Why We Need That Foreign Country, The Past

When we turn to the past, do we seek a mirror to reflect our own faces back at us, to reinforce our current attitudes and behaviours? Or do we look for a window that could show us other faces, other ways of thinking and living?

By the same token, when we deal with plays and poems, art and stories of the past, should we "reinterpret," "reimagine" them for "today's audience," to align them with current ideologies, or should we allow them confront us, to challenge us, on their own terms?

In 163 BC, the Roman playwright Terence translated a Greek play by Menander; this became HEAUTON TIMORUMENOS ("The Self-Tormentor"), remembered today for one brief riposte. "Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto."

"I am human: nothing human is alien to me."

When we look into the past, we find attitudes and activities that we share now, and yet, often in subtle, disconcerting ways, we also find differences. These differences have become all the more striking in our current crises.

The West is collapsing. Human values and human relations have been supplanted by values and relations of the market. This is neoliberalism, the defining ideology of our times. In September 1987, while interviewed in WOMAN'S OWN, one of the pushers of neoliberalism, Margaret Thatcher, said, "Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families."

Yet if we go back to the 5th century BC, we find that Aeschylus took a different view. At the conclusion of his dramatic trilogy, THE ORESTEIA, he shows how the legal system of a democratic state can end the seemingly unstoppable cycle of murders for the sake of revenge. For too long, the House of Atreus has been trapped in this brutal cycle, but now, the citizens of Athens hold a trial and reach a verdict that finally puts the killings to a stop. Left on their own, individual men and women and families can tear themselves apart, but a democratic society can bring justice and civic peace.

In today's dying West, democracy crumbles into rule of the rich and powerful. Human rights retreat into smaller and tighter coffins of identity, and thus become self-limited, unthreatening, no challenge to the power of corporations and oligarchs. We need reminders of another time, when democracy held the promise of liberation, when societies and human beings mattered. For this, Aeschylus represents a good starting point, but only a starting point.

"Nothing human is alien to me." This is true, yet it also remains true that the people of yesterday did not quite resemble us. We do not read Montaigne or Thomas Browne to find ourselves; we read them to encounter minds better than ours. We read the Greek dramatists, the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, for their poetry, for their piercing insights into human character and human failings. We read Shakespeare's CORIOLANUS, or the OEDIPUS REX of Sophocles, because the nobility of these heroes perplexes and challenges us in ways that the idiotic Trumps and Macrons, Bidens and Zelenskis, Modis and Netanyahus never could.

As L. P. Hartley wrote in THE GO-BETWEEN (1953), "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." This is why we need the past. This is why we should allow the past to speak to us on its own terms, with all of its difference, because we have lost many ways of being human, and we must rediscover all that we can, to survive.

John Ford, 'TIS PITY SHE'S A WHORE (1633)

By critical consensus, the plays of John Ford represent either a last echo of popular Jacobean theatre, or early examples of a Caroline theatre designed not for the crowds, but for private viewings in palaces or in houses of the wealthy. Whatever the label, most critics agree that by this time, the vitality, the broad appeal of Elizabethan-Jacobean tragedy was dead, that Ford was one of the few interesting writers of this period who retained something of Jacobean vigour, and that his most interesting, most lively play, 'TIS PITY SHE'S A WHORE, remains one of the best from its period.

I would call it a hand grenade, to be handled carefully at the risk of losing several fingers or an eye.

One reason for caution: the play's topic.

GIOVANNI:
Must I not praise
That beauty which, if framed anew, the gods
Would make a god of if they had it there,
And kneel to it, as I do kneel to them?

FRIAR:
Why, foolish madman!

GIOVANNI:
Shall a peevish sound,
A customary form, from man to man,
Of brother and of sister, be a bar
'Twixt my perpetual happiness and me?
Say that we had one father, say one womb
(Curse to my joys!) gave both us life and birth:
Are we not therefore each to other bound
So much the more by nature, by the links
Of blood, of reason (nay, if you will have't,
Even of religion), to be ever one,
One soul, one flesh, one love, one heart, one all?

[Act I, Scene i]

Like many teenagers before and since, Giovanni knows that he knows everything, and that his will, his desires, transcend social norms and accepted customs.

