along, often keeping a distorting lens in front of our understanding, like looking through a glass of water. It bribes with beauty before we realize it can be drowning.
Here are some of my favorite samples – descriptions of light:
“Gold light, dimly luxurious.. //In the gold light, the bruised eye looked like an embedded prune.// …asleep in a wash of moonlight a curious hyacinthine color – as if it had been stored for later release by the paintwork of the building across…//…elsewhere a curious kind of light – in which several colors were represented but only faintly…//later, thundery light swung in, flat to the flagstones, to which it lent a sullen gloss…//low-ceilinged rooms, where the light flowed slowly from wall to wall like silt//.. glittering under pastel sunlight with a sense of dawn in a foreign country..//..kind of late night city light that, while failing to relieve the darkness in any way, seems to pour in from every direction at once..//..wintry light slanted into the upstream reach at a surprising angle from the broken edges of the clouds, leaving the air architectural yet transparent between darkening banks.//
No hyacinths in November. The Elderberry was as close I could get to the bluish light.
I tell you that painter of light J.M.W. Turner would have had a field day, painting all these descriptions, or maybe Harrison put into words what Turner had already painted…
In any case, if you are up to vicarious travel to a place at once familiar and new, a psychological landscape that can be found here as well as across the pond, a realm that will feed every synapse used in practicing imagination, this is the book for you.
Photographs of autumn light and water birds rather than water babies from yesterday out at a windy, rain-swept Forest Grove.
Here is a sample of Turner’s British landscapes that you will (re)discover in the novel, with a medley of classical music.
The red death had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal — the madness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease, were incidents of half an hour.
But Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his crenellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts.
They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “Red Death.”
It was toward the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence.
It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. But first let me tell of the rooms in which it was held. There were seven — an imperial suite, In many palaces, however, such suites form a long and straight vista, while the folding doors slide back nearly to the walls on either hand, so that the view of the whole extant is scarcely impeded. Here the case was very different; as might have been expected from the duke’s love of the “bizarre.” The apartments were so irregularly disposed that the vision embraced but little more than one at a time. There was a sharp turn at the right and left, in the middle of each wall, a tall and narrow Gothic window looked out upon a closed corridor of which pursued the windings of the suite. These windows were of stained glass whose color varied in accordance with the prevailing hue of the decorations of the chamber into which it opened. That at the eastern extremity was hung, for example, in blue — and vividly blue were its windows. The second chamber was purple in its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes were purple. The third was green throughout, and so were the casements. The fourth was furnished and lighted with orange — the fifth with white — the sixth with violet. The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue. But in this chamber only, the color of the windows failed to correspond with the decorations. The panes were scarlet — a deep blood color. Now in no one of any of the seven apartments was there any lamp or candelabrum, amid the profusion of golden ornaments that lay scattered to and fro and depended from the roof. There was no light of any kind emanating from lamp or candle within the suite of chambers. But in the corridors that followed the suite, there stood, opposite each window, a heavy tripod, bearing a brazier of fire, that projected its rays through the tinted glass and so glaringly lit the room. And thus were produced a multitude of gaudy and fantastic appearances. But in the western or back chamber the effect of the fire-light that streamed upon the dark hangings through the blood-tinted panes was ghastly in the extreme, and produced so wild a look upon the countenances of those who entered, that there were few of the company bold enough to set foot within its precincts at all.
It was within this apartment, also, that there stood against the western wall, a gigantic clock of ebony. It pendulum swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang; and when the minute-hand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to be stricken, there came from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical, but of so peculiar a note and emphasis that, at each lapse of an hour, the musicians of the orchestra were constrained to pause, momentarily, in their performance, to hearken to the sound; and thus the waltzers perforce ceased their evolutions; and there was a brief disconcert of the whole gay company; and while the chimes of the clock yet rang. it was observed that the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as if in confused revery or meditation. But when the echoes had fully ceased, a light laughter at once pervaded the assembly; the musicians looked at each other and smiled as if at their own nervousness and folly, and made whispering vows, each to the other, that the next chiming of the clock should produce in them no similar emotion; and then, after the lapse of sixty minutes (which embrace three thousand and six hundred seconds of Time that flies), there came yet another chiming of the clock, and then were the same disconcert and tremulousness and meditation as before.
But, in spite of these things, it was a gay and magnificent revel. The tastes of the duke were peculiar. He had a fine eye for color and effects. He disregarded the “decora” of mere fashion. His plans were bold and fiery, and his conceptions glowed with barbaric lustre. There are some who would have thought him mad. His followers felt that he was not. It was necessary to hear and see and touch him to be sure he was not.
He had directed, in great part, the movable embellishments of the seven chambers, upon occasion of this great fete; and it was his own guiding taste which had given character to the masqueraders. Be sure they were grotesque. There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm — much of what has been seen in “Hernani.” There were arabesque figures with unsuited limbs and appointments. There were delirious fancies such as the madman fashions. There were much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust. To and fro in the seven chambers stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams. And these the dreams — writhed in and about, taking hue from the rooms, and causing the wild music of the orchestra to seem as the echo of their steps. And, anon, there strikes the ebony clock which stands in the hall of the velvet. And then, for a moment, all is still, and all is silent save the voice of the clock. The dreams are stiff-frozen as they stand. But the echoes of the chime die away — they have endured but an instant — and a light half-subdued laughter floats after them as they depart. And now the music swells, and the dreams live, and writhe to and fro more merrily than ever, taking hue from the many-tinted windows through which stream the rays of the tripods. But to the chamber which lies most westwardly of the seven there are now none of the maskers who venture, for the night is waning away; and there flows a ruddier light through the blood-colored panes; and the blackness of the sable drapery appalls; and to him whose foot falls on the sable carpet, there comes from the near clock of ebony a muffled peal more solemnly emphatic than any which reaches their ears who indulge in the more remote gaieties of the other apartments.
But these other apartments were densely crowded, and in them beat feverishly the heart of life. And the revel went whirlingly on, until at length there commenced the sounding of midnight upon the clock. And then the music ceased, as I have told; and the evolutions of the waltzers were quieted; and there was an uneasy cessation of all things as before. But now there were twelve strokes to be sounded by the bell of the clock; and thus it happened, perhaps that more of thought crept, with more of time into the meditations of the thoughtful among those who revelled. And thus too, it happened, that before the last echoes of the last chime had utterly sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked figure which had arrested the attention of no single individual before. And the rumor of this new presence having spread itself whisperingly around, there arose at length from the whole company a buzz, or murmur, of horror, and of disgust.
