Category Archives: Articles/reviews

October 18, 2012 · 7:07 pm

How magic resides in the lessons of life–Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist”

When we hear a simple tale told by a grandparent in an unpretentious style, with a sort of humorous, or sad, or wry punchline attached to the end, we may make the mistake of assuming that it’s just a matter of another old country saying (or street-wise rejoinder, for that matter), that the punchline is something not really to be taken seriously.  But if we had lived that person’s life through, we might well think otherwise–in fact, that punchline or reduction of a piece of reality to what seems like a formulaic old saw might in that case be something to make us sit up and take notice, or mumble under our breaths, or sigh dramatically, or feel a shiver as if a “person just walked over our graves.”

Paulo Coelho’s book The Alchemist is all about the experience of attaining life wisdom through a sort of personal journey, paying attention to signs and omens along the way and always keeping one’s goal in sight even when it seems delayed by everything that happens to one.  And the book is full of teacher figures eager to share their principles with the right student and knowing more than he does himself about his dreams.  Signs and omens and pilgrimages to Mecca and belief in Jesus Christ and Allah and prophets and seers and Gypsy fortune tellers and scholars and merchants and even, yes, an alchemist all have their place.  Even encounters with rogues and thieves and people who threaten to murder one are or become learning experiences for an Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago, who starts out only by having unusually troubling dreams.  When he asks a Gypsy woman to interpret, she tells him that if he goes to Egypt and visits the Pyramids, he will find a treasure that makes him a rich man.  It’s obvious that a kind of symbolic alchemy is going on in the text, however, because as Santiago is led on through the book by various prophesying and teaching figures, he accepts a spiritual sort of quest in place of a monetary one, and thus is in the process of refining himself and allowing himself to be refined by others.

Santiago learns that he is in search of living out his own “Personal Legend” and is being led by these others to perceive the “Soul of the World” in all living things.  Reading the signs and omens as he learns to do, he seems not ever actually to use or to use only once the two magic stones, one black and one white, Urim and Thummim, pronosticating stones given him by Melchizedek, a mysterious “king” with a Biblical name who says he is the “king of Salem” and wears (under a voluminous robe) a golden breastplate.  Santiago learns the importance of accepting his fate and learning to perceive it truly and follow it well because, as an Arabic crystal dealer for whom he works for a year says, “Maktub,” (“It is written”) by “the hand that writes all,” though the words used are always “Personal Legend” and never the less gentle and more dreaded word “Fate.”

What’s the most unusual is the combination in the book of an uncomplicated story line with what amounts almost to a treatise on belief, as Santiago goes from being a shepherd to a traveller to a temporary employee for a candy dealer in Tangier, then for a crystal merchant in Tangier, whom he so enriches by his merchandising concepts that he makes enough money to decide whether he wants to pay his passage back to Spain and forget the whole matter or go forward.  But he would have worked for neither of the two men had he not been robbed at a time in Tangier when he was unable to speak Arabic; what he later learns to speak fluently is known as “the universal language without words.”  He also learns that understanding and following one’s Personal Legend is a matter of not perceiving himself as a victim of the thief, but as someone following his own destiny.  After all, as he also knows by this time, “To realize one’s destiny is a person’s only obligation.”  (In my edition of this book, there are questions for discussion, and one of them is centered around whether this does not convey at least a hint of narcissism–but when one has covered the entire book and realizes that the doctrine taught throughout is that the main unifying force of the whole world is love, and that acting in line with love in fact helps one find one’s Personal Legend, the point is dismissible, I believe.)

Santiago in fact goes to the Sahara and, surrounded by dangers such as tribal warfare, makes his way with his caravan to an oasis, meeting an Englishman along the way who first introduces him to the idea of alchemy, carries a load of books along, and also has two prognosticating Urim and Thummim stones.  The Englishman is trying to learn from books what the shepherd is learning from life.  At the oasis, the Englishman seeks for knowledge of the alchemist who is said to live just to the south of there, and Santiago falls in love with a beautiful young woman named Fatima whom they have stopped to ask for information.  This later becomes a temptation to him also, to forget about the treasure near the Pyramids and stay with her.  But fate intervenes again:  the boy reads the omen of two hawks warring in the sky, and reports back to the oasis chieftains (who are at peace with each other in the oasis) that a warring tribe is about to descend.  He is threatened with death if this turns out to be a false prediction, but he has spoken truly, and the chieftains muster in time successfully to defend the oasis from attack.

The boy’s fate takes another turn when the real alchemist seeks him out and challenges him because he read the signs of the desert accurately.  Because the boy shows courage at this meeting at swordpoint (said to be the most necessary thing to have in order to stand up to one’s Personal Legend), the alchemist leads him further into the desert, within a short distance of the Pyramids, to an old Coptic monastery.  There the alchemist shows the boy how to transmute lead into gold, but when the boy asks if he himself will ever be able to do so, the alchemist responds that it is his own Personal Legend to have done so, not the boy’s.

When Santiago is actually standing in front of the Pyramids, he is remembering that his heart earlier told him to be aware of the place where his tears fall, because there is where his heart is and his treasure also.  At this point, he weeps at the beauty of the Pyramids and the desert night, and so takes the command literally and begins to dig with his hand in the desert soil beneath him, hoping to unearth a literal treasure.  But at the next moment, he is set upon by refugees who take his only remaining gold from him and beat him nearly senseless.  They have asked, though, what he is doing there, and when he tells them he is digging for treasure because he twice dreamed of it there, they scoff at him and prepare to depart.  One of them in mocking him, however, goes go far as to tell him that he had fallen asleep on just that spot on the desert two years before and had dreamed something about a treasure buried in an old sycamore tree near a ruined church on the field of Spain where the shepherds and their flocks sometimes stayed, but that he himself is not so stupid as to cross the whole desert and into another country to follow a dream.  They leave, and suddenly Santiago realizes that he is now rich beyond his dreams, because he does have that kind of belief, and he can get his way back again somehow and claim the treasure.

Lest one assume that this story ends with the usual lessons about alchemy being only a means of transforming a metal or only truly being about changing people from one state to another morally or spiritually, it is for Santiago both:  it is this complexity which means that if he is a wise man and a rich man, he will never confuse the two, but will always pay his debts of teaching and learning and of wealth in the proper coin.  It also is not a tale which rewards us only with the unadventurous thought that “happiness is best found in your own backyard.”  That would be a truly unrewarding moral to the story.  Luckily, Coelho provides an Epilogue in which Santiago goes back to Spain, retrieves his treasure, and feels the kiss in the wind of his desert woman, Fatima, waiting for him.  The optimism of the text leads us to believe that he will go back to the oasis, too.  Thus, though he has achieved his Personal Legend, he will never have to reproach himself, as others in the story do, with not having had the courage to act on their dreams.  He is both materially and spiritually successful, but it took the second to bring about the first, and it is the second which will ensure that he does not misuse his material goods.