GIOVANNI:
What I have done I'll prove both fit and good.
It is a principle, which you have taught
When I was yet your scholar, that the frame
And composition of the mind doth follow
The frame and composition of the body;
So where the body's furniture is beauty,
The mind's must needs be virtue; which allowed,
Virtue itself is Reason but refined,
And Love the quintessence of that. This proves
My sister's beauty, being rarely fair,
Is rarely virtuous; chiefly in her love,
And chiefly in that love, her love to me.
If hers to me, then so is mine to her,
Since in like causes are effects alike.

[Act II, Scene v]

What Giovanni ignores is the weight of the world's countering opinion.

FRIAR:
O ignorance in knowledge! Long ago
How often have I warned thee this before!
Indeed, if we were sure there were no deity,
Nor heaven nor hell, then to be led alone
By nature's light -- as were philosophers
Of elder times -- might instance some defence;
But 'tis not so. Then, madman, thou wilt find
That nature is in heaven's positions blind.

[Act II, Scene v]

Luckily (or unluckily) for Giovanni, his beloved sister is more than willing to love him back. For Annabella, the long line of suitors eager to win her hand might as well not exist; her one true love is her brother.

ANNABELLA :
This noble creature was in every part
So angel-like, so glorious, that a woman
Who had not been but human as was I,
Would have kneeled to him, and have begged for love.
You -- why you are not worthy once to name
His name without true worship, or indeed,
Unless you kneeled, to hear another name him.

[Act IV, Scene iii]

The first unsettling aspect of this play is the implication that these lovers are indeed sincere. Despite the hardships that eat away at their secret union, they remain devoted and loyal to each other.

The second unsettling detail is the brutal ferocity of the other characters towards Annabella. Like the enemies of the Duchess in John Webster's THE DUCHESS OF MALFI, these men seem to resent her mainly because she openly, honestly, and courteously follows her own path. Circumstances are complicated (perhaps over-complicated) by plotters in disguise, by daily betrayals, by feuds between the suitors, but in all of this, Annabella, despite her incest, comes across as the better human being.

Yet as we know, history is written by the victors. The final judgement of the victors in this play is that Annabella was a despicable whore, which ignores her actions and her personality. Whether this harsh assessment of her character was also John Ford's remains impossible to tell, but much of the lingering bitterness of this play comes from the unfairness, the cruelty of the men.

If Annabella seems more innocent, more pure than the men around her, Giovanni carries the weight of a more complex mind. At the play's end, he becomes a full revenger against those who persecute his sister, yet his own "solution" to the challenge of his love is just as brutal as theirs. The play foreshadows this end in many lines, but it remains horrific. For some readers, this might seem over the top, but in the traditions of Elizabethan-Jacobean tragedy, the spectacle of gore fits right in.

While John Ford shares with Webster and Shakespeare this passion for bloodshed, he lacks their genius for metaphors and imagery. Instead, he offers a smoothly elegant dramatic language that brings pleasures of its own.

ANNABELLA:
Methinks you weep.

GIOVANNI:
I do indeed: these are the funeral tears
Shed on your grave; these furrowed up my cheeks
When first I loved and knew not how to woo.
Fair Annabella, should I here repeat
The story of my life, we might lose time.
Be record all the spirits of the air,
And all things else that are, that day and night,
Early and late, the tribute which my heart
Hath paid to Annabella’s sacred love
Hath been these tears, which are her mourners now.
Never till now did Nature do her best
To show a matchless beauty to the world,
Which in an instant, ere it scarce was seen,
The jealous Destinies required again.
Pray, Annabella, pray. Since we must part,
Go thou white in thy soul to fill a throne
Of innocence and sanctity in heaven.
Pray, pray, my sister.

ANNABELLA:
Then I see your drift.
Ye blessed angels, guard me!

GIOVANNI:
So say I.
Kiss me. [They kiss] If ever after-times should hear
Of our fast-knit affections, though perhaps
The laws of conscience and of civil use
May justly blame us, yet when they but know
Our loves, that love will wipe away that rigour
Which would in other incests be abhorred.
Give me your hand. How sweetly life doth run
In these well-coloured veins! How constantly
These palms do promise health! But I could chide
With Nature for this cunning flattery.
Kiss me again. Forgive me.

