False Face, False Life

Observations:

1) For all of my life, I've been considered "not quite like anyone else," and this might be caused by my refusal (or perhaps inability) to put on a happy face when I feel grief.

2) Yet here on the margins of Canada, we have many people, like me, who never seem able to wear that mask. Perhaps our visibility is part of a traditional Canadian sadness that has not yet been corporatized and marketized out of sight. After all, we spend half the year in a deep freeze, with short days and long nights, in a country that hides any number of seasonal stings behind a calm white wall. We have social space, then, to frown when life creeps up on us.

Jason E. Rolfe: Life is a play, but everything is improvised

THE PUPPET-PLAY OF DOCTOR GALL.
From the original 1832 manuscript of Sebastian Haarpuder.
Translated faithfully from the original German of Doctor Gall
by Jason E. Rolfe.

"I believe the world is a stage. I believe we are mere players. I do not, however, believe in playwrights. I do not believe in scripts and rehearsals. The world is a stage, my dear readers. Life is a play, but everything is improvised."

It can be hard to specify the appeal of certain writers; we like their stories because we like their stories. Jason E. Rolfe provides an exception. I can point to the clarity of his prose, the playfulness of his wit, the endlessly-quotable sentences, but I can pin down three more qualities that make his work stand out for me.

"Ernst took himself far too seriously. He was, if I am being honest, a bit player on life’s stage. His lines were those he gave himself, and while he played his role admirably it was invariably uncredited."

Jason E. Rolfe never thinks in the ways that I do, yet no matter which pathways he follows into strange meta-textual mazes, he leaves behind footprints easy to recognize and to follow.

He works within a heritage of Absurdist fiction that rarely communicates to me, perhaps because I remain unsteeped in its history and its methods, yet he compels me to turn pages and to laugh at his puns, his jokes, his wordplay. His writing never fails to keep me reading with a smile:

"He is dressed in a fine suit. Not, I can assure you, a fine suit by my estimable, if not flamboyant standards, but fine to those of the clerical persuasion. I refer, of course, to dismally formal daywear -- a tailcoat with the front cut straight across his waist while its tails hang down in the back. It is black because he is dreadfully unimaginative. His trousers are beige because he is monotonously boring. Waistcoats, of which there are two, shirt and cravat are white because white requires no thought whatsoever, and our Stranger is unwaveringly thoughtless."

And finally, he experiments with fiction in ways that I never do; he bends time, causes personalities and identities to shift and spread, plays games with settings and voices, and all because he can. That seems to be the sole reason for his methods, and I am happy to see where the test results might lead.

"There is no singular organ, no faculty of the mind that explains the perception or the creation of beauty."

True? False? No idea. I only know that Jason E. Rolfe has written something new, that I have read it twice, that I have grinned and laughed all the way through it.

Losing

At the end of a long and complex dream last night, a stranger told me that I must confront the problems of creativity as if I were a lawyer pleading cases.

"And if you need to know where to plead the hardest, then just think of a case you're losing."

Hateful In My Silence

"Never do to others that which is hateful to you."

Yet so much is hateful to me that I often fall into silence and isolation as an alternative to hatred. I like people -- sometimes, within limits, and mainly women -- but holding myself back to spare others the worst of myself denies me the chance to be myself, in all of my hateful splendour.

A puzzle!

Lost in the Baxian Bog

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No matter how often I try, I cannot hear Bax. Not even a great conductor with a great orchestra, beautifully recorded on a great label, can make this music work for me.

And yet, I love the uncharacteristically firm Symphony no. 1, which is unlike anything else he wrote, and which comes to life under any baton. Bryden Thomson with Chandos, David Lloyd-Jones with Naxos, Myer Fredman with Lyrita: all of these recordings bring out the power and structure of no. 1, qualities I have never found elsewhere in Bax, not in the other symphonies, not in the tone poems.