The 1993 English edition of the text translated by Alan R. Clarke and published by HarperCollins has a brief biographic sketch of the author and tells how he himself was repressed first by his parents from following his dream to be a writer, and then imprisoned and tortured by a repressive political regime for defending free expression.  When he was freed, he first decided to live what he regarded as a more “normal” life.  But then he had “an encounter with a stranger,” whom he had first met in a dream.  “The stranger suggested that Paulo should return to Catholicism and study the benign side of magic.  He also encouraged Paulo to walk the Road of Santiago de Compostela, the medieval pilgrim’s route.”  After that pilgrimage, Coelho’s writing career took off.  As of the 1993 printing, “The Alchemist went on to sell more copies than any other book in Brazilian literary history.”  It just goes to show that what to one person might be a tall tale or a moralistic fantasy chockful of truisms is for another a guide to true wisdom, and that discovering one’s own Personal Legend means listening sometimes to older, wiser voices that speak of their own experience of things, so that one doesn’t have to find everything out through trial and error.  And Paulo Coelho is one of those voices who speak truly of life’s tribulations, though he disguises them ever so well as simple learning exercises, perhaps so that we can learn to resist discouragement as well as his character Santiago did, and as he himself obviously had to do.  This book, though, is a delight as a literary experience as well, with its simple style and clear explanations of complicated states of mind.  I predict that it is the fate of Santiago the shepherd boy in The Alchemist to continue to please readers for many years to come.

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October 16, 2012 · 3:01 pm

Anticipation and longing in Italo Calvino’s “The Adventure of a Traveler”

In the middle of November, I will be travelling to Canada by train to attend my graduation for my Ph.D.  While there, I will stay with some dear friends, a man and woman who have helped me over many a hurdle by their concerted force and welcoming ways.  So, it was only fitting that some days ago when I happened to read Italo Calvino’s “The Adventure of a Traveler” I immediately understood the notions and laughable moments he set forth therein:  anticipation and longing are an arrival of their own, an arrival at the state of appreciation for one’s eventual destination.  The glow cast over the trip itself is something which comes from one’s expected activities:  for me fellowship, laughter, and good times, for Federico V. in the story a regularly appointed rendevous with his lover, Cinzia U., “a resident of Rome” who also lives at the end of a train journey.

The whole of the story, a ten page short story, is taken up with describing Federico’s activities as he looks forward to the train journey, calculates just where on the train to sit and how best to get a compartment as much as possible to himself, plans the details of his trip ahead of time, and gets a “token” of his whole trip, an actual telephone token with which he will call Cinzia once he arrives.  It is significant that he only supplies himself with one, when he could easily even on his apparently middle class budget afford to supply himself with several, in case of loss or error on the phone line.  This token is in a sense the last bar that stands between him and his lover, and is simultaneously the last thing he has to do to meet her and the first contact he will have with her each time he travels.  As the text says, “Everything seemed to be there to encourage him, to give a spring to his steps like the rubberized pavement of the station, and even the obstacles–the wait, his minutes numbered, at the last ticket window still open, the difficulty of breaking a large bill, the lack of small change at the newsstand–seemed to exist for his pleasure in confronting and overcoming them.”

The whole trip is filled with things Federico already knows well from past experience:  how to keep other people at bay and mostly out of his compartment by closing the curtains; how to borrow a paper from someone who’s finished reading it; how to start out in a second class car perhaps to switch to first later in the trip; how to arrange his clothes for sleeping so that he does not wrinkle his overcoat, which he uses as a blanket; how to adjust the heat and cold to keep himself comfortable without too much resistance from other passengers; in short, how to organize each and every moment of the trip so that nothing goes wrong and he gets to where he is going with the greatest ease possible.  And yet, how can it be the greatest ease possible, when he has planned everything out with the careful consideration of an obsessive-compulsive person who has never been on the trip before?

When he is finally on the train and having his “adventure,” which to some people would be simply a rather pedestrian and necessary trip (though of course they are not travelling presumably for the same reason as he), snatches of a French love song he seems to be making up in his head flow through the text, and one wonders if he’s finally thinking of Cinzia as something other than an abstract goal.  But the fragments of the song (“Je voyage en volupté,” “Je voyage toujours…l’hiver et l’été,” “du voyage, je sais tout,” “J’arrive avec le train,” and so forth) are more about the trip itself than about his lover Cinzia, love in the wonderful city of Rome, or anything more usual that a man travelling for love might be expected to be thinking of.

When the old pillow merchant comes by out on the platform, there is even a bit of Calvino’s fantastic imagination:  “The pillow now was in Federico’s arms, square, flat, just like an envelope, and, what’s more, covered with postmarks:  it was the daily letter to Cinzia, also departing this evening, and instead of the page of eager scrawl there was Federico in person to take the invisible path of the night mail, through the hand of the old winter messenger….indeed the very fact of departing, the hiring of the cushion, was a form of enjoying [later comforts, later intimacy, later sweetnesses], a way of entering the dimension where Cinzia reigned, the circle enclosed by her soft arms.”

The comedy of the story and the gentle pathos is typical Calvino, for when he calls Cinzia up on the telephone, she is still drowsy from sleep, “and he was already in the tension of their days together, in the desperate battle against the hours; and he realized he would never manage to tell her anything of the significance of that night, which he now sensed was fading, like every perfect night of love, at the cruel explosion of day.”  On the surface, of course, the “perfect night of love” is the night he will actually spend with Cinzia; still, since they have “days” together they presumably may have also more than one night, and the “perfect night of love” about which he will never be able to tell Cinzia the significance is also the night he has spent on the train, on his great “adventure,” a modern day knight-errant struggling against modern day challenges to reach his lady.

Thus, though Calvino is never heavily ironic nor heavy-handed either, this stands as a mild cautionary tale about letting anticipation and longing build and find their natural release in an ordinary way, instead of frittering away the strength of one’s feelings through petty details and obsessive habits.  It certainly was an eyeopener of a tale for me, because ever since my trip was planned, I have been notifying my friends of every minor detail of my arrival and departure and have tried to make my plans foolproof from this end as well.  Now that I know what one of my favorite authors has to say on the subject, I will try to conduct myself with a more becoming gravitas, and save my feelings for my friends rather than for the displacement activity of hogging the seats on the train!

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October 14, 2012 · 5:59 pm

“Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!”–Samuel Beckett sums up a reader’s experience of Kafka’s “The Castle”

A few weeks ago (and it was longer ago than it should have been, because I had a real difficulty forcing myself back to Franz Kafka’s The Castle every time I put it down), I decided that since Kafka is so very important to existentialism and existentialism is not only so monumental in 20th century thought but is also still healthy and well in portions of some contemporary novels, books, and plays, I should read him.  The only Kafka I’d read before was “The Metamorphosis,” and I quite enjoyed it, so I expected equally well to enjoy The Castle.  Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately for my finally getting the point of the book), it was no such thing!

After the first few chapters, I found the book painful to pick up (in the attention-span sense), excruciating to make my way through, and delightful to put down.  I read it at long intervals interspersed with other things of more interest and apparent moment, and took it as in the old days people took their castor oil in the spring, as a sort of needful and necessary tonic.  Definitely I appreciated all the variety and color of the other works I was reading much, much more by contast with The Castle.  Not making it any easier was the fact that there were insertions which had to be made periodically and read with the understanding that they had been in one version of the book and not in another, and the book’s tangled history of revision and translation was against me, was, in fact, truly Kafkaesque (now I really, really know what that word means whereas before I merely threw it around as a synonym for “existential”; there is a difference, because “Kafkaesque” means something more like “existential” plus “evilly absurd and apparently pointless, though endlessly involved”).