ANNABELLA:
With my heart. [They kiss]

[Act V, Scene v]

What we have, then, is a play of elegant poetry, undeniable power, and an overwhelming bitterness. Readers will respond as they will; for my part, I admire the play even as I wince at the sting of its venom.

Close Encounters Of The Third Kind

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In the 1977 theatrical version of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, a moment of human honesty caught me off guard: as protagonist Roy Neary sculpts a mound of mashed potatoes into the blob-image that haunts him, his elder son watches with silence and tears. It offers a glimpse of the pain that Neary has brought to his family, but writer-director Steven Spielberg will soon reassure us that a family's pain counts for nothing. The one thing that matters is Dad's rapture into heaven as a Chosen One.

When I saw this film in 1977, I hated it. Watching it now, I respect its technical merits. It looks great (with five expert cinematographers, it should), and the visual effects by everyone from model-maker Greg Jein to the legendary Douglas Trumbull ensure that visually, at least, the film will grab its audience. At the same time, Spielberg shows genuine skill with direction. He knows how to set up elaborate crowd sequences without losing focus on the placement and movements of the central characters, how to block action with clarity, and where to place the camera for maximal impact. These once-common skills can be hard to find in the Age of Marvel, and I appreciate them here.

What troubles me now is what troubled me in 1977: the failure (the refusal?) of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS to explore the implications of its evangelical message, along with the failure of any character in the film to suggest that religious adoration of alien beings might be short-sighted.

Any first contact would leave impact craters on human science, politics, philosophy, art, on all aspects of human existence. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS turns away from this, and instead, looks at one man's religious conversion. Not a bad concept, and much could be done with it, but Spielberg has no concern for the implications of ideas; he wants a rock concert light-show, and thanks to his team of technical geniuses, he can provide it. But story-telling films live or die by drama, and what this film lacks is a doubter to pose the obvious questions: Should we assume that superior technology means a superior culture? Why, against all biological odds, do these alien beings look so human, so childlike? If they can fly starships, why should they not be able to master human languages? Can we really trust these alien kidnappers?

Writers are not obliged to answer all questions (indeed, unanswered questions can make a story haunting), but I do expect writers to understand that questions will arise. I would have been less uneasy with CLOSE ENCOUNTERS if someone in the film had put up a hand, and said, "Excuse me. Excuse me! Have we really thought about the implications of our choices? Aren't we assuming more than we actually know?"

These questions would have turned CLOSE ENCOUNTERS into science fiction, but like THE TEN COMMANDMENTS playing on TV in the Neary house, Spielberg's film remains, at heart, religious. Other viewers have embraced its blank-eyed innocence, but I see a failure of imagination, a lack of dramatic development, a refusal to confront the implications of running away from your wife and children to join a cosmic cult. The result is akin to Neary's mound of mashed potatoes: it might have meant something in Spielberg's head, but here, on the plate, it looks more like an unfinished blob.

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"You are a fucking idiot."

With terse precision, a Mr D on Facebook assessed my comments on CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. He continued:

"It's a movie. An action=adventure piece of crowd-pleasing entertainment. About ufo's and aliens. It's nothing more than that."

This is where he and I disagree. Films that tell any kind of story are necessarily statements of meaning. This meaning can sometimes be hard to specify; it can be plural and contradictory; it can be dramatized, so that we know how certain characters think and feel, without necessarily finding ways to transpose their personal meaning into an overall meaning for the film. But in certain cases, the meaning is presented with simple clarity, and this is often true of "crowd-pleasing entertainment" films.

Mr D implies that we should never look for meaning in popular entertainment, but as I see it, films that reach a wide audience often tell us about the unspoken assumptions, hopes, or dreads of that audience. For this reason, I think a close look at certain films can bring widely-held public attitudes to light, and sometimes, these attitudes can be disturbing. They can suggest unaddressed issues, hidden resentments, or troubling limitations of thought and feeling.

Mr D concluded, in summary:

"Get a life."