I would never deny the sudden sparks that flicker up in "Tintagel" or in "November Woods," until the music sinks back into a glutinous Celtic bog. People love these tone poems; I want to love them, too, but I can only think of how much more I find in Sibelius, and of how many times I have heard these Baxian efforts without epiphany and without pleasure.

Walt Kelly and Mervyn Peake: the Teachers

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In the summer of 1979, when the gruelling work on the final exams of high school gave way to the sweating, aching work of the farm, I was finally able to sit down and read the Titus books by Mervyn Peake. During the last few months of school, I had tantalized myself by tasting passages here and there; now, given the chance to sink into the books without mental distraction, I took them slowly.

Peake had arrived with an echo. In the spring, while stalking through the library at Carleton University with my father's card, I had found a book by Walt Kelly, TEN EVER-LOVIN' BLUE-EYED YEARS WITH POGO. I recalled the strip from childhood; it had seemed like a shipwreck from the past on the tidy modern beach of PEANUTS: elaborate, incomprehensible, crowded with panels and words, with an ink and colour style that looked like nothing else in the newspaper. With all of this in mind, I borrowed the book, fell in love, and read it repeatedly.

The Titus books made me realize how little I knew about writing. After the duel between Flay and Swelter, which fattened page after page after page with obsessive detail yet still excited me as few action scenes had before, I put down the book, stared out the window at the Gatineau Hills, and wondered why no one had ever told me that such writing was possible.

At the same time, Walt Kelly revealed an anger at the world that somehow found ways to laugh, even if the laughter rang a bit crazed and desperate. He showed me dishonest, delusional, dysfunctional idiots, lunatics trapped in their own obsessive mazes; he made me love the mazes and the fools.

That was then. Decades later, both Peake and Kelly remain a living influence and a constant challenge. My wrestling with the candour and strangeness of Peake's verse is one of the foundations for ICE AND AUTUMN GLASS. Kelly's angry laughter suggests a more healthy response than my own seething bitterness.

Kelly and Peake were teachers in 1979, and remain teachers now. I still need to learn from their lessons.

If You Say, Miss: I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE

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BETSY [voice over]:
It seemed only a few days before I met Mr. Holland in Antigua. We boarded the boat for St. Sebastian. It was all just as I'd imagined it. I looked at those great, glowing stars. I felt the warm wind on my cheek. I breathed deep and every bit of me inside myself said, "How beautiful!"

PAUL HOLLAND [aloud]:
It's not beautiful.

BETSY:
You read my thoughts, Mr. Holland.

PAUL:
It's easy enough to read the thoughts of a newcomer. Everything seems beautiful because you don't understand. Those flying fish -- they're not leaping for joy. They're jumping in terror. Bigger fish want to eat them. That luminous water -- it takes its gleam from millions of tiny dead bodies. The glitter of putrescence. There's no beauty here. Only death and decay.

BETSY:
You can't really believe that.

[Cut to the shot of a falling star.]

PAUL:
Everything good dies here -- even the stars.

Of all the Lewton films, I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE might be the most dreamlike and mysterious. It owes much of this mood to the shadowy, often iridescent images of Jacques Tourneur, to long moments without dialogue punctuated by the skittering of wind in the leaves and dry sugarcane, to the sparse and elegiac music of Roy Webb, to the broken family relations on this island with a long history of suffering:

COACHMAN:
Times gone, Fort Holland was a fort, and now, no longer. Holland's was the most old family, miss. They brought the colored folks to the island. The colored folks and Ti-Misery.

BETSY:
Ti-Misery? What's that?

COACHMAN:
A man, miss. An old man who lives in the garden at Fort Holland. With arrows stuck in him and a sorrowful, weeping look on his black face.

BETSY (alarmed):
Alive?

COACHMAN:
No, miss. He's just the same as he was in the beginning. On the front side of an enormous boat.

BETSY:
You mean a figurehead.

COACHMAN:
If you say, miss. And the enormous boat brought the long ago fathers and the long ago mothers of us all, chained to the bottom of the boat.

BETSY (gazing around):
They brought you to a beautiful place, didn't they?

COACHMAN:
If you say, miss. If you say.

The other source is a narrative strategy that offers an event long-completed before the film begins, one that is interpreted with conflicting views by the people involved, but never shown to the audience. In films, we believe what we can see, but when we are denied this authoritative perspective on what happened, we can only hear about it from second-hand accounts.

A few of the characters explain this event in the framework of modern medicine, others, in the framework of religious belief. At the end of the film, we are shown magical intentions to manipulate events, but we have also been shown, earlier, that identical results have been caused by ordinary means: one character is known to wander aimlessly; another does exactly what he had asked someone else to do before the climax. Just because magic is being used does not imply that magic is a cause; all too often, instead, people can mess up their lives through typical sorrows, obsessions, and addictions.

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In a similar way, the film denies itself narrative clarity by refusing any firm opposition between cultures. The Houngan, the Voudou priest, uses religious rites to apply practical psychological therapy to ordinary human suffering, while the Western doctors use religious terms for medical advice. Two of the Western characters believe in magic, while others do not, but in the end, neither science nor magic are given authority. We can see the result, but we cannot specify the cause.

Even during the final moments, the one character who might be given authority, the Houngan, offers no explanation, no clarification, but only a prayer in hope that the sorrows of the island will be healed. In the face of the island's long history, in the face of ordinary human suffering, such a hope seems impossible:

"Everything good dies here -- even the stars."

How to Stop the Leopard Man

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Even when extremely well made, slasher films have never appealed to me. For example, when I watch Mario Bava's BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, I can respect the astonishing use of light, colour, and texture, but I cannot respect the use of human beings.

I respond in the same way to THE LEOPARD MAN, a small film that improves every time I see it, and one that confirms, again, that Jacques Tourneur was born to direct stalking scenes by night. The film offers one sequence in particular that must have shocked viewers in 1943, and that still kicks hard today. You know the sequence: every critic of the Lewton films raves about it, and for damned good reason.

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Yet despite all of the cinematic skill that can go into such material, killings are not for me. What I do like about THE LEOPARD MAN is the sense of a small town in danger; I like the rapid ways in which the film sets out its characters in a place where they all know everyone else. At a running time of 66 minutes, the film packs in many people and many sub-plots without losing sight of its overall story.

Above all, what gives the story meaning is a sub-theme about the necessity for compassion. The two lead characters have lived through hard times, and reject any hint of being "softies," but that is exactly what they are, and in their empathy, their basic human goodness, they find the courage to confront evil. In that sense, THE LEOPARD MAN, for all of its emphasis on death and fear, is actually one of the more optimistic of the Lewton films: it shows that a community matters, and that strength comes from caring.

The Murk of THE SEVENTH VICTIM

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JACQUELINE: Who are you?

MIMI: I’m Mimi. I’m dying.

JACQUELINE: No!

MIMI: Yes. I've been quiet, oh ever so quiet. I hardly move, and yet it keeps coming all the time, closer and closer. And I rest and I rest and... and still I'm dying.

JACQUELINE: And you don’t want to die. I’ve always wanted to die. Always.

MIMI: I’m afraid. And I’m tired of being afraid, of waiting.

JACQUELINE: Why wait?

MIMI: I’m not going to wait. I’m going out, I'm going to laugh, and dance, and do all the things I used to do.

JACQUELINE: And then?

MIMI: I don’t know.

JACQUELINE: You will die.

What can I say about THE SEVENTH VICTIM that has not been mentioned before in countless articles? That the film has more symbolic weight than dramatic resolution? More characters than it needs, yet insufficient reasons for them to act as they do? More explanations than seem necessary, yet nothing to dispel the murk of motivation and consequence?

What we have, here, is the search for a victim whom the heroes cannot save, and the villains cannot kill, in a film that cannot be forgotten. For all of its twisting complexity and fundamental simplicity, the film remains unlike anything else I have seen from its decade, with an ending as abrupt and as final as a back-alley stabbing. That makes it worth celebration.