Between the Scylla of Netanyahu's genocide and the Charybdis of Western collapse in the face of challenges that our corporate-owned governments cannot confront, these are terrible days.
Only two things give me pleasure, now: music, and bringing to light illustrations from the past. Certain joys deserve to live.
Jason E. Rolfe has long been one of Canada's best-kept secrets, and for years, now, I have loved the melancholic wit, charm, and laughter of his short story collections.
TRIPLE OBSCURA ONE, a recent anthology from Gibbon Moon Books, reprints a few of these Jason E. Rolfe tales, but also provides a new one that surprised me in several ways. Like his other stories, "The Mechanical Theatre of Sebastian von Schwenenfeld" testifies to his love for absurdist literature and his fascination with obscure corners of European history, but unlike the rest, it gives off a sinister glow of mad scientist conspiracy and technical artistry gone wrong. The result is not so much horror as a kind of conceptual unease:
If the automatons somehow sensed his presence, they paid him no mind, allowing Schubert to reach the edge of the open grave unopposed. Within the grave lay a closed casket. The Haarpuder puppet stepped forward, and when it spoke the artificial voice chased a chill down Schubert’s spine. 'You act as though you have never attended a funeral before,' it said.
'Certainly not a puppet funeral,” Schubert replied. He spoke without thought, only pausing after the echo of his words had faded to study the automaton more closely.
The machination laughed mirthlessly. 'They are all puppet funerals, my friend.'
Schubert poked the automaton’s left cheek. It gave way like a silken cushion beneath which lay the cogs and gears that articulated its slightly crooked smile. 'You are clearly a puppet,' he said. 'You are a work of art, to be certain, but you are nevertheless a puppet, an automaton, an artificial construct. How can it be that you speak and act so much like the real Sebastian Haarpuder?'
'You act as though you have never attended a funeral before,' the automaton said, repeating, perhaps, the only words it had been programmed to speak.
'Certainly not a puppet funeral,' Schubert said, echoing his earlier assertion.
It elicited the same dour response from the automaton.
'They are all puppet funerals, my friend.' It turned suddenly, with a smoothness that belied its cog-and-gear nature. 'Why that song?' it asked.
'What song?'
'The automation looked at him, cocked both its head and its mock smile and said, 'You act as though you have never attended a funeral before.'
As I read this quiet story about the quietly unsettling life to be found in dead objects, I wondered how it might wrap itself up. One option was the obvious ending, but Jason E. Rolfe has never been an obvious writer; his equally quiet, equally unsettling solution caught me off guard. It made perfect sense in the context of the story, but also implied a level of strangeness that I had not seen coming. It also reinforced my admiration and respect for its author.
A story like "The Mechanical Theatre of Sebastian von Schwenenfeld" could easily fall out of sight through cracks of genre expectation and readers' assumptions, but it calls for much more: it deserves to be read, appreciated, and praised.
Since the years of Trudeau the First, I have criticized, openly and loudly, every Canadian federal government and many provincial governments, yet in all of these decades, no one has called me "anti-Canadian" or "a self-hating Canadian."
Why not? For the simple reason that citizens of democratic nations have a responsibility to keep their governments honest and humane. For the simple reason that voters have little power to influence or to modify the behaviour of elected officials, yet must not remain silent. For the simple reason that governments come and go, while people and principles remain.
I can think of another simple reason, perhaps the most compelling: here in Canada, anyone who called someone else "anti-Canadian," or "a self-hating Canadian," would become an instant butt of everyone's laughter. Only a fool would try it.
Why, then, if we are not fools, if we are not idiots, do we stand by in silence while Jews are called "anti-Semitic" or "self-hating" because they reject apartheid, occupation, genocide? Why do we never laugh such nonsense out of the room and out of existence?
Because our corporate-media Petri dish has no memory, no sense of perspective, no desire to learn from the past and no courage to be compared with it, the rest of us need to search actively for greatness. When we find it, the impact can often hit us with unexpected force.
One such knock-out came with Murnau's 1926 adaptation of FAUST. Having now seen the restored print from the "Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung," I wish I could have seen it years ago, but good things arrive on their own terms and in their own time.
So much has been said about this film that I have little to add, beyond urging you to see it. As a work of high-budget expressionist Gothic cinematic magic, it compels from start to finish, even if the central portion of the film is more comic than nightmarish (but still well-directed). No need for qualms: the nightmare surges back. The screaming face of Gretchen that hurtles over trees and mountains is merely one of the images that will stay with you long after the film has ended.
For a film almost one century old, FAUST makes many of the current films I've been unhappy enough to see look pale and dull. Enough time has passed to turn its traditional silent-film methods into startling innovations, which allows FAUST to shock in ways that post-modern films cannot. Every technical aspect, from lighting and set design to miniatures and optical effects, stimulates the head and heart while serving the story without fat. As a combination of pure spectacle with pure story, FAUST cannot be anticipated; it can only be seen.
PIETRO:
Nobody must realize that the artist is worthless, that he's an abnormal, inferior being, who squirms and twists like a worm to survive. Nobody must ever catch him out as naive. Everything must be presented as perfect, based on unknown, unquestionable rules.Like a madman, that's it. Pane after pane, because I can't correct anything, and nobody must notice. A sign painted on a pane corrects, without soiling it, a sign painted earlier on another pane. But everyone must believe that it isn't the trick of an untalented artist, impotent artist. Not at all. It must look like a sure decision, fearless, lofty and almost arrogant. Nobody must know that a sign succeeds by chance, is fragile, that as soon as a sign appears well made, by a miracle, it must be protected, looked after, as in a shrine. But nobody must realize that the artist is a poor, trembling idiot, second-rate, living by chance and risk, in disgrace like a child, his life reduced to absurd melancholy, degraded by the feeling of something lost forever.