Perhaps he rejects the examined life as not worth living, but I would say that looking under public stones and peering through dusty public windows can be worthwhile, if only to see what cobwebs writhe in the shadowed spaces of our times.

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Mr D encouraged me to share his comment:

"Please do. It would be a pleasant surprise for everyone if you posted something intelligent."

I suspect I might have disappointed him again.

John Webster's THE WHITE DEVIL Revisited

As a Jacobean-mad teenager forty-five years ago, I read John Webster's THE WHITE DEVIL for the first time. I applauded its brilliance, but I also wanted to take a hot, soapy shower to wash away the grease of all that evil.

FRANCISCO:
Brachiano, I am now fit for thy encounter.
Like the wild Irish I'll ne'er think thee dead
Till I can play at football with thy head.

= = = = = = = =

[A man with a set of pistols threatens two women, and he means it]

FLAMINEO:
Look, these are better far at a dead lift
Than all your jewel house.

VITTORIA:
And yet methinks
These stones have no fair lustre, they are ill set.

FLAMINEO:
I'll turn the right side towards you: you shall see
How they will sparkle.

Above all, in the world of THE WHITE DEVIL, power counts for everything, people count for nothing.

FLAMINEO:
He was a kind of statesman, that would sooner have reckon'd how many cannon-bullets he had discharged against a town, to count his expense that way, than how many of his valiant and deserving subjects he lost before it.

= = = = = = = =

[A child, a mere child of murdered parents, has claimed the throne]

GIOVANNI:
Away with them to prison and to torture.

A world of power is a world of horrors.

BRACHIANO:
Look you; six gray rats that have lost their tails,
Crawl up the pillow....

= = = = = = = =

BRACHIANO:
O thou soft natural death, that art joint-twin
To sweetest slumber: no rough-bearded comet
Stares on thy mild departure: the dull owl
Beats not against thy casement: the hoarse wolf
Scents not thy carrion. Pity winds thy corse,
Whilst horror waits on princes.

VITTORIA:
I am lost for ever.

BRACHIANO:
How miserable a thing it is to die
'Mongst women howling!

Yet reading this play again -- for what, the fourth time? The fifth? -- I caught a hint of grey light in its darkness. There is goodness in this world, even if much of it endures in resigned sadness.

FLAMINEO:
I would I were from hence.

CORNELIA:
Do you hear, sir?
I'll give you a saying which my grandmother
Was wont, when she heard the bell toll, to sing o'er
Unto her lute--

FLAMINEO:
Do, and you will, do.

CORNELIA:
'Call for the robin red breast and the wren,
Since o'er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flow'rs do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
Call unto his funeral dole
The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole
To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm
And (when gay tombs are robb'd) sustain no harm,
But keep the wolf far thence that's foe to men,
For with his nails he'll dig them up again.'

They would not bury him 'cause he died in a quarrel
But I have an answer for them.
'Let holy church receive him duly
Since he paid the church tithes truly.'
His wealth is summed, and this is all his store:
This poor men get; and great men get no more.
Now the wares are gone, we may shut up shop.
Bless you all good people.

FLAMINEO:
I have a strange thing in me, to the which
I cannot give a name, without it be
Compassion. I pray leave me.

This night I'll know the utmost of my fate:
I'll be resolved what my rich sister means
T'assign me for my service. I have liv'd
Riotously ill, like some that live in court;
And sometimes, when my face was full of smiles
Have felt the maze of conscience in my breast.
Oft gay and honour'd robes those tortures try:
'We think cag'd birds sing, when indeed they cry'.

Yet along with resignation comes defiance, in particular, the courageous defiance of women. This hits a peak during Act 3, Scene 2, with an arraignment of the heroine, Vittoria, whose only crime is that men want her. She will not be cowed by accusations: instead, she argues back, brilliantly, and gains approval from the court's witnesses.

VITTORIA:
Find me but guilty, sever head from body:
We'll part good friends: I scorn to hold my life
At yours or any man's entreaty, sir.

ENGLISH AMBASSADOR:
She hath a brave spirit.

Her defiance, and the defiance of certain women around her, never fades, not even at the end.