The basic situation is even too complicated to explain at length, though I’ll make a start at it:  “K.,” the main character, is travelling at night and comes to an inn where he is allowed to stay on a bag of straw in the parlor.  But in the middle of the night, a castellan from a previously unmentioned castle which dominates village protocol wakes him and insists that he does not have the right to stay without permission from the castle itself.  Though there has been no previous statement that K. is a land-surveyor on the way to a job, and in fact he doesn’t at first even seem to know where he is, he says that he has been called to do work, and they take him at his word!  The castle, when contacted over the phone, even acknowledges that he has been called.  From there on, the absurdities rapidly proliferate, with different bureaucrats from the castle and village endlessly complicating the affair by the good or bad ways in which they receive K., and the manner in which they quickly change the tenor of their remarks to him from favorable to unfavorable at the drop of a hat.  Each man and woman, it seems, has a vision of his or her own importance to the castle, and though they seem always to understand amongst themselves how the game of changing places and importances is played, K. himself remains on the outside, always at the mercy of whomever he happens to be speaking to at the moment and their quick-change artists’ psychologies, even when he is talking to Frieda, a woman to whom (for once acting as quickly as the rest) he has become affianced.  Nor does this connection avail him of anything much but a momentary peace, however, for his relationship with Frieda unravels nearly as easily as the rest, and he goes on trying to find other routes than Frieda to Klamm, an important bureaucrat whose previous involvement with Frieda he’d hoped to capitalize on in order to get ahead.

I did read the book until the end, and read the revisions, and deleted passages, and continuations.  One of the more intriguing bits of information which has accumulated about the book is that Kafka said (to his friend and executor Max Brod) before he himself died that he was planning to have K. the land-surveyor be told on his deathbed that though he himself had not technically acquired a legal place in the village, because of “‘certain auxiliary circumstances'” it is going to be allowed for him to stay there.  It’s been a long time since I’ve been so glad to see the end of any book I’ve read.  And I have to recognize that so many people before me can’t be wrong:  the book is a monumental work of art (and is monumentally boring as well).  It’s one of those works of art that once done, cannot be done again in a like manner by anyone else, though I’ve run across lots of books now which have been called “Kafkaesque.”

Then, my mind was jogged by Thomas Mann’s tribute to Kafka, in which he called The Castle one of Kafka’s “warmhearted fantasies” and suggested that like The Trial it might cause people to break into open laughter if they heard it read aloud.  I remembered my frustration with the book: was I really so off-target?  After all, when I thought of Samuel Beckett’s remark from “Waiting for Godot,” (“Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!”), isn’t that the reaction I was actually having?  And the fact is that even though people are constantly coming and going in Kafka’s book, nothing really happens!  The awfulness I was so in angst over was what was making others capable of laughter in Mann’s view!  The only end that is really suitable to the whole experience is the one Kafka confided to Brod before his own death, and later recanted about, also to Brod, telling him that he planned to leave the work unfinished!  Now, finally, I understood.

There is, however, another darker side to the book, and it’s one which I would give myself credit for having apprehended from the start.  It’s the notion which I’ve seen articulated in several places, that evil is not really a derring-do procedure of demons and imps and ghosts and horrible hallows; evil can, in fact, have something boring and procedural about it.  The lack of moral imagination and dullness of mind which endless days and nights of bureaucratically following an unscrupulous leader bring about, for example, might be mentioned.  Hannah Arendt has mentioned them, in reference to Eichmann, in Eichmann in Jerusalem:  A Report on the Banality of Evil.  There, she says, “It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us–the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”  How many people in concentration camps must’ve been affected by the way in which, when they appealed to human empathy, to their Gods, even, it might have seemed that “nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes” (except Death), until the final devastating end of the war, when the great insults and affronteries that human life had borne became so evident that no one could deny or ignore them anymore?  And it’s still much the same today:  the same calculations of number of bullets and guns needed, number of missiles at the ready, the same mind-numbing statistics about casualties to one side’s or the other’s blame, the same helplessness of refugees and starving peoples, and the recurrent mutilations of the weak and innocent, and we continue the evil pattern.  Even Kafka, though he and his friends apparently laughed until tears came when he read them his other great work, The Trial, which Thomas Mann tells us “deals explicitly with the problem of divine justice,” might have been stricken to silence and have been unable to laugh.

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October 12, 2012 · 3:20 pm

The third and last Halloween post–early memories of two terror films from the small screen

Though I said yesterday that I probably was going to write a shorter post than usual, in fact I became quite verbose on the subject of Joss Whedon’s “The Cabin in the Woods,” and got some good pointers about it from my commenters.  Today, the subtext of my post is that memory of terror, unless it’s perhaps of a genuine personal tragedy or accident that has befallen one, is fragmentary and gets confused with other moments one has witnessed on the screen, or perhaps is connected with the time and place when you encountered the substance of the memory.  Thus as a former fan of “Dark Shadows” when it was in its first “incarnation” as a television show in the 1970s (and Mom didn’t know, I don’t think, that we watched it in the afternoons after school), I can’t be sure that my memory of  what sticks in my mind as one of the most frightening werewolf scenes I’ve ever seen didn’t come from that show.  Maybe it did; maybe it was Quentin Collins I’ve confused the werewolf snippet with.  At any rate, I want to pass along here two early memories of the two most frightening images/films I saw at the time when I was eagerly absorbing all sorts of fictional material, and before I had more or less eschewed horror films.

In the barest trace of the werewolf film in question (which is all my memory retains of that particular episode), the unusual thing wasn’t the amount of blood and gore I saw, which is in marked contrast with the horror films I’ve lately seen advertised on television.  I can recall no blood and gore.  What was the most startling and vivid and terrifying was the pursuit of the victim herself as she ran through an autumn wood, where some leaves were down while others still clung to the trees above.  There was a suitably mysterious mist rising to all sides of the path she was fleeing along, though she was quite unmercifully clear and plain ahead, even I believe losing a shoe as she ran along the path, screaming fitfully and in sheer hysteria.  But do you know what was the most frightening aspect of all?  It’s that her screaming was muted and subdued as if coming through a tunnel from a distance:  what I heard in the foreground audio was the hoarse breathing and growling of the beast running behind her.  Moreover, the film was taken from the beast’s visual point of view as he or it ran.  This may be standard now for all I know, but I had never seen this before, and was astounded by the greater immediacy of my fear; I was in the werewolf’s totally unreasoning mind, his hungry and rapacious point of view suddenly my own.  This was a very effective way to keep a young child up at night with nightmares (believe you me!), though of course what was even more frightening was that I couldn’t confess my fear because I didn’t want to be prohibited from perhaps more scary television watching to come.

The second memory is of me as a slightly older child, acccompanied by my five-year-old brother.  It was New Year’s Eve, and we were at a relative’s house for the celebration.  It was a very small party, though such family favorites as Swedish meatballs were on the menu (another stray fact my mind insists on dredging up).  While the adults partied in the kitchen and dining room, my brother and I sat in the den, served food periodically like little princes by adults who popped in to see if we were all right.  It got late and then later.  All of a sudden, on came “Chiller Theater,” a classic show of which we had only heard, never having been allowed to watch it before.  We made one of those unspoken pacts children make and turned down the sound a bit:  we were going to watch a movie on “Chiller!”

This movie did not feature monsters.  In fact, it featured something which our culture nowadays believes to be the province of Bart Simpson:  the trick harassing telephone call.  (In our area, there was a tobacco called “Prince Albert,” and it came in a can.  We were fond of calling up total strangers at stores and markets on the phone and asking “Do you have ‘Prince Albert’ in a can?”  Our busy and long-suffering audience of one would either unsuspectingly or just to give us cheap joy answer “Yes.”  Whereupon we would respond with the nostrum, “Well, you’d better let him out then, hadn’t you?”)  Anyway, to get back to the “Chiller” movie in question:  the basic plot involves a teenage girl’s slumber party, at which she and her friends are getting bored late at night and trying to think of something to do.  The parents are away at a late night party.  At the risk of giving away the whole story early, I should probably tell you that the title of the movie is “I Know Who You Are, and I Saw What You Did.”  Well, the story jogs along at average pace for a while, with various comic misunderstandings when the girls call strangers and say “I know who you are, and I saw what you did.”  Then, the girls happen to strike a nerve in a major way with someone who has really done something horrible, we don’t find out what right away.  The phone line on the other end of the call goes dead.  The dread and thrill gradually build as the girls become the victims of their own practical joke; near the end, a call to the police to come and prevent an intruder who is trying to get in from entering goes awry, when their own phone line goes dead, due to it having been cut through by the mysterious criminal.  (This was well before the day of cell phones.)  It was also before the day, however, of horribly bloody scenes being actually “shown” on film, and so in the end the police do get there in time, in league with the returning parents (whose calls had received no answer, of course).

Though I can’t say that either of these memories haunted me for life (and it’s a fact that I continued to read Gothic novels and scary stories for some years to come), they have certainly stayed with me as reference points to my earliest recall of scary movies, even though they were only television films.  What about you?  What are some of your earliest fictional scary memories?  How have they affected your reading and viewing habits since?

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October 11, 2012 · 2:26 pm

When wicked bureaucracy and monstrous evil conjoin–“The Cabin in the Woods”

My last post kicked off the Halloween season with what I regarded as an appropriately frightening tale, A. S. Byatt’s “The Thing in the Forest.”  Nevertheless, a friend of mine said, “Yes, it’s a good post, but it’s not about something like a true horror book or movie.  Why don’t you let your hair down and write about something that’s just-for-fun scary and not about so serious a set of moral points?”  So, warning my readers ahead of time with a “spoiler alert” (I will be giving away the end of the movie), I’ve undertaken to write a shorter post than usual on “The Cabin in the Woods.”

This post is probably going to be one of the shortest I’ve ever written, for the simple reason that though I am moderately well-trained in other areas of theater, I’ve never taken a film course or been more than a casual film buff.  Generally, I respond to movies through their plot devices, character sketches, and most obvious symbolism, as if they were stories written down on the page.  Thus, I claim no special status in my remarks about a recent horror-film-with-a-difference which I’ve seen, though I’m proud of myself for even attempting to write down a few observations on the movie.

When a friend of mine who is as clueless as I am about horror films read the blurb on the back of the DVD, she was persuaded that this was a genuinely funny movie, one which two horror film cowards could view with the assurance that they would laugh their way through whatever silly shadows cast by ghostly hands might appear.  After all, the blurb said something about a group of producers/directors who are behind the scenes of a scary encounter in a “haunted” house, set up apparently to pull a joke on unsuspecting visitors to/buyers of the property.  This, we felt, was going to be good.

Once we started actually watching, there were a few moments of mild humor of a sophomoric sort,  but the wittiest rejoinders were always delivered by an engaging pothead who was one of a group of five young people on their way to the cabin for a vacation in the woods.  If there had been enough humor in the movie, it would’ve worked better, or if the pothead had had more lines and been less in the shadows of the action, it might’ve been a better movie.  Or maybe given my rank amateur status as a viewer of this kind of film, I have no right to complain.  But I have seen movies which were both scary and extremely clever and artistic with their humor, such as “The Shining” (“Hi, honey, I’m home!”) and “An American Werewolf in London” (the dialogues with the friend who comes back from the dead, and the main character waking up in the wolves’ cage at the zoo) and I was perhaps spoiled for something as full of the one-trick pony joke as “The Cabin in the Woods” from the start.  The joke appears to be that while the adventurous, heroic characters are to be killed off, the inaptly named “virgin” and the pothead are meant to survive, at least to the end of the film, after having been apparently killed off more than once.  (I’ve commented on humor plus horror as a workable combination in plays, films, and books before, in my post of August 20, 2012 entitled “‘What beck’ning ghost, along the moonlight shade/Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?’–Alexander Pope”.)

The best dramatic parts of the film are the sections when the producers/directors of the putative “reality tv show” appear, as it gradually becomes apparent that they are more than they seem:  the dramatic tension, such as it is, builds and is invested in watching them trying to kill off the characters.  But a large part of the dramatic tension is lost when it becomes apparent that they really are “out for blood,” and suddenly the movie becomes just another horror film in a list of many, and one feels it’s probably not one of the best.

One of the most effective qualities of the filming which I feel I can responsibly comment on (as a person largely disinclined to watch horror films) is the extreme darkness of the scenes.  It’s effective in the scenes shot in the woods at night and in the cabin not solely because of any obligation to a supposed realism, but because as Henry James reminded us in writing about his “potboiler” “The Turn of the Screw,” using the reader’s (or viewer’s) mind to half-invent the horrors you want to portray is at least half the battle.  The zombies are very bumpy and reddish-black and messy and not backlit, which helps more than actual pale faces and drooping, stained features would have.  And by the time “all hell breaks loose” and all the other fantastic monsters and so forth appear, one is more or less preoccupied solely with watching the two surviving characters try to keep their heads above water (and there is a water scene) amidst what seem like incredible odds.

The end of the movie, with the two surviving characters sharing a joint while the world ends, is engaging, but not really believable on some subconscious “okay, I’ve seen all this horror, now deliver the chilling punchline about how some trace of evil has managed to survive” or conversely “now everything’s all right again and we can all draw a sigh of relief” level.  As noted before, I’m not an expert on horror films, but the utter devastation in the final scene and the sort of shoulder shrug response of “oh well, let’s just get high and forget about it” is mysteriously unsatisfying, though certainly one has to admit there is a certain justice in the two characters quietly enjoying a joint and accepting that the challenge has been too much for them.

This is about where I stand on the movie “The Cabin in the Woods,” though I am interested in hearing what those with either more film experience or more experience of horror films in particular have to say:  basically, I think the most innovative and creative part of the whole movie is its premise, its main idea, that is, that some group of competitive, driven button pushers somewhere is sitting on the powder keg of hell and keeping it under control, and yet that they have constantly to function within the idea of an “acceptable loss margin,” which consists of other people.  Have you seen the movie?  What do you think?

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October 9, 2012 · 7:59 pm

A humanly chilling tale for Halloween–A. S. Byatt’s “The Thing in the Forest”

A. S. Byatt’s tale “The Thing in the Forest” from Little Black Book of Stories is a deceptively docile story about perspective, childhood, and nightmare (both the everyday and the fantastic kinds).  By and large, what produces the at least initially docile tone is the series of simple declarative sentences, often beginning with “the” or “there” as in any children’s well-told story with its fiats and “there once was.”  Defying the conventional writers’ wisdom about varying sentence structure, for a lot of the story these sentences march in order, simply telling what was the case without apology or intricacy, though there is intricacy in the implications attendant on the “simple” facts so posed.  This means of telling reinforces the factuality from a childlike perspective, at the same time as it heightens the mystery of “the thing in the forest.”  Just as the two little girls who are the main characters wonder if their WWII evacuation to the countryside is a punishment or a treat–and many children in England were sent into the country at the time to keep them safe–so a sense of uncertainty about the terror itself causes them to separate willingly after they “see” the thing in the forest attached to the countryhouse where they are staying.

The “thing” too is simply described, with only a gentle introduction and a slight variation from the previously repetitive sentence structure:  “Did they hear it first or smell it first?  Both sound and scent were at first infinitesimal and dispersed.  Both gave the impression of moving in–in waves–from the whole perimeter of the forest.  Both increased very slowly in volume, and both were mixed, a sound and a smell fabricated of many disparate sounds and smells.”  In the rest of the description, which tells what smells exactly and sounds precisely the thing is composed of, the fantastic is at war with the flowing pace of the language, not elevated or unusual, but causing a concatenation of images for the reader to be appalled by.  The “thing” is apparently not aware of or not after the two main characters, but at first seems simply to inhabit that time, place, and set of conditions.

When the characters become two grownup women, vacationing after the deaths of their mothers within a week of each other, they happen to meet up in the house again, in front of a “medieval-looking illustrated book” which is on display at the house in the room where they had previously eaten as children there, though there is in the present time no record of any of the children having visited.  Other war time events that took place in the great house are extensively commemorated, they find.  Thus, there is a reversal:  in the original encounter, they had no previous warning of “the thing in the forest,” though both of them were on record as being there, since they were later returned to their mothers, who unlike their fathers survived the war; now, there is no indication that the two main characters were there, whereas there is the illustrated book about family legends regarding the “thing.”  The “thing” can clearly take over places and people in at least this sense of memory.

In the book, the “thing” is spoken of as the “Loathly Worm,” not a dragon with wings but an “English worm,” and is described as having been killed several times by the “scions” of the house (it needs periodically to be “re-killed” because like the earthworm it is compared to, it can grow new heads).

One important feature of the story is that though Penny, the tall thin little girl, now a trained child psychologist, and Primrose, the short plump blonde child, a babysitting storyteller for children, are so different in other respects, the episode has clearly been a major force in both their lives in different ways, as their “vocations” attest, since both have wound up caring for children.

As the two women converse over tea, they finally agree that they both “saw” the Loathly Worm and that it has continued to affect them.  As Penny says, “….I think that there are things that are real–more real than we are–but mostly we don’t cross their paths or they don’t cross ours.  Maybe at very bad times we get into their world, or notice what they are doing in ours.”  For the first time, they admit that maybe the monster disposed of a little girl named Alys whom they had refused to let play with them:  “There had been a mess, a disgusting mess, they remembered, but no particular sign of anything that might have been, or been part of, or belonged to, a persistent little girl called Alys.”  The two women agree to meet up again, but when the time comes, both of them sit alone in separate B & Bs, as if paralyzed by the fear they once felt.  Something peculiar affects them and keeps them apart.

Primrose decides the next day to go back to the forest, while Penny walks off in the opposite direction.  This is characteristic of their personalities as adults:  while Primrose the fairy tale teller is practical and down-to-earth, Penny, the “rationcinative” is impractical and given to avoidance.  Primrose takes a different path into the wood than they had taken the first time.  She enjoys the flowers at first, and the birds and small animals.  We see her as a child in retrospect, loved and protected by a mother who creatively made her some toy stuffed animals each Christmas.  Her view as a developing child is a touching one.  “She told herself stories at night about a girl-woman, an enchantress in a fairy wood, loved and protected by an army of wise and gentle creatures.  She slept banked in by stuffed creatures, as the house in the blitz was banked in by inadequate sandbags.”  She reasons to herself in the present that she should get to the center of the “forest” and Byatt uses a sentence in quotation marks to show that Primrose is the heroine of her own story, thinking of it as a different story she might tell to the children she tends:  “‘She came to the centre and sat on the mossy chair.'”  We are told that normally she does not frighten the children with this particular story of the Loathly Worm from her past.  “She frightened them with slimy things that came up the plughole, or swarmed out of the U-bend in the lavatory, or tapped on windows at night, and were despatched by bravery and magic.  There were waiting goblins in urban dumps beyond the streetlights.  But the woods in her tales were sources of glamour, of rich colours and unseen hidden life, flower fairies and more magical beings.  They were places where you used words like spangles and sequins for real dewdrops on real dock leaves.”  When Primrose has sat a while, she becomes prey to warring desires, the one to go home and the other to stay exactly where she is, questioning if she ever had a home.

Though Penny has taken an apparently opposite route, she too winds up on one side of the wood, so that (as in many a fairy tale) the wood becomes that magical place that all of the champions against it must face.  “She had wagered on freedom and walked away, and walking away had brought her here, as she had known it would.”  She begins to move “as if she were hunted or hunting.”  Since she is apparently looking for the monster, she quite logically begins to trail its scat:  “She found things she remembered, threadworms of knitting wool, unravelled dishcloth cotton, clinging newsprint.  She found odd sausage-shaped tubed of membrane, containing fragments of hair and bone and other inanimate stuffs.  They were like monstrous owl-pellets, or the gut-shaped hair-balls vomited by cats….It had been here, but how long ago?”  She comes out at a place she suddenly recognizes, and finds some “small bones” and a tortoiseshell hairslide, and suddenly the reader begins to speculate again about the child Alys.  Is this a fantasy tale, or a tale about a reality too horrible to relate?  Did the two girls perhaps do something to Alys to make her stop following them through the wood?  Is there a real monster?  In the past, are they seeing a bomb fall, or perhaps seeing the results on the ground of a bomb that has already fallen?   At this point present and past become one for a moment, because the traces of human death are still there.  Penny thinks for a moment of bringing the bones together and burying them, but does not do so.

Primrose enters the forest in the morning of this day in the present of the story; by the time Penny sees “the full moon” and is “released” by the forest, night has clearly come.  Now what do our two main characters do?  Whereas Primrose had previously made up a better type of forest to tell children about, and as Penny had specialized in dreams as a child psychologist, so they both take their own way out again.  They end up going back to town in the same train, but both remembering the expression of misery on the face of the monster, they avoid each other on the platform.  “They saw each other through that black imagined veil which grief, or pain, or despair hangs over the visible world.  They saw each other’s face and thought of the unforgettable misery of the face they had seen in the forest.  Each thought that the other was the witness, who made the thing certainly real, who prevented her from slipping into the comfort of believing she had imagined it or made it up.”

Penny is haunted, and after returning to town, goes back later to the original entrance they’d come in by, wanting to see the monster face to face.  Her story ends with her hearing and smelling its approach.  Primrose overcomes it by telling her children’s group at a mall about it in fairy tale form.  These are two characteristic choices again, but now it is Penny who is facing what she previously avoided and Primrose avoiding ever so delicately what she previously faced, trying to envelope the “Loathly Worm” in a net of fiction.  Byatt’s choice of her subject, however, is characteristic of both, for as readers we are encouraged not only to believe in the monster on a fantastic level, but also to look beyond it, to a harsh reality, the facts of war, death, decay.  And we see, as I believe Byatt wants us to see, that in our century, war is not about a man’s heroic contest with a Loathly Worm, nor perhaps was it ever so simple a thing, even symbolically.  It’s about the quotidian level of destruction which goes on daily through the deliquescence of all uncomplicated daily things which are eliminated in their simple nature during wars and which become so much detritus, trailing mournfully and sluggishly and stinking thorough a “forest,” which bears a mute resemblance to Dante’s “dark forest” also.  Unless we see the conglomeration of all the tiny emblems of our lives which war engulfs, we are unable to track it down; it is we ourselves who are gone and forgotten and left in pieces.

Yet, when this ghastly tale is done, the tale is not after all the worst there is:  for, forgetting would be the worst, and we remember in tales like this one, too.  Whether writing in deadly earnest factual prose or writing a supple and light prose of great poetic and fairy tale beauty, writers like A. S. Byatt don’t forget, nor do they allow us to do so.

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October 5, 2012 · 4:24 pm

“Why I Transformed Myself Into a Nightingale”–Wolfgang Hildesheimer and choice of form

At first reading, “Why I Transformed Myself Into a Nightingale” is a light, frivolous, playful short story featuring a fantastic tale of episodes in the life of a magician.  The first paragraph which begins the story is even fantastic while it sounds rather dry and factual in form, because the “magician” is telling the story after the transformation has taken place, when (presumably) all he can do is sing.  We therefore are entering his fantastic world from the first moment, because it would seem (from his bothering to explain to us his choice) that we can understand the nightingale’s “words” in his song:  “Acting on the strength of my convictions, I transformed myself into a nightingale.  Since neither the reason nor the resolve necessary for this sort of action lies within the realm of the ordinary, I think the story of this metamorphosis is worth telling.”  Yet, as will emerge, both the “reason” and the “resolve” are a great deal more easily understandable for readers than what the narrative voice asks us to believe, which is that he mastered the art of turning people into animals.  We are asked to accept the totally fantastic in addition to a tale of a man being in a rather ordinary though selfish frame of mind, or at least one which is ordinary by comparison.

The speaker begins by telling us about his parents, his father being a zoologist, his mother an actress.  It is almost as if the practical and the (aesthetically) magical meet in his family history and descent thus.  He describes the magic kit they give him to amuse himself with, which he soon masters and discards when he reads the condescending legend on it, “The Little Magician.”  Later, he asks for regular magic lessons and is caught up in giving performances for those who know him well.  A noticeable change comes about in the magician’s attitude toward what he does, however, as he grows up:  “I outgrew my teacher and began experimenting on my own.  I didn’t neglect my academic education, though.  I read a lot and went around with school friends whose patterns of development I observed.  One friend who had been given an electric train in his childhood was preparing for a career with the railroad; another who had played with tin soldiers decided on a career as a military officer.  In this way, the work force was regulated by early influences.”  Nevertheless, the magician is at least convinced that he himself is not influenced by early training, though it becomes obvious through his later “choice of form” that he is deceiving himself.

As he tries to select a career, a very telling notion occurs to him, which shows that as a person he is on the surface more concerned with ethics than others of his age.  Yet, he too ends up making “ethical” choices which clearly show in a fantastic way that he has not entirely escaped “interference” in the lives of others, which he says he is trying to avoid:  “[I had a] growing awareness that I couldn’t select a conventional, bourgeois profession without in some way interfering with other people’s lives….When I came to this realization, I came to yet another, namely that only the momentary state of things can be perceived, that it is merely idle speculation to try to draw conclusions or gather knowledge from experience.  I decided to spend my life in leisure and contemplate nothing.  I got two turtles, sat down on a lounge chair, and watched the birds above me and the turtles beneath me.  I had given up magic because my art had reached a state of perfection.  I felt that I was able to change people into animals [emphasis mine].  I didn’t make use of this ability, though, because I believed that this sort of interference into another person’s life was completely unjustifiable.”  Yet at the same time, the narrator reports that he himself has a strong desire to become a bird, because it leads what he calls a “pure existence.”  He is thinking on one level that he cannot interfere with anyone else, yet he is thinking on another that “I need[] only a test of my art” to know for sure if he can change people into animals!

As with every story of temptation, once he imagines the possibility, an “opportunity” comes along to test his powers.  A friend, Mr. Werhahn, comes to visit, and is full of complaints about the journalists whom he manages as an editor.  He happens in the midst of his complaints to catch sight of the speaker’s turtles and desolately remarks that he would like to be a turtle.  And, it’s no sooner said than done, though if our speaker had really meant what he says about non-interference, of course, he wouldn’t so readily have interpreted the remark as a factual, genuine expression of desire to be transformed.  Upon the instant, he has three turtles, though offering the reader a sop, he says, “(Just for the record, I’d like to assure you that I purchased the other two animals as such.)”  This is a very comical version of the sort of thing people say when they are making excuses for other excesses.

Next, “I used my art one other time before my own metamorphosis.”  In this case, however, the magician feels some degree of compunction, symbolically because it has to do with music, an art form in which one, while singing lyrics, may express many emotions which are contrary-to-fact.  This second case also has to do with birds, living as which may not appeal to others as it does to the speaker (to enter for a moment into his odd world).  He is sitting at an inn under a tree drinking apple cider, when five young girls come along and start singing a song, in which a speaker expresses a desire to be a sparrow.  The narrator is annoyed by their sounds, and so takes their words as factual:  he changes them into sparrows.  Though the reader may see no real difference in the two cases of transformation so far described, the narrator says that his worry is because “I had the feeling that I had acted emotionally, under the influence of my (certainly justified) irritation.  I thought that this wasn’t worthy of me, so I decided not to delay my own metamorphosis any longer.”  He assures us that he is not afraid of prosecution, because of course he could change his pursuers into “toy fox terriers!  It was more the certainty that, for technical reasons, I would never find the unspoiled peace I needed for the pure enjoyment of things, undisturbed by the will.  Somewhere a dog would always bark, a child scream, or a young girl sing.”

He decides to change himself into a nightingale because he likes the idea of flight from place to place and ironically enough “I wanted to sing because I love music.  The thought that I would interfere in the life of someone else whose sleep I might disturb did occur to me.  But now that I am no longer human, I have put away my human thoughts and interests.  My ethic is now the ethic of a nightingale.”  The real question here is whether he ever really had a human ethic, a human relationship to others, which would enable him to see their point of view.

Thus, this story about a choice of form is a meditation upon what it is really to enter into the pains and sufferings and also the joys of other human beings without wanting to change them.  Many serious ethical world texts express the idea that we cannot change the world, only ourselves.  But the ultimately selfish, egotistical/egoistical narrator comes to this belief only from a limited point of view, not because he wants to master and control his own worst impulses, but with regret because he cannot have total control over what is going on around him.  Yet, Hildesheimer is always light of touch, and we can see that this story is not only about a choice the narrator has made, to be a beautifully trilling bird perched on a branch in the dark night singing, but a choice the author has made likewise, to be a storyteller who gets across singingly in few words some of the same points that a long, anguished, and argumentative treatise on ethics might do.  We may of course remember that magic is also known as “legerdemain,” or lightness of hand.  The story is written almost as a parody of the sort of speech, partly cautionary and partly leadership-oriented, that an important public figure might be expected to give to students who are trying to choose a career, and this is where the author’s appeal is especially notable.  Is it a case of “don’t do what I did,” or is it a case of “this is what makes me particularly suited to stand before you today”?  The story almost seems to suggest that all along the character is deficient of human moral considerations, and thus is better off as a nightingale, with “the ethics of a nightingale,” those which he seemed to start out with.  Yet, the whole piece is one which a reader may be enchanted by, and may read through with whimsy, almost without noticing the seriousness of it.  As the narrator says finally, “Now it is May.  It is dusk, and soon it will be dark.  Then I begin to sing, or, as humans say, strike up my song.”

I have given some long quotes from this story, and more or less summed up the action, yet there is still a great deal to be gotten from it, and those interested in what I’ve written should certainly read it for themselves.  For one thing, there’s the moral/magical question of why, when most magic tricks involve the restoration of order once the “trick” is done (the egg is put back together somehow, the assistant is shown to be still in one piece), the narrator cannot change his friend back from a turtle to a human, or why the girls cannot be changed back from sparrows?  And who exactly is the public speaker/nightingale voice narrating?  What do you think?  A truely magical story, wouldn’t you say?

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October 3, 2012 · 5:21 pm

On the subject of growing old–Oscar Wilde and Andrew Marvell

As we know from two very different perspectives, there is always a penalty to be paid when one ages:  either one becomes older and wickeder and uglier, or one (in sadness) acquires the ability to be more mature and more knowledgeable and more composed about one’s appearance (a moralist’s view of older and wickeder and uglier.  As a non-professional moralist and a person of 55, sometimes I feel I belong to one camp, sometimes to the other).  Both Oscar Wilde and Andrew Marvell have written on the topic of youth and age in well-known works, Wilde in his novella “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and Marvell in his poem “To His Coy Mistress.”  As well, the two authors are interested in what can constitute the golden mean of outwitting a loathesome age or the just punishment for evading the maturity that should come naturally to a naturally composed person.

In “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Dorian is at first merely a somewhat flighty, attractive, shallow young man who is beloved by the painter Basil Hayward, a man painting his portrait.  But along comes Sir Henry Wotton (Harry to his intimates) who derives a certain amusement from dragging Dorian into haunts of bad repute and amongst evil characters.  Dorian makes a wish that his portrait, a triumph of the painterly art when Hayward finishes it, might take on the characteristics of his appearance as he ages, and leave him free to appear always young and handsome (and as the Arabic saying goes “Be careful what you wish for, because you will surely receive it”).  This is in fact what happens.  By the end of the novel, Dorian has murdered the author of his artistic being, Hayward, and outdone Wotton in the degree of his depravity.  When he tries to destroy the by-now-unsightly picture, however, catastrophe strikes, reminding us that “The truth will out” or “What’s bred in the bone will not out of the flesh,” or a hundred other aphorisms.  I say aphorisms are in a sense the point here, because Wilde was in some works especially a moralist, and the notions of morality were never far from even his lightest touch with the pen.

With Marvell’s poem, the point is a little otherwise, and it’s really a triumph to both authors that this should be so.  What I mean by this is that Wilde wrote his story and ended it as he did and published it when he was only thirty-five; his story is about how much more graceful and mature and moral it is to accept age as it comes.  By contrast, Marvell wrote his frolicky poem “To His Coy Mistress” by the time he was about 60, a poem in which apparently the lady being addressed is a young virgin and the male voice speaking has much of the urgency of an equally young swain courting her.  But then, who better to be an expert on the carpe diem theme, perhaps, than a man a great deal older than a woman he is courting, so that possibly my point is not well-made?  At any rate, his reminder that “The grave’s a fine and private place,/But none, I think, do there embrace” is definitely a pointed reminder to the lady.  As he also informs her, it may be that “worms shall try/That long-preserved virginity,/And your quaint honor turn to dust,/And into ashes all my lust.”  (Note for my readers:  at the time Marvell was writing, “mistress” may or may not have meant “mistress” as we use it today.  It also meant “girlfriend,” “lady of the house,” “one whom I admire,” and sometimes simply “Mrs.”  As well, in a context like this, the word “quaint” was a pun on the “c” word, which is used rudely these days as a word for a woman one disrespects.  The disrespect was not current in Marvell’s poem.)

The end of the poem, however, is where Marvell’s “fable” diverges from Wilde’s.  Wilde’s fable has a serious and a tragic ending; Marvell’s fabulous poem surpasses the flourish of imagery at its beginning with a truly cosmic witty imagination at its end:  “Let us roll all our strength and all/Our sweetness up into one ball,/And tear our pleasures with rough strife/Thorough the iron gates of life:/Thus, though we cannot make our sun/Stand still, yet we will make him run.”  Or, do the two fables (and I am using the word “fable” imprecisely in this paragraph) really diverge?  Wilde’s novella shows one failure to stay young at heart and hope at least, a failure which is particularly desperate.  Whatever age Marvell’s speaker and his mistress may be imagined to have, they have come up with yet another solution:  to “seize the day” and make the most of the time they have together.  Yet to some readers, this solution seems a little hasty, as does Robert Herrick’s poem “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” on a similar theme, beginning “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.”  In all cases, the devastating abilities of time and old age are acknowledged; the main divergence of the fables is in which choice they choose to portray.  Wilde’s tale is cautionary though witty, Marvell’s is witty, though with an underlying morality of seriousness.  Both authors are indicating the need for a golden mean, though one shows a character notably failing of it and another is trying to persuade a woman to disregard her doubts, her doubts holding her back because of a kind of “coyness”; there is, after all, no indication in the poem that she is unwilling to listen.

And so, readers, just as an afterthought, what were you planning to get around to soon?  What had you determined to carpe diem, or “seize the day” about?  Perhaps you were planning to wash the car, or read a particular book, or pay a peculiar relative a visit, or write a post:  as Wilde would have it, do so with loving-kindness and an awareness of your privilege of being still among the living, and as Marvell would have it, don’t forget why you’re doing it today (because you’re still vital enough).

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September 29, 2012 · 7:22 pm

“When he hath tried me I shall come forth as gold.”–Job, Kurt Vonnegut, and “Breakfast of Champions”

To start with the boring stuff and get it out of the way first, here’s what I had for breakfast today.  I have it for breakfast six days a week, and on the seventh, I have some version of scrambled eggs (or fried eggs) and toast:

1 cup fat-free plain yoghurt, 5 strawberries sliced, 1/2 banana sliced, 1 Tablespoon peanut butter, cinnamon, 2 packets Splenda, 1 cup sugar free Langer’s pomegranate juice.

Here’s what I usually have for lunch, unless it’s a day when we haven’t cooked beans, in which case I have some sort of sandwich (an egg sandwich if I didn’t have eggs for breakfast):

2 scoops of beans, cooked with fragments of red and green bell peppers or carrots, and onions.  4-6 wheat crackers.  Water.  (Alternate days are sometimes big chef salad and croissant days, rarely).

For dinner, I have various things, no red meat usually:

1 green vegetable, steamed without sauce but with some salt added after cooking, 1 yellow or white vegetable with margarine or 1 cup pasta with red sauce, 1 3-4 oz. serving of fish, chicken, or turkey.  (On alternate weekends, I have one pizza with veggies meal.)

After dinner:  1 apple or orange, average size.

My constant struggle:  to avoid salty snacks and to try to limit desserts with meals.

That was the boring part, and now it’s over.  But is it?  Kurt Vonnegut and his spokesman Kilgore Trout from Breakfast of Champions say “No.”  I picked up the book today to look for the section which has stuck in my mind all these years (and I won’t say exactly how many) since I first read the book at 21.  The section of the book I’m referring to is the section in which Kilgore Trout is sitting in a pornographic film theater and he imagines the subject of a new book while he is sitting.

The story he imagines takes place on “a planet where all the animal and plant life had been killed by pollution, except for humanoids.  The humanoids ate food made from petroleum and coal.”  When a human astronaut comes to this planet, they give him a big feast, but of course the food is execrable.  Their dinner table conversation is about censorship, of all things.  Their whole city is innundated with “dirty movie” houses.  The residents of the planet want to put the theaters out of business without limiting free speech.  So far, it sounds like a real-life script we’re familiar with.

But when the astronaut goes with his hosts to see a movie presentation “As dirty as movies could get” on his own home planet, Earth, what he sees is something he would never have predicted.  I quote at length:

“So the theatre went dark and the curtains opened.  At first there wasn’t any picture.  There were slurps and moans from loudspeakers.  Then the film itself appeared.  It was a high quality film of a male humanoid eating what looked like a pear.  The camera zoomed in on his lips and tongue and teeth, which glistened with saliva.  He took his time about eating the pear.  When the last of it had disappeared into his slurpy mouth, the camera focused on his Adam’s apple.  His Adam’s apple bobbed obscenely.  He belched contentedly, and then these words appeared on the screen, but in the language of the planet:  The End.”

“It was all faked, of course.  There weren’t any pears anymore.  And the eating of a pear wasn’t the main event of the evening anyway.  It was a short subject, which gave the members of the audience time to settle down.”

“Then the main feature began.  It was about a male and a female and their two children, and their dog and their cat.  They ate steadily for an hour and a half–soup, meat, biscuits, butter, vegetables, mashed potatoes and gravy, fruit, candy, cake, pie.  The camera rarely strayed more that a foot from their glistening lips and their bobbing Adam’s apples.  And then the father put the cat and dog on the table, so they could take part in the orgy, too.”

“After a while, the actors couldn’t eat anymore.  They were so stuffed that they were goggle-eyed.  They could hardly move.  They said they didn’t think they could eat again for a week, and so on.  They clearred the table slowly.  They went waddling out into the kitchen, and they dumped about thirty pounds of leftovers into a garbage can.”

“The audience went wild.”

The astronaut, Don, goes outside only to find food whores on the sidewalk, who offer real food goods that aren’t actually obtainable on that planet.  The “humanoids” say that a whore could take him home and cook expensive petroleum and coal products for his consumption, “[a]nd then while he ate them, she would talk dirty about how fresh and full of natural juices the food was, even though the food was fake.”

Though every blurb on the book and every reviewer I’ve run across mentions Vonnegut’s great satirical and comic status, what really stuck in my mind about this particular part of Breakfast of Champions was how painfully close it is to a future we are really threatened by, and it’s close on several levels.  Firstly, the point about pollution is even more well-taken now than it was when Vonnegut published this book, back in the early 70s.  Secondly, we are exploiting all of our natural resources at such an alarming rate that it has finally become a real issue in a presidential election coming up this fall, and though it has been mentioned in previous years, now it is serious as it has never been before.  We have invented so many of the necessities of our lives from petroleum and coal that we can almost imagine an earth fated to subsist on them entirely.  We no longer have the illusion that our earthly goods are unlimited.  Thirdly, we are in a season of despair and frenetic groping after the subject of love itself–not only do we look to movies, television shows, and various kinds of shrieking publicity to obtain our love from others, both “brotherly” love and sexual/passionate love, but we are involved in intricate dances of love and hate with figures in the public eye through various media outlets.  Finally, and perhaps most tellingly for Vonnegut’s satire, much of the world is starving right now, in their own countries from famine and drought, in other countries in refugee camps, and in all sorts of bad weather conditions which have, in turn, caused the food shortages we are suffering from.  So, through global warming the satire circles back upon itself here.

My point about Vonnegut’s book, if anything, is that even just that one part of his satire which I am claiming for my inspiration today–and the whole book is full of such moments of self-recognition with only a slight wry twist for fantasy’s sake–is more than enough to ensure that though Vonnegut died a few years back on April 11, 2007 and before that lived an event- and trauma-filled life, he can justifiably say, with Job, “When he hath tried me I shall come forth as gold.”  The quote from Job appears at the beginning of Breakfast of Champions.

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September 27, 2012 · 4:14 pm

“We all have the strength to endure the misfortunes of others.”–La Rochefoucauld

In a general way, the short story I will be writing about today, Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson,” is about the reverse side of “endur[ing] the misfortunes of others,” which is what the mostly unseen rich white people in the story do; it is about learning to think beyond one’s own advantage and gain the ability to form strong bonds with others for political and social purposes.  Yet, grouped around the main adult figure in the story (a college-educated, “properly” taught member of the African American community named “Miss Moore”), the children in the story compete, and riotously and in laughter bring about the minor misfortunes of the other children, their friends, by jeering at them, engaging in physical displays of hostility, taking things away from them and so on and so forth.  Which is to say, they are acting like many a child in many a place and time.  But their time and place happens to be New York City, in some place near or like Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant (where Bambara herself grew up), and they are bored, antagonized, and sometimes puzzled by the class and ethnic consciousness which Miss Moore is trying to teach them.

Miss Moore does not give many lessons an outright exegesis, of course; rather, she confronts the children with the situation as it is and allows them to draw their own conclusions.  As children, they often are sidetracked by side issues and unimportant details, or at least by non-essential features of the scene.  And yet, when she takes them to view the large toystore F. A. O. Schwarz on Fifth Avenue, they all seem to understand the lesson, even when its main outcome is that they are frustrated by what they learn:  the cost of a simple model sailboat at this elite toystore is enough to allow their families many necessary items of daily existence.

Though the children are allowed to give the five dollars to the cab driver and retrieve the change (which Miss Moore never asks them for) and two of them keep it defiantly after she has had her chance at impressing them with what they need to overcome to be equal citizens, it is in fact possibly this defiance itself–though wrong-headed in this instance, since it is aimed at Miss Moore, who is their mentor and wants them to succeed–which will give them the energy and knowledge and strength to defy what is oppressing them.  Sugar, when asked for her conclusions about the toystore, comes out with the knowledge of what they’ve seen, which causes her to say “‘[T]his is not much of a democracy if you ask me.  Equal chance to pursue happiness means an equal crack at the dough, don’t it?'”  Sylvia, the main character, is just as cognizant of the lesson implied, but she spends her time trying to impede Sugar from articulating the truth by standing on Sugar’s foot while Sugar attempts to answer Miss Moore.  She even ends by rejecting Sugar’s peace offering to share the extra cab money they’ve scored by refusing to make friends again.  Still, her energy and strength are the two other components I’ve enumerated which can help the children, and she races away from Miss Moore and Sugar and thinks to herself, “‘[A]in’t nobody gonna beat me at nuthin.'”  Thus, she too has absorbed “the lesson,” though her reaction to it is not to take the rest of the money and derive what small advantage the day allows.  Instead, she proposes to go “to the West End and then over to the Drive to think this day through.”

We see therefore that Sugar, who has the correct intellectual answer to the problem, yet decides to take the rest of the day as a sort of holiday from further thought about the situation while enjoying the benefits of the money she so seldom has at her disposal, while Sylvia is planning for the future, though at first she was not willing to be cooperative with Miss Moore to the point of answering her intelligently.  She may or may not be partially right to suspect the path of learning Miss Moore has taken, yet it is from Miss Moore’s perspective the right thing to do for her to help out her own community by making things for them, doing things for them, and going about enlightening their children about the “something better” which nearly every human soul not especially blessed by fate and fortune wishes for.  The misdirected hostility of the children towards her “lessons” is in fact possibly derived from a suspicion of lessons which others, seemingly built on the same model as Miss Moore (though perhaps whites or consdescending fellow African Americans), may have articulated.  The children must thus decide for themselves which models are true to the heart and which are “false leaders.”  Toni Cade Bambara is quoted by Ann Charters as saying of herself, “While my heart is a laughing gland and my favorite thing to be doing is laughing so hard I have to lower myself on the wall to keep from falling down, near that chamber is a blast furnace where a rifle pokes from the ribs.”  In this story, we see both the laughter of the children and their rough play with one another, and the “blast furnace” and “rifle” which are at the source of their reactions.

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