In an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted, it may well be supposed that no ordinary appearance could have excited such sensation. In truth the masquerade license of the night was nearly unlimited; but the figure in question had out-Heroded Herod, and gone beyond the bounds of even the prince’s indefinite decorum. There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made. The whole company, indeed, seemed now deeply to feel that in the costume and bearing of the stranger neither wit nor propriety existed. The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revellers around. But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood — and his broad brow, with all the features of his face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.
When the eyes of Prince Prospero fell on this spectral image (which, with a slow and solemn movement, as if more fully to sustain its role, stalked to and fro among the waltzers) he was seen to be convulsed, in the first moment with a strong shudder either of terror or distaste; but in the next, his brow reddened with rage.
“Who dares” — he demanded hoarsely of the courtiers who stood near him — “who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery? Seize him and unmask him — that we may know whom we have to hang, at sunrise, from the battlements!”
It was in the eastern or blue chamber in which stood Prince Prospero as he uttered these words. They rang throughout the seven rooms loudly and clearly, for the prince was a bold and robust man, and the music had become hushed at the waving of his hand.
It was in the blue room where stood the prince, with a group of pale courtiers by his side. At first, as he spoke, there was a slight rushing movement of this group in the direction of the intruder, who, at the moment was also near at hand, and now, with deliberate and stately step, made closer approach to the speaker. But from a certain nameless awe with which the mad assumptions of the mummer had inspired the whole party, there were found none who put forth a hand to seize him; so that, unimpeded, he passed within a yard of the prince’s person; and while the vast assembly, as with one impulse, shrank from the centers of the rooms to the walls, he made his way uninterruptedly, but with the same solemn and measured step which had distinguished him from the first, through the blue chamber to the purple — to the purple to the green — through the green to the orange — through this again to the white — and even thence to the violet, ere a decided movement had been made to arrest him. It was then, however, that the Prince Prospero, maddened with rage and the shame of his own momentary cowardice, rushed hurriedly through the six chambers, while none followed him on account of a deadly terror that had seized upon all. He bore aloft a drawn dagger, and had approached, in rapid impetuosity, to within three or four feet of the retreating figure, when the latter, having attained the extremity of the velvet apartment, turned suddenly and confronted his pursuer. There was a sharp cry — and the dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet, upon which most instantly afterward, fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero. Then summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng of the revellers at once threw themselves into the black apartment, and seizing the mummer whose tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements and corpse- like mask, which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form.
And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
Happy Monday ….. here is a good site for all Poe related curiosity
Photographs are of graffiti found in surrounding SF neighborhood, with a few masks added…
The last book I recommended, in April no less, was Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King. It has made it onto the Booker Prize Short List by now, and deservedly so. The interwoven tale of women’s participation in Ethiopia’s defense against Mussolini’s invasion, the role of war photographers in the fascistic propaganda machine, and the redemption of individuals who paid a price for war that no human should possibly carry, was breathtaking.
These days I am reading another tale of resilience writ large, a novel in a wholly different category, yet the perfect book for our strange times. Kingdomtide by Rye Curtis is a genre-crossing adventure tale that celebrates the human spirit, compassion, good deeds and the power of belief. In case that sounds off-putting as being too goody two-shoes, rest assured: this is a weird, twisted, often bitingly funny romp involving a 72-year old prissy Presbyterian plane-crash survivor that killed her husband of 54 years and an alcoholic park ranger in the Bitterroot Mountains in Montana, who divorced her husband now serving time for trigamy, and works with a motley crew of misfits, sexual deviants, and general human jetsam.
Just the kind of thing that your poor brain, overwhelmed by the daily news, can process without being too strained, realizing after a while that you are not reading adventure trash after all but a smart, psychologically attuned, insightful depiction of people rising to intense challenges. People who restore our presently endangered faith in humanity.
The plane crash happens on the beginning of Kingdomtide, a term I had to look up. It was a liturgical time period reaching from Pentecost (late August) to shortly before Advent, installed by several American Protestant denominations in the 1930s to foster a commonly shared topic among the diverse congregations. The focus was on God’s kingdom and the need to do good works during these days now known as Ordinary Time in the Church calendar.
Well, good works can be found in abandon as the story unfolds, often despite the lack of or different intentions. Ordinary times they ain’t though. Just like we stumble through our Covid- and government-induced deprivations, overwhelmed by drama and tragedy not of our own making, taking recourse in all kinds of mind-dulling things, alcohol for many among them, the novel’s characters have different and sometimes destructive ways of dealing with significant odds laid out against them.
The story is told in two voices, that of Cloris Waldrip, the elderly survivor, who recalls the unfolding events from the porch of her assisted living residence, now, 20 years later, in her 90s. The other view is Deb Lewis’, the ranger, a Merlot-doused wreck of a woman who nonetheless doggedly pursues a search for Cloris when all hope is abandoned by everyone else.
Most of the reviews I read seemed to agree (though I dissent) that Cloris’ retelling is the more substantive one, while Deb’s perspective is often drowned in a coterie of side characters all of whom are creatively invented and absorbing a lot of literary oxygen in their colorfulness. The author’s’ imagination is a a sight to behold, you can firmly see Curtis stomping at the bit to get yet one more funny or caustic or shocking detail into the narrative thread.
It’s interesting to see a young, male author to imbue a 70 plus-year old Christian, Texan wife with a consistent voice. There are hints at rebelliousness, and also hints at previous adventurers or strong characters in her family tree, which allows us to be persuaded that she had the guts to survive this ordeal, the crash, the loss of life, the eventual treck through the cliffs and forests, mountain lions, starvation, hypothermia, mysterious companions and all. But overall she talks and thinks like an old lady – or more precisely what a young person would think an old lady would sound like. I think one of the greatest discoveries throughout our lives is how little we change from who we were then to who we are now – when it is so often assumed by the younger set that something decidedly decrepit, or conservative, or prissy appears with age. Correct me if I’m wrong!
Deb Lewis, on the other hand, is the seemingly weak counterpart to the headstrong septuagenarian, and yet the author manages to imbue her with a sense of strength despite her vulnerability and willingness to give up on her self that shines long after you finished reading. As one of the characters in the book observes: you can never really tell who a person is, just looking at her from the window. You need to know the context, and Curtis shines in creating that context with subtlety, letting you stumble on the psychological discoveries, rather than flagging them.
In any case, I found myself engrossed in the tale, and enriched by how much goodness the author believes resides in humans even under the worst conditions. Being able to laugh, something not coming easily to me these days, was worth the read alone. He will not be on the Booker Prize list any time soon, but the talent exhibited in this first novel might very well carry the author there eventually.
Photographs are of Eucalyptus trees, found everywhere in the Bay area, with their pungent smell and bark-shedding trunks that reflect the light. Placeholders for whatever grows in the Bitterroot Mountains.
“A sense of purpose returned to him: he must wind his watch. He pulled it out. It had stopped. Till that moment, he had been perplexed, or angry, or cut to the heart; but he had not felt intimidated: it had been too storylike for that. Now he fell into the blankness of despair. He was lost, lost! His watch, sole ally of his rational man, had stopped.” –From Foxcastle, in the story collection Kingdom of Elfins, by Sylvia Townsend Warner.
One of the hallmarks of serious crises is the strange shrinking of time horizons, with only occasional tunnels linking to specific points in the past. For the most part the experienced time is blurred, circumscribed by a yesterday, today, tomorrow, and no sense of an extended future. The fear of envisioning scenarios that might not come to pass, if too positive, or are too frightening to contemplate, if negative, locks the mind into the diffuseness of the moment.
The mantra of “a day at a time” is in some ways descriptive then just as much as prescriptive. In this week’s challenge to find positive things I tried to recall how the future, after all, exists, and is often filled with extraordinary surprises. As good an example as anything is the life and work of Sylvia Townsend Warner, a musicologist, poet, novelist and rebel.
Her life itself during the times of the Bloomsbury Circle to the late 1970s when her work was regularly published in The New Yorker, would be material for a novel. She lived with a woman poet, Valentine Ackland, who these days might be considered a transexual, who had multiple extra-relationship affairs, and who she nursed until her death from virulent breast cancer. It was in her 80s that Townsend Warner decided to write a collection of stories far removed from her usual fare, envisioning a kingdom of elves and other mythic creatures, nasty ones as much as anything else. The stories, Kingdom of Elfins (1977), are strange, peculiar, sometimes brutal, and testimony to the will of an artist to transcend boundaries and just do what she damn well pleases, late in life. A vision I cherish for my own future.
“In Kingdoms, Warner experiments with the excision of affect from the narrative process, producing stories which construct the narrative voice uncompromisingly as a voice of observation rather than identification. The playing field on which this is carried through is nothing less than a whole new fictional universe in the form of meticulously worked-out ‘Elfin’ worlds. The narratives’ observational stance unfolds itself as a disinterested ethnography of the strangeness of behaviours both human and non-human, radically decentring human perceptions and moral convictions in the process.”
Given my preoccupation with the shrinking of time right now, I chose one of her stories, Foxcastle, for us to read. It uses the old fairy tale trope of spending time in a different world, and then re-emerging into your own one, having grown old. (My mirror is my witness, believe me.) It also appealed to me because of the apt description of how the existence in a different time frame, exposed to forces that are unfamiliar in behavior and ways of interacting, also affects other psychological processes (see the quote at the beginning of today’s musings and the descriptions in the story) that previously defined us.
(For those who subscribe to The New Yorker, the full story is here.)
He could not imagine in what way he had offended them. Ever since he could remember, they had fascinated him. His nurse sang him to sleep with ballads about them; he pursued the hinds and shepherds on his father’s estate for stories of how they danced round the Cranach Loch, of the pebbles aimed by invisible hands that skipped over its surface in games of duck‐and‐drake, of how, on a sudden, they would leave all together, whirring their wings and whistling; how they stole butter from Mungo’s mother’s churn, hated sluttishness, danced rings into the grass; how, wearing mourning scarves, they were seen following the crazy Minister’s bier to the grave; how it was impossible for them to weep, how they must never be mentioned on a Good Friday, how wary one must be not to offend them by pulling as much as a dead bough for fuel from a thorn tree. When he was sent to the University of Aberdeen and could get at books, he read everything he could find on their subject: that they were the scattered remnants of Satan’s host, were a superstition, were the old Picts; and reading the English poets—a fanciful lot—that they slept in cast snake‐skins, drank from acorn‐cup goblets, sat on mushrooms, drove teams of mice. Grounded on ballads and folklore, he discounted most of this, except as evidence substantiating their existence—since to be dismissed as a superstition proves a preliminary belief. Time went on, he took his degree as MA, and was appointed to the Lectureship in Rhetoric. The learned life suited James Sutherland so well that he was careful not to jeopardize his hold on it by mentioning his private opinions. Yet sometimes they broke from him, as when in a Disputation with the Professor of History, a fanatic for the Picts, he found himself being an Apologist for the Kingdom of Elfin—and thereafter was spoken of behind his back as Fairy Sutherland.
During the summer vacation, when many of the scholars went home to help get in the harvest, the Professor of History travelled about in search of Pictish remains—the likeliest sites for them being the so‐called Fairy Knowes, which proved conclusively that fairies were imperfectly remembered Picts. The Lecturer in Rhetoric also travelled about for his own purposes, and was not above examining Pictish remains, in case they afforded a small footprint or a strain of harp music. If, as sometimes happened, the two men met, they conversed on blameless subjects, such as the prevalence of horse‐flies or the clear atmosphere which presages rain; and parted. But in his forty‐ ninth summer James Sutherland had Foxcastle to himself. One might say it came to him as a reward of faith. A visiting Lecturer in Jurisprudence had remarked that, whether or no fairies existed, they influenced leaseholds: the legendary teind to hell which bound fairies to offer a living sacrifice every seven years making many tenants unwilling to begin a seven‐year lease, or a lease of multiple sevens. On the offchance of finding a fairy legally recorded, James Sutherland used to buy bundles of old law papers off the scrivener’s stall in the market. Nothing came of it till the day he saw the name Foxcastle in a disputed ownership of a sheep walk in Peeblesshire. Foxcastle. Folks Castle. The meaning jumped to the eye. It was a long journey to make on foot, but if it had been as far as the Indies he would have made it.
Foxcastle was a hill among other hills, steep‐sided, flattened at the top. If it had been a sheep walk that must be long since, for the heather had taken over, covering the summit and lapping down the sides. It was heather of long‐established growth, standing over knee‐high on thickened stems. As he was forcing his way through it he thought that the Professor of History would be hard put to it to trace any Pictish remains. He was still relishing the thought when he fell into a pit. He had got into a formation of peat hags, which started up from the heather like foes from an ambush. The stagnant water streaking between them reflected the sky with a savage blue. He scrambled out, none the worse except for wet feet and a twisted ankle, and with a sharpened appreciation of the nature of moorland peat: dry as a bone above, wet as corruption below. Walking more cautiously, he skirted the peat hags, and sat down on the western slope to shake the water out of his shoes and rub his ankle. He had never felt so imperially alone. In all the wide expanse around him there was no sign of man. Nothing moved except a few sheep on the opposite hillside and the burn flickering and rattling down the valley between. He watched a hawk flying in wide surveying circles overhead, saw it gather its flight into a poise and strike down on its kill. It was as though this imposed an edict of silence; not a small bird uttered. After a while he saw it lift nonchalantly away.
It was its own hawk. But manned hawks must often rise over Foxcastle. Fairies were known to go hawking, using merlins, he supposed, to bring down larks: a merlin would be proportionate. Angus the shepherd, who had seen a fairy, said it was a head taller than the tallest thistle, portly, and holding itself very stately and erect. So much for sleeping in a snake’s cast weed! But poets always spin nonsense out of reality, piling Pelion on Ossa for a giant, whitening a lady’s hand to new‐fallen snow. There was considerable variance about the Elfin complexion, authentic reports ranging from pallor to gipsy swarthiness. The fairies who came out of a hill in Suffolk were green. Other authorities held that they are invisible to mortal eyes, or only to be seen at dusk, when colours would be muted. Angus had seen his thistle fairy at dusk.
James Sutherland rubbed the ache from his ankle. His shoes were dry. He put them on, but did not get up. There was still a good stretch of the long summer afternoon to run; the sheep on the opposite hillside had not begun to move upward to their sleeping place. With every moment the rich drowsy scent of the heather intensified. He would stay a while longer.
When he woke, it was night. Clouds had gathered, blotting out moon and stars. It was cold, the heather had lost its scent. He Iay unmoving, to husband his warmth. Later, he woke again. It was still mirk night, and so silent that he could hear, as though it were close at hand, the burn in the valley. Lulled by its unresting voice, he fell profoundly asleep.
A fingernail pricked him awake. The heather was gone, the clouded sky was a shadowy stone vault; he Iay on a stone floor, and was bound hand and foot in swathings of cobweb, so elastic that when he moved they yielded, so tough that they would not let go. The fingernail explored the convolutions of his ear, left it, traced the lines on his cheek. Other hands were fingering him, lightly, delicately, adroitly. His shoes were taken off, his toes parted, the soles of his feet prodded. His coat was unbuttoned, his shirt opened. Fingers tweaked the hair in his armpits. The watch was pulled from his fob pocket. He knew they would not stop at that. The cobweb bonds yielded as he writhed and struggled, and each time he thought he had snapped them they tightened again. The explorers waited till he lay exhausted, replaced the watch, and proceeded methodically to his genitals.
Not once had they inflicted the slightest pain, except to his feelings. He did not even know when they left him, only that they were gone. He lay in his cobweb bonds and wept. For these were fairies, these silent invisible tormentors. Throughout his life they had been his dearest preoccupation. He had believed in them, venerated them, championed them. How had he offended them? Why were they so ungrateful?
A bowl of milk and some sponge fingers appeared beside him. ‘Wash your hands first.’ The speaker was invisible. The voice was unmistakably that of a servant of position. He was propelled toward a jet of water which cascaded from a hole in the wall, brimmed a rocky basin, and vanished with a gurgle. He implored the speaker to appear, asked why he was made captive, thanked for the milk. He was speaking to the empty air. The jet of water splashed, gurgled, and went its way. While his back was turned a truss of dry fern had been spread out beside the milk. It smelled of sun and the outer world. The milk, too, was restorative, the sponge fingers so exquisitely light that they melted in his mouth. A sense of purpose returned to him: he must wind his watch. He pulled it out. It had stopped. Till that moment, he had been perplexed, or angry, or cut to the heart; but he had not felt intimidated: it had been too storylike for that. Now he fell into the blankness of despair. He was lost, lost! His watch, sole ally of his rational man, had stopped. He sat with its accustomed weight in his hand and looked at its dead face. An expedient of fear, disguised as common sense, sneaked into his mind. It would be possible to set it going again, its hands adjusted to a conjectural position. The conjecture need not be far out, and in any case he would be sure of a measure of time. With an odd scruple of honour, he buried the dead watch in his pocket.
Presently they came back again—or were back again. He was stripped of his clothes, his wig was pulled off, he was again propelled to the jet of water and washed. The water cascaded over his head and shoulders; soapsuds exploded in his ears and stung his eyes. There must have been half a dozen of them at work on him, hissing as though they were grooming a horse and tut‐tutting at the dirt ingrained on his knees and elbows. When they had washed and dried him they cut his nails, cleanedhis teeth, and handed him his clothes. The clothes smelled rancid; he was averse to putting them on, but did so because he was chilled. He was also very hungry. No food appeared. Instead, there came a new relay of fingerers, who stripped him once more and began to measure him; he felt the tape slipped round him, laid along him. The hope that he was being measured for new clothes was unfounded. He was being measured from motives of biological curiosity: the length of his nose, the span of his nostrils, the girth of each toe, the exact position in relation to spine and thighbone of the mole on his buttock, the dimensions of the callus on his pen finger. They also took his pulse and counted his teeth.
After this, he thought, they will cut me open and anatomize me. But when they had finished their measurements and repeated some in order to be sure of them, they were gone—silently as they had come, silent as they had been throughout their leisurely, meticulous investigation.
Then came a bowl of soup, bread, cheese, and bullace plums. After that—how long after he had no watch to tell him—came nightfall. In the darkness he was woken by the sound of a desperate voice: a shout of despair which had broken from him in a dream, re‐echoing from the vault overhead. He recognized it, and heard it die away.
He had renounced chronometry. It was not so easy to renounce habit. From habit, he continued to pull out his watch and consult its dead face. Each time, he said to himself, ‘I won’t do that again,’ but he went on doing it; for how long he could not have said, but certainly for several months, for the fern they brought him for his bedding had lost any smell of the warm summered earth. He judged by the hollowness of the wind and the lessening of the mysterious daylight, which came and went in the windowless gallery where he lay like the flow and ebb of a tide, that it must be well past Martinmas. By now his absence from the Faculty would have been remarked on, one or another of his pupils accounting for it by saying he had been stolen by the fairies; the hypothesis would have come to the ears of the Professor of History, who would have poured reason on it. Legend supplants reason: in days to come there would be a tradition that a Lecturer in Rhetoric at the University of Aberdeen had been stolen by the fairies—as, indeed, he had been. It was easier to speculate on what was going on in the outer world than on his own circumstances. He saw his food appear (there was never enough of it), he heard the wind blowing, he heard the water splash into the rocky basin with an unchanging voice; he felt himself washed, and saw every fragment of litter, every crumb and cobweb, removed by invisible hands and de facto becoming invisible: his attendants (he had come to think of them as such) had a Presbyterian zealotry for cleanliness. His beard was cultivated daily. He had never thought to have a beard, only beggars and peasants were bearded; he supposed it was let grow as a badge of captivity. It was combed and trimmed, and anointed with oils like Aaron’s. In a moment of curiosity, he pulled out a hair. He was swarthy, but the hair was bright red. He grew attached to his beard; it replaced the mouse or the spiders which ameliorate the lot of ordinary prisoners. But it was reaped off, and after that they kept him clean‐shaven.
At lengthening intervals he was measured, but now a little perfunctorily. Before long they would lose interest, and there would be no more visits. Whatever they had had in mind—entertainment, the pursuit of knowledge, the pleasure of being busied about something—they had intended him no harm, no good. It was impersonal, the traffic of water flowing over a stone. And one day, when they were finished with him, he felt a pat on his shoulder. It intended him no harm, no good—and it almost destroyed him. It was as if he were falling apart with happiness. For the first time, a fairy hand had rested on him with the wastefulness of a caress.
He froze, he burned; he was immortally awake, he was overwhelmingly sleepy; he experienced all the vicissitudes of love simultaneously. Even when he had dwindled down to his ordinary self, his mind had been jolted to a different tilt, and took a different retrospect. If he had offended them and so put himself in their power, they had shown a most moderate resentment, imposing nothing worse than solitude—which he had always preferred to company—and cobweb fetters. They had washed him, fed him, bedded him in a comfortable thickness of fern; their hands had always been gentle. Where was the farm animal who could say that of a mortal master? Why had he wasted all these months in being unappreciative?
He detached his fetters, coiled them up, laid them in a corner, and walked easily to the door. As he expected, it was locked. Remembering his mortal weight he put his shoulder to the door and forced it open. Behind rose a winding stairway, its steps very shallow. He mounted it, rising into gradual warmth and light, hearing the splash and gurgle of water sounding on in its solitude. The stair ended in an anteroom where two fairies were playing beggar‐my‐neighbour, as intently as though crowns and kingdoms depended on it. He stood for a while, watching the fall of the cards; they were the same as any other cards, but smaller and more brightly painted. These were the first fairies he had ever seen. He saw them without surprise or particular elation. The fortune of the game wound and unwound, governed by the chance of a card. The fortune of his game had brought him fairies—but he had always known fairies were in the pack. He walked into the adjoining room. It was a large room, lit and scented with bayberry candles, and an assembly of fairies moved about in it, moving with such small gliding steps that they seemed to melt rather than move. Angus was not far from the mark: taller than a tall thistle, he had said. Well‐grown thistles on the family estate must have reached a good four foot; he could remember them overtopping him when he was a child, and how majestically they fell when his father slashed them. He stationed himself in a recess, to be out of the way, and undisturbed by being noticed.
One is always disconcerted by the ease with which foreigners talk their native tongue. The speech he heard resembled no civilized mortal language; slurred and full of hushed hisses, it was more like some dialect of Gaelic; but though he listened, hoping to catch a word which would put him on the track of what they were talking about, all he knew was that some proposal had been made and accepted. They gathered into a circle, sat down on the floor, and began to sing, softly clapping their hands to mark the measure. It was a wandering melody, a melody of no enterprise, but it must have had some charm for them, and the words, perhaps, some rustic association, for why else should these well‐dressed persons sit in a ring on the floor, like peasants in a hayfield? Or were they rehearsing a masque? He had got the tune by heart and learned nothing of the words when there was a brisk tooting of trumpets. All rose to their feet. In came the trumpeters—two children, bright as parakeets in their gold—laced uniforms. The Queen followed. She was small—not taller than her trumpeters—cat‐faced, and carried a knitting bag on her arm. She acknowledged her court by a ceremonious inattentive curtsy, and beckoned to a fairy who was obviously a person of importance. He hurried forward, bowing deeply, and knelt before her, holding out his hands. She looped a skein of wool over them, wound it into a ball, dropped another curtsy, more of a bob this time, and withdrew, followed by her trumpeters, whose gold‐laced demeanour contrasted with her air of modest simplicity.
He was still smiling over the trumpeters when another music began—a sort of Turkish march, played by two fiddlers and a drummer. By degrees, everyone was dancing: here a minuet, there a reel, there a prancing hornpipe. It seemed they danced as the fancy took them, with little regard to the music, till with a rap on the drum it quickened and commanded them into a circle that gathered and dispersed, gathered and dispersed, faster and faster, whirling by like swallows. He watched till he could watch no more. In the anteroom the match of beggar‐my‐neighbour was still going on. Burrowing into his fern bed he told himself he must remember all this.
He awoke hearing an airy scuffle overhead. His attendants were flying up and down the gallery, contesting for a pair of stockings. It was gratifying to see them at last, though embarrassing to know he had been in the charge of these flippant young persons. He coughed. They descended looking as grave as tombstone cherubim. When he glanced round for his clothes, they held out new ones. The measuring had certainly not been for these. Everything was too large; the shirt pouted, the sad‐green suit would have fitted a Hercules; as for the stockings, they were so inordinately long that they had to be rolled half a dozen times before they could be gartered. He was not a vain man, or luxurious, but he esteemed his legs, and wore silk stockings. These were woollen, and the word that came to his mind was ‘Pictish.’ It struck him that just as the English poets underestimated the size of fairies, fairies over‐estimated the size of mortals. The reflection was philosophic, and soothed him; but not entirely. The theory of pockets had defeated the Foxcastle tailor, so he had to hang his watch on a ribbon round his neck and tuck it into the bosom of his shirt, like a loyal Jacobite locket.
From an outer‐worldly point of view his attendants’ good will was a trifle hail‐fellow. But he was grateful for it. They were fairies, visible and well disposed, who might be useful as teachers of their native tongue; and they had the merit of being reliably available. When he went upstairs into good society it was disconcerting to find himself alone, as he often did.
Accustomed to a methodical social order where time is respected and persons occupy the portion of space where you expect to find them, he reconciled himself to the vagaries of Foxcastle by seeing it as an exemplification of the Fay ce que vouldras of Thélème. What would next be wished and when, and for how long, and by how many was unforeseeable. They were fickle in their loves and hates, fickle and passionate in their pursuits. Some devoted themselves to astronomy. Others practised the French horn. Others educated squirrels. Some, he presumed, made measurements. Only one thing was certain: they never quarrelled. Even in their fickle hates, they hated without malice. Whisking from one pursuit to the next, they never collided. The best comparison he could draw from the outer world was the swarm of mayflies, indivisibly borne aloft, lowering, shifting, veering, like a shaken impermeable gauze veil over the face of a stream.
Somewhere beneath her court the Queen of Foxcastle sat in her private apartments and knitted. Fay ce que vouldras. She was devoted to knitting and never tired of it. When his attendants told him this, and that if she had no more wool at hand she unravelled her work and knitted it up again, he exclaimed ‘Penelope!’ But of course they had never heard of Penelope.
Though by now he had learned enough Elfin to be able to converse in it, and was considering a treatise of Elfin Grammar, he found it difficult to acclimatize himself to a society which had not a vestige of mortal scholarship—except in mathematics: the stargazers astonished him by the dexterity of their calculations, looking at him blankly the while if he spoke of Orion or Cygnus. His previous researches into fairies had not prepared him for this divergence between their values and his. They had a practical knowledge of the world; they also knew it was round; but that was the extent of their knowledge; they knew nothing of its ancient history and celebrated characters and did not care to. They had no more than a loose hearsay acquaintance with their own history, and were satisfied to be without any written record of it, since they attached no importance to what might be learned from a book and were amused by the mortal dependence on pen and paper. It was this that blighted his project of the Elfin Grammar. They were not unfriendly to it, and when he explained the laboriousness of inscribing it on tables of stone (another allusion lost on them) a party of working fairies was dispatched to steal a load of paper, while others compounded ink and collected goose quills. But the Grammar was never written, because the load of paper was stolen from a cooked‐meats shop, and consisted of a manuscript cantata soaked in grease.
It was also disconcerting when a fairy he was talking to became invisible.
But the overruling disconcertingness was to find himself unconcerned. It was as if some mysterious oil had been introduced into the workings of his mind. If a thought irked him, he thought of something else. If a project miscarried, a flooding serenity swept him beyond it. He lived a tranquil truant, dissociated from himself as though by a slight agreeable fever—such a fever as one might catch by smelling a flower. This happy state had begun when he stood watching the game of beggar‐ my‐neighbour, and became aware that the players didn’t notice him, that his large obtrusive mortality made him in some way invisible to them—invisible in that they did not connect with him, felt no obligation to do so. In his former life, he lived in a balancing act between obligations. He had an obligation to do such‐and‐such, he had no obligation to do the other. He performed the obligation; and the best he was likely to get out of it was the thought that it was done with, for the time being. He omitted the non‐obligation; and was lucky to get off without a kick from his conscience. He had never conceived of the total release of not being an obligation himself. Day after day, month after month, went by and not once did he see a fairy’s face clouded with a look of obligation. Whether they conversed with him, praised his pronunciation, said how much better he looked without his wig (it had eventually fallen to pieces); whether they vanished leaving him halfway through a sentence, their motives were pure as the heavens. They had done as they wished.
But why, feeling no obligation toward him, had they plucked him from the heather and added him to their establishment? And why, if he were to be added, did they hide from him, and keep him a prisoner—to make him desolate, then change his desolation to happiness? Such a motive, stern and sentimental, might obtain in Aberdeen, but not under Foxcastle. To be useful? But he was useless. To be informative? At the least breath of information they melted into air. To be a trophy? Of all his speculations, this was the only one he paused at. A despot of the Renaissance, his court swarming with poets and philosophers, experts on Plotinus, sumptuous harlots, bishops, boys, artists and artificers, inventors, assassins, dancers on the tightrope, had fixed his ambitions on owning a giraffe. He had forgotten which despot.
The learning he had brought from the outer world was mouldering from disuse; only legends and trivia like the giraffe remained. What happened to his wig might well be happening to the compartmented order inside his skull. In his blessed condition of being nobody’s obligation he could spend his intellect as he pleased, sometimes thinking, sometimes observing, coming to conclusions and unripping them for the pleasure of knitting a new one from the same material, as the Queen did. It was as though he had always lived at Foxcastle, accepting his good fortune without surprise as the fairies accepted him, and endlessly fascinated by their unaccountableness.
The more he studied them the more baffled he became. It was not that they were mysterious: they were as straightforward as the scent of a rose, as a wasp sting. It was impossible to love them: they were too inconsistent to be loved. It was unavoidable not to be drawn to them. And they defied conjecture by taking themselves for granted. Theologically identified as the scattered remnants of Satan’s host, rationally dismissed as superstition, they were a race of pragmatists. Just as they were content to know next to nothing of their own history because they were living in the present, they took Foxcastle for granted because it was their dwelling place. Yet how was it that living inside a solid, sizable hill he could hear the wind blowing and recognize from what quarter it blew? How could he know day from darkness, with all that bulk of earth between him and the sun? When he questioned his attendants they looked blankly at him, blankly at each other, and said the bayberry candles were regularly lit at sundown. When he asked the leading fiddler, who enjoyed conversation and had never made himself invisible, he was told ‘Rabbit holes.’ And by degrees he gave up the problem, and was grateful for the light that drifted in like a mist and need not be accounted for.
Whenever the fairies trooped off on a raiding excursion into the outer world, he wandered about the halls and corridors of Foxcastle, almost and never quite familiarizing himself with its layout. For instance, he never discovered how the fairies quitted it. Quit it they certainly did, since they came back with spoils. Perhaps they used some watery stair; the hill was veined with springs; some were trapped for the water supply, others only existed as murmuring voices at a distance. When he was left alone, he could hear them quite plainly. But this was only possible when he was alone. The raiders came back, the silence was painted by their gay glittering voices, they were extremely hungry, they had tricked all the mortals they had met. Fingering his watch, that old harmless acquaintance, he sat listening to their brag, and admired the faithful traditionalism with which they recounted exploits well known to him before ever he met a fairy: Mungo’s mother gaping into her churn, the elf bolt spanged off an invisible thumb that knocked the peddler senseless as he made off with his load of thorn‐tree wood, the girl laid on her back in the greenwood. ‘Burd Janet’ was one of the ballads he had fallen asleep to. But Janet’s babe had been fathered by Tam Lin, who was a stolen mortal like himself, and so uneasy lest at the end of his seven years in fairyland he should be picked as the teind to hell that he invoked the girl to lie in wait and snatch him out of the Queen’s retinue. He himself was safe from such a rescue, since no one in the outer world had loved him enough to snatch him back to it.
Falling into dreamless sleep in his bed of fern, waking to the splash and gurgle of the running water, opening his eyes to the brooding dusk of the stone roof it was inconceivable that he had lain there unreconciled and heard his shout of despair re‐echoing from the vault overhead. A fuss about nothing, a midge‐bite madness, a fit of the tantrums. For by the simple act of discarding his fetters and walking up a winding stair he had attained the wish of his heart. Watching these happy beings for whom weeping was impossible, he had become incapable of grief; watching their inconsistencies, he had become incapable of knowing right from wrong; disregarded by them he had become incapable of disappointment. Alone or in their company, listening to music or to silence, he lived in a perpetual present—like the Queen with her knitting, each stitch the stitch of the moment.
It was her custom to appear every evening and knit publicly, as she had done the first time he saw her. He had then supposed that the business of the skein of wool wound off the supporting hands of a kneeling courtier was a formality of etiquette, like his approaching bows and the tooting trumpeters. Afterward he learned that it was a signal mark of favour, and rarely bestowed. Like all etiquettes, it was thought slightly funny and viewed with great respect. On the evening when she beckoned to him he was so far from expecting it that he had to be nudged by a stander‐by before he realized what was happening. Remembering to bow and feeling painfully aware of his disproportionate size, he made the long journey toward her and crouched at her feet, holding out his hands like a suppliant. Out of her knitting bag she drew a ball of wool and two needles. ‘Attend,’ she said. ‘This concerns you. I cast on seven stitches. Two plain, two purl, two plain, one purl. And reverse. One plain, two purl, two plain, two purl. And reverse. Two plain, two purl, two plain…’
She knitted slowly and firmly. Already he saw the rib emerging. ‘And one purl. And break off.’ She bit through the thread. A squadron of flying fairies swooped down, seized hold of him, bore him up and away. He was shoved and squeezed through a twisting crevice into the outer world.
A couple of sheep took fright and galloped off, their hoofs drumming on the shallow turf. The hill had been fired, nothing remained of the heather except a few charred stumps. He would not have known where he was except for the peat hags and the hurrying burn in the valley. He watched the blood congeal on his leg, and his consciousness wandered over his body from one ache to another. The aches were specific; they corresponded with the bruises, the scratches, the punctures of being forced through an exit much too narrow for him. But there was a further ache, an underlying discomfort which corresponded with nothing and existed totally: an ache of weariness, of bodily mistrust.
‘Castellum … a fortified enclosure.’ It was a mortal voice, the voice of a person of culture! He sprang up—and almost fell over. His legs were tottering, he had lost his sense of balance. He had become an old man.
The speaker was quite close. He was dressed in black, he wore a voluminous white neckcloth, he carried a most peculiar hat in a gloved hand. He had spoken to a group of ladies, who were even more oddly dressed than he, wearing white shifts down to the ground. Their waists were under their arms, the shifts fluttered in the wind and showed the shape of their legs. A couple of young men made up the party; they, too, had waists under their arms, and a general resemblance to clothes pegs. But all these were mortals.
He staggered toward them, making noises. He had lived so long with the fairies he had forgotten his native speech; he could only gibber and stammer. When they turned to look at him, he realized that he was in rags and half‐naked. The ladies started back. The young men stepped forward defensively.
‘Do not be alarmed, do not be alarmed! He is merely one of our half‐wits, too common in these days—poor unfortunate creatures, allowed to stray about for their living. But harmless. Our country people call them Innocents. Leave me to deal with him.’
He turned to James Sutherland.
‘Go away, my poor fellow! Here is a guinea, to buy yourself better clothing before the winter finds you out.’
The ladies were making a little collection amongst themselves. Now one came forward with it, her eyes averted.
He stared at her. Words were coming back to him. ‘Take it, take it,’ said the gentleman. ‘Go away, and be grateful.’
I like silence, though I am not one of those people who crave it constantly. In fact, one of the pleasures of travel that takes me away from a place where the incessant screeching of crows is the dominant sound in an otherwise quiet environment, is the return to city noise. New York City in particular, a place where I spent many years, greets me with “Ah, this is the noise indeed,” (as well as “Oh, I remember these inescapable, foul smells,”) in ways that provide a bittersweet jolt of familiarity and reminiscence. Different, of course, if you visit, and don’t have to live any longer immersed in the constant barrage of sounds.
Silence is certainly the mode when I work, no background radio for me when writing or creating montage, despite my love for music. Silence was the biggest prize when moving out of shared housing, including boarding school dorms where you could not hear your own inner voice for constant vigilance of what the noises meant across the hall, the whispered ones most dangerous of all. Silence unimpeded by the neighbors in surrounding flats was a gift when finding our house.
Many have written about silence and its nemesis, the bombardment with noise in our culture. The linkage is smartly captured in a book by George Prochnik from a decade ago, In Pursuit of Silence. A comprehensive review can be found here.
But today I want to share descriptions of types of silence that I’ve come across, in hopes they’ll spark recognition and give you as much pleasure as they did for me.
“Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.”
It is somewhat ironic that they were written by a man eulogized in 1973 by journalist Nat Hentoff, his friend and colleague, asCitizen Va – r- ooooooom! The author in question, Paul Goodman, would be one of those people I’d choose to invite to the proverbial lonely island.
Born to a sephardic Jewish family in NYC, he led an intellectual life as rich as they come, and a practical life as poor as they can be endured. His openly lived bisexuality cost him educational status, jobs, group memberships in even the most progressive environments. His anarchist writings did nothing to improve that lot. Fame, or notoriety, you choose, that were accrued in the 1950s as a philosopher of the New Left, a social critic, as co-founder of the Gestalt Therapy movement and psychotherapist, as a novelist and activist, did not extend much beyond his early death from a heart attack.
And yet his writings are especially applicable to our current times. His World War II-era essays on the draft, resisting violence, moral law, and civic duty were re-purposed for youth grappling with the Vietnam War but can be applied to state violence in general. In Growing Up Absurd(1960), he addressed young protesters, really young Americans in general, whom he encouraged to reclaim ThomasJefferson’s radical democracy as their birthright. The book was not just about school reform to re-engage disaffected youth, but a reckoning with a political and economic system that used and discarded human beings as pawns. If alive today, he would be a welcome, loud voice indeed, not a proponent of silence.
More on the uses of silence tomorrow.
Photographs today from a place where you commune in silence – collected across cemeteries in Paris, another nicely noisy city.
“Silence is not acoustic. It is a change of mind, a turning around,” composer John Cage once remarked. He was drawn to it in his studies of Zen Buddhism. So it shall be his music for today, the Sonatas and Interludes in a prepared Piano, recently performed in Seattle. For those interested, here is an approachable introduction to the composer and the music. Open your week-end rested brain to the challenge!
In truth, today is all about peas, their luminescence, their daintiness, their curlycues and their service to science. The sheep play a minor role, just in as much as they were of great economic value to the monasteries that raised and sold them 150 years ago. When imports of Australian wool tightened the financial competition in the mid 1800s at least one Abbot, Cyril Knapp of St. Thomas monastery in Brünn (Brno, Czech Republic,) was prescient enough (and worried enough about profit margins) to allow in-house scientific studies to understand the laws of inheritance, which might help breed sheep for better quality or faster growing wool.
Luckily a scientist was at hand, a novice who had chosen St. Thomas as an order known for enlightened thinking. With its Augustinian credo per scientiam ad sapientiam (“from knowledge to wisdom”), the monks focused on scholarly teaching and research, as well as having a reputation for being culinary wizards.
His name was Mendel, of course. Formerly Johann, now novice Gregor, son of poor peasants, protégé of numerous professors at the university in Vienna where he studied mathematics, botany and physics (which he failed miserably just as he failed later teachers’ exams, twice…) Haunted by depression and too poor to continue his studies, he was persuaded to join the monks.
The Mendel, who chose peas as his field of study after the monks discovered his laboratory of black and white mice in his monastery cell, promptly nixing in vivo experiments involving sex.
What Mendel brought to the field of genetics, (he is really assumed by many to be the actual father of that field,) was rigorous scientific experimentation, botanical research techniques – and mathematics. He basically figured out fundamental laws of inheritance and ALSO calculated their statistical probability. (Ref.)
5 acres of garden, one greenhouse. 28.000 to 29.000 pea plants cultivated between 1854 and 1856, because they were easy to grow, came with visibly different traits, and could be easily pollinated. For two years he grew strains that were absolutely pure, along one of 7 dimensions that he chose to observe: the height of the plant (short or tall) the color of the flower (white or purple,) its position on the stem, the seed shape and color, the pod shape and color. Literally he grew and tested 34 varieties of garden peas for these traits to be consistent across several generations. Two full years devoted to a base-line control group!
Then he started to explore what would happen when he hybridized these pure varieties. Would cross-pollinating a tall plant with a short one create medium height? Would cross-pollinating a white flowering plant with a purple one lead to pink blossoms when you planted the seed?
Surprise. Some “factors” (what we call genes today) were dominant, while others were recessive for certain traits. In the first generation of cross-pollinated peas, for example all would have purple flowers, the white ones being masked. However, and here is where his mathematical observation started to reveal new insights, if you counted what happened in the next generation, you would find a 3:1 ratio – for every 3 purple flowering plants, a white one would re-emerge. It took almost a decade to reveal a truly reliable pattern. Ten years of growing, pollinating, observing, measuring, recording peas. Nothing but peas.
Eventually he published his work, “Experiments in Plant Hybridization” in 1866 in Proceedings of the Natural History Society of Brünn.
Deafening silence. About three citations over the next 35 years. He died, painfully, of kidney disease before the importance of his discoveries were understood and the hereditary factors he had inferred identified by modern genetics. Contemporary research on genetics has, of course, revealed more complicated patterns of inheritance, including the fact that sometimes there can be co-dominance of two traits, or incomplete dominance of one, but the basic ideas stand: he figured out how living systems send their genes down to the next generations, and how dominant genes mask recessive ones until they don’t.
I am trying to grapple with the psychology of this scientific mind. Having ideas that were revolutionary for the times, and no one, really, to talk to. He sent a manuscript to Darwin, but that was found among the latter’s papers, unread. He prayed with his monks, he administered the monastery, (appointed abbot at some later point,) he taught some kids, but where would he find the discussion partners so necessary to develop ideas and have them questioned? Dedicated to a single type of plant, its size and color, the smoothness of its seeds, doggedly pursuing the idea that there needed to be something, some thing that made off-spring carry the traits of its progenitor, that made children look like their parent, or have certain traits skip generations (one wonders if there was a history of depression in his family or hair color that might have been recessive.) Next time I complain about lack of mobility in these Covid – 19 times, I will just think: 3000 or so days with nothing but peas behind the cloister walls!
The mechanisms of inheritance is a fascinating topic, made even more interesting when you have a person who is in equal parts gifted writer and scientist, help you understand its history. Siddhartha Mukherjee does just that in his book “The Gene.” Here is a review that could not be more enthralled if it tried…. and here is a link to a trailer of the PBS program they filmed, based on the book. Full program is available if you are a member of your public station. Given the author’s stunning success with The Emperor of all Maladies one might have wondered how that can be followed up. Wonder no more.
Music by Dvorak, Mendel’s Czech compatriot, the most bucolic of his Symphonies – maybe there are sheep to be heard in there after all…….
I learned a new word yesterday, psychogeography, in the contextof thinking and reading about travel writing. The travel ain’t happening, but the writing, of course, goes on. So what am I to do?
When I looked it up, as this English-as-a-second-language speaker is want to do, Wikipedia told me it is “an exploration of urban environments that emphasizes playfulness and “drifting”. Hm.
A bit more digging revealed the fact that the term was coined by Marxist theorist Guy Debord in 1955 in order to explore how environments make us feel and behave. “Inspired by the French nineteenth century poet and writer Charles Baudelaire’s concept of the flâneur – an urban wanderer – Debord suggested playful and inventive ways of navigating the urban environment in order to examine its architecture and spaces…. It is also linked to dadaism and surrealism, art movements which explored ways of unleashing the subconscious imagination” (Ref.)
First thought: Isn’t it weird that the word came up in a review of a book by one of the most deeply influential, brilliant travel- and nature writers, Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways. If there ever was something written that makes you feel you’re IN a landscape that you’ve never seen, a natural environment you’ve never visited, it is this. No urban frolicking, but nature captured in its essence. The kind of writing that has me yellow with envy (sticking to the German color scheme for emotions, I know you’ll tell me it is green.)
Second Thought: I had encountered Debord as a young student, maybe early 70s, when his Society of Spectacle was en vogue in leftist circles, but not yet translated into German. The book was an indictment of consumer culture crazy for spectacle, or image, as provided by advertisement, television, celebrity culture and so on. People slogged through finding the correct translations from the French, trying to understand the link between consumer culture as distraction or pacification of mass movements and the Marxist concept of commodity fetishism. Heady days. I wonder what Debord would say now in our times of internet image barrage, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Instagram! He sure was prescient in linking the spectacle with the economy.
Third Thought: Debord stated that everything that used to be directly lived has now moved into representation (sort of fake life instead of fake facts…). Macfarlane believes that too often we only think of landscapes as affecting us when we are in them. “But,” he writes, “there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places — retreated to most often when we are most remote from them — are among the most important landscapes we possess.”(Ref.)
Ho do we square the circle from the fleeting pleasure offered by externalized representations to the comfort provided by those we have internalized?
Nothing is lost, we might rejoice, memory representations carry the day through isolation! All is lost, we might despair, when our travel longings are but satisfied by pretty pictures, inside or outside of our not so pretty heads.
Perhaps it’s possible to switch from spectacle to life by redefining travel, and figure out authentic ways of capturing the essence of our current place. Must try.
In the meantime here are the views captured by Flâneuse Heuer ambling along the streets of Vienna 2 years ago….
And what better music for this unfinished travel business than Schubert’s Unfinished, performed in Vienna under Kleiber in the 70s, one of the best renditions ever.