VITTORIA:
'Twas a manly blow.
The next thou giv'st, murder some sucking infant
And then thou wilt be famous.

In THE WHITE DEVIL, defiance often snarls with bared fangs, but it remains courage, and as a light against the darkness, admirable.

Darkness obscured the critical consensus on Webster for decades. Even after Shakespeare had been revisited and rehabilitated from his long neglect by British and German Romantics, Webster was hobbled with the reputation of Horror Sensationalist until the end of the 19th Century, when critics like Swinburne and John Addington Symonds came forward to defend him. His rehabilitation continued in the 20th Century, thanks to critics like Rupert Brooke and F. L. Lucas. They pointed out what should have been obvious right from the start: John Webster was not only a great poet, but a great dramatist.

A great poet, a great dramatist. Marlowe was a great poet, but not exactly a good dramatist. Chapman could write beautifully, but dramatically, his plays, especially BUSSY D'AMBOIS, were unconvincing, inconsistent messes. Ford was often fine as a dramatist, and as a poet, often very fine. Above all, however, as dramatist and poet, stood William Shakespeare, and along with him, John Webster.

Webster's poetry differed from Shakespeare's in its precision. Shakespeare seems to have thought in metaphors, and he rarely used one or two when he could use twelve or fifteen; Webster showed more constraint, which enhanced the power of those metaphors he carefully chose. Webster's drama differed from Shakespeare's in its range of people and emotions. While Shakespeare understood all kinds of people, and covered a vast emotional range, Webster focused on angry, bitter people, ignored, passed by, denied promotion and money despite their qualities. It would not be exaggeration to call Webster a Poet Of Resentment.

Yet as THE WHITE DEVIL makes clear, he was also a Poet Of Defiance.

LODOVICO:
Dost laugh?

FLAMINEO:
Wouldst have me die, as I was born, in whining?

GASPARO:
Recommend yourself to heaven.

FLAMINEO:
No, I will carry mine own commendations thither.

For John Webster, defiance represents courage: a daylight strength against a world of brutal midnight power.

The Past Glides On. We Lurk Within Its Currents.

450 million years ago, I studied classical guitar. (I failed at this, but my teacher, an Ottawa University student named Terry Gomes, quickly became my closest friend.)

At this time, I read a book by a famous rock session player. I can't recall his name, but I've lived by his advice. He wrote that the best way to learn was not to study your favourites, but to study the favourites of your favourites. For each of his "guitar gods," he traced back lines of influence to their "gods," and this taught him far more about guitar playing, and about music, than he would have gained by focusing on current players only.

Tracing back a lineage can be not only educational, but transformational. E. T. A. Hoffmann is rarely mentioned these days, but his impact on European and Russian fantasy was a nova-level event. When I studied German (again, 450 million years ago), I was able to read Hoffmann in his own language, and the impact shook me. Any readers of today who go back to "Der goldne Topf," or "Meister Floh," will be astonished by how "modern," how creative, how thrilling these old stories remain. In many cases, the work of originators has not only been passed down over the centuries, but watered down by would-be imitators, and this is obvious with Hoffmann.

Hoffmann is hardly alone. Thomas Browne left impact craters not only on English prose, but on English vocabulary; his books remain glorious. Dramatists, poets, and writers of intensely-felt fiction have looked back at Elizabethan-Jacobean geniuses like Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Ford, and Tourneur (or whoever it was who wrote THE REVENGER'S TRAGEDY, and no, I do not believe it was Middleton). I have no classical Greek, but not even French or English translations can hide the power of Aeschylus, or Sophocles, or Euripides (whose THE BACCHAE remains a sinister, full-blown horror story 2,400 years later).

The past glides on. We lurk within its currents, and our efforts to drift along with it, to swim against it, to swallow it, or to spit it out, become a dialogue with dead people and thriving methods. To focus only on the writers and stories of today is to fall into a crippling trap, is to accept, all-too often, imitation and mayfly mediocrity. Anyone who desires more, who wants to learn, who struggles to develop an individual voice or perspective, will gain more from a study of the past than from the postmodern, postliterate, corporate-academic market place of today's instantly-forgettable exemplars.

In truth, we have many good writers today, often ignored, often buried under piles of garbage. Yet the best way to understand what makes them good is to pay attention to writers of yesterday. Pay attention, celebrate, learn. Become yourself.

The Strangeness of the Symbolists

For years, now, I have to tried to understand the Symbolist movement that appeared in France during the late 19th Century, that went on to influence art, poetry, fiction, and theatre in Europe, in the United Kingdom, and especially in pre-revolutionary Russia. My difficulty was that no one seemed to have any down-to-Earth, non-contradictory definition that could match the work of so many varied poets and writers. Any attempt to define Symbolist intentions felt like pouring raw egg yolks into an open picture frame, and then mounting that frame on a wall: the result, inevitably, was a mess.

Book after book failed to give me any firm concept of what the Symbolists had tried to do, but I gained a sudden insight when I returned to a book I had read earlier in the century, and had, for the most part, forgotten: THE TECHNIQUES OF STRANGENESS IN SYMBOLIST POETRY, by James L. Kugel (Yale University Press, 1971.)

Kugel admits that the term "Symbolist" is vague, contradictory, and perhaps inappropriate. Yet what the Symbolists did have in common was an evocation of Strangeness:

"These... poems have within them the seeds of two central ideas.... The first, briefly stated, is this: that the mysteriousness [of these] poems is a peculiarly Symbolist phenomenon -- that, in fact, after seventy-five years of this kind of verse, what we mean by the term Symbolism is this poetic strangeness.... The second idea is that... Symbolism changed our whole notion of what poetry is, changed the reader's expectations in approaching a poem, and that is where modern poetry begins."

Kugel offers, as "the first poem to achieve this symboliste effect in the French language," a well-known verse from 1853:

EL DESDICHADO
Gérard de Nerval.

Je suis le Ténébreux, -- le Veuf, -- l’Inconsolé,
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la Tour abolie :
Ma seule Étoile est morte, -- et mon luth constellé
Porte le Soleil noir de la Mélancolie.

Dans la nuit du Tombeau, Toi qui m’as consolé,
Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d’Italie,
La fleur qui plaisait tant à mon cœur désolé,
Et la treille où le Pampre à la Rose s’allie.

Suis-je Amour ou Phœbus ?... Lusignan ou Biron ?
Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la Reine ;
J’ai rêvé dans la Grotte où nage la Syrène...

Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l’Achéron :
Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d’Orphée
Les soupirs de la Sainte et les cris de la Fée.

[GÉRARD DE NERVAL ŒUVRES I. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Librairie Gallimard, 1960.]

My roughest of rough translations:

"I am the tenebrous -- the widower -- the inconsolable, the prince of Aquitaine in the destroyed tower: my one Star is dead, and my constellated lute bears the black sun of Melancholy.

"In the night of the Tomb, you, who comforted me, give me back Posillipo and the sea of Italy, the flower that pleased so much my desolate heart, and the trellis where the Vine and the Rose unite.

"Am I Love or Phoebus? Lusignan or Biron? My forehead remains red from the kiss of the Queen; I have dreamt in the grotto where the Siren swims...

"And twice, as conqueror, I have crossed Acheron: modulating, in turn, on the lyre of Orpheus, the sighs of the Saint and the cries of the Fay."

Kugel explains that the poem is full of "allusions to nowhere." Before the Symbolists arrived, poems often alluded to historical, mythical, religious places, events, or figures that readers would have recognized. As an example, he quotes from Shakespeare's THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. Literate readers would understand this passage as a reference to THE AENEID:

"In such a night
Stood Dido with a willow in her hand
Upon the wild sea-banks, and waft her love
To come again to Carthage."

What Gérard de Nerval has done, instead, is to mention people and events for which readers have no reference. He offers no clues to context or meaning, no way to make sense of his clearly-stated yet mysterious allusions. This makes the reader feel like an "eavesdropper" who has "caught snatches of a conversation" that will never become clear.

Kugel adds:

"This is the genius of Nerval's poem, and the fundamental discovery of the Symbolist poets. They were the first to seek out systematically this effect of witheld information, recognizing in mystery a source of beauty and depth not known in poetry before....

"The point of the poem is that we read it again and again, that we read it until the simple message -- veuf, inconsolé, Mélancolie -- is enough for us to glide on, until we can get so much into the poem that we can accept all its words and love their mystery."

Reading de Nerval's poem again made me think of a later poem, equally famous, equally filled with "allusions to nowhere":

THE LISTENERS
by Walter de La Mare.

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head: --
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,’ he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

[THE LISTENERS AND OTHER POEMS. Constable and Company Ltd, London, 1912.]

Like "El Desdichado," "The Listeners" explains none of its mysteries. Who is the Traveller? What was his promise? He seems aware of the ghosts, but what connection do these ghosts have to the people he had hoped to find? Where and when does any of this take place?

Walter de la Mare provides no answers, but his poem, like the poems of the Symbolists, remains lodged in the mind primarily through its denial of answers.

As I read Kugel again, I realized that I understood what the Symbolists had intended, because I had heard the echoes of their Movement all throughout my reading life. I had only needed one clear guide to show me what I already knew.

Too Stupid to Understand Symbolism

Because I lack the intellect to be intellectual, I read essays and manifestoes on some aesthetic movement (in this case, 19th Century Symbolism), only to find vague terms, contradictions, definitions that go 'round and 'round until they plunge into their own event horizons, and a linguistic fog that gives me a clear impression of misty conditions, but of not much else.

"What do you see out there?"
"Nothing."
"That's the weather."

As a result, I find more value in looking at methods. Methods, at least, are clear on the page; methods, at least, can be studied and applied. What sort of words does a writer use? How are they used? Are the words abstractions, or specific nouns? Are they specialized, common, technical, archaic? Is the prose or verse primarily visual, primarily sonorous, or a mixture? Highly metaphorical, or plain?

These approaches can be taken apart, examined, learned, even by someone with my own limited intellect. So please forgive me if I set aside scholarly books of academic intent, and read what the writers and poets have to say in their own stories and poems.

Thomas M. Disch, THE GENOCIDES

Richard Powers, 1965. Click for a better jpeg.

In 1984, science fiction writer Thomas M. Disch surprised many readers when he published a full-blown novel of the supernatural, THE BUSINESSMAN: A TALE OF TERROR. Yet right from the start of his writing career, he had used horrific imagery and nightmarish concepts in many stories: in "Descending" (1964), in "The Roaches" (1965), and especially in his first novel, THE GENOCIDES (1965).

This American book followed the example of many British "catastrophe stories" of the kind written by H. G. Wells, John Wyndham, and J. G. Ballard. Like Ballard, Disch took this form into new, personal directions; also like Ballard, he wrote without compromising the logic of his concept. Ballard's catastrophes offered his protagonists a psychological fulfillment, a liberation of the mind and emotions. Catastrophe in THE GENOCIDES offers escalating horrors and a cruel, inescapable extinction for humanity.

That a book so disturbing, so bleak, should be so light on its feet and effortlessly readable is a testament to the writer's artistry. The prose maintains a tonal consistency from beginning to end; it is clean, clear, understated, even when it deals with topics like mass murder and cannibalism:

"The fish were all eaten, and Blossom began gathering the bones. The moment everyone had been waiting for -- the dreadful moment of the main course -- could be put off no longer. While Blossom brought round the bowl of steaming polenta into which were stirred a few shreds of chicken and garden vegetables, Lady herself distributed the sausages. A hush fell over the table.

"Each of them had a single sausage. Each sausage was about nine inches long and three-quarter inch in diameter. They had been crisped over the fire and came to the table still sizzling.

"There is some pork in them, Alice reassured herself. I probably won't be able to tell the difference.

"Everyone's attention turned to the head of the table. Anderson lifted his knife and fork. Then, fully aware of the solemnity of the moment, he sliced off a piece of hot sausage, put it in his mouth, and began to chew. After what seemed a full minute, he swallowed it.

"There, but for the grace of God . . . Alice thought.

"Blossom had turned quite pale, and under the table Alice reached for her hand to lend her strength, though Alice didn't feel an excess of it just then.

"'What's everyone waiting for?' Anderson demanded. 'There's food on the table.'

"Alice's attention drifted toward Orville, who was sitting there with knife and fork in hand, and that strange smile of his. He caught Alice's look -- and winked at her. Of all things! Or was it at her?

"Orville cut off a piece of the sausage and chewed it consideringly. He smiled beamishly, like a man in a toothpaste ad. 'Mrs. Anderson,' he announced, 'you are a marvelous cook. How do you do it? I haven't had a Thanksgiving dinner like this since God knows when.'

"Alice felt Blossom's fingers relax and pull out of hers. She's feeling better, now that the worst is over, Alice thought.

"But she was wrong. There was a heavy noise, as when a bag of meal is dropped to the ground, and Mae Stromberg screamed. Blossom had fainted."

By focusing on what interests him, and by leaving out the rest, Disch keeps the book in swift motion. (In his SF IMPULSE review from January 1967, Brian Aldiss called this method of telling a story in "rapid bursts," a "staccato" style; Disch makes the method work well.) The result is a short book that covers a lot of ground rapidly. Boring, bloated writers of today could learn from this.

The book gained positive reviews by Aldiss, Judith Merril, and E. C. Tubb. Its best-known detractor was Algis Budrys, who, in his review column in GALAXY, December 1966, complained about the influence of J. G. Ballard (despite Ballard's very different methods, intentions, and style). He accused Disch of being an "apt pupil" of Ballard, and supposed that THE GENOCIDES "reflects a deep and dedicated study of the trappings of a book everybody says is good." (As if Disch had no imagination and purpose of his own.)

This non-review, an insult to Disch, an insult to Ballard, should have been a terminal embarrassment to Budrys. It brought up the notion that science fiction "takes hope in science and in Man," and proclaimed that optimism should win out over pessimism. (As if science fiction had any reality beyond the writings of disparate individuals with their own perspectives on life and art.)

For me, this matter of "pessimism versus optimism" is not only a waste a time, it avoids a more searching question: "How much of the real world do we expect in a science fiction story?"

For Disch, as for so many writers associated with the magazine NEW WORLDS during the 1960s, science fiction was a forceful way to confront reality. Like Aldiss, Ballard, Michael Moorcock, John Sladek, and Norman Spinrad, Disch was compelled to face the realities of contemporary politics, economics, media, imperialism, warfare, art; these provided the energy, the drive, to write science fiction that engaged in speculation without ignoring the crises and possibilities of the day. Disch, like the others, took on this challenge in his own fashion, and worked in his own ways -- ways that often echoed or contrasted with methods used in the past.

For example: when H. G. Wells wrote THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (serialized in 1897, published as a book in 1898), he made explicit connections between his invading Martians and the imperialism of his own times; he also had his Martians killed by an earthly ecosystem for which they, given their evolution on a distant planet, were unprepared.

Disch implies more than he spells out, but those who read THE GENOCIDES might be reminded of American imperialism, of American military force being used to impose the will of American corporations (like United Fruit) over the economic and agricultural needs of third world countries. At one point in the book, Disch includes a bureaucratic memo written by the unseen aliens that reads exactly like a corporate request for "excessive force" to be used against the natives.

Unlike the Martians of Wells, the aliens of Disch target not only human beings, but the entire ecosystem of planet Earth. Their monoculture crop out-competes and smothers local plants, and leads to the extinction of animals and birds. Again, readers of the book might be reminded of corporate assaults on natural environments here and now.

There is more to the book, and more that makes it hauntingly relevant to the American "polycrisis" of today. Disch offers no heroes, no experts with sudden solutions at the height of disaster; instead, he pits ordinary people of the cities against ordinary people of the countryside, authoritarian religious communities against atheists and outsiders. He shows the danger of stupid people who take on "leadership," and the frustration of basically-decent people whose efforts to help each other are thwarted by aggressive morons. America, in this book, is divided, conflicted in ways familiar to us now, and like today's America, as it faces collapse, it lashes out against its own people and against the world, with isolating policies, pointless retreats into solipsistic fantasy, and of course, genocide.

Above all, genocide.

Ripeness is All

EDGAR:
Away, old man; give me thy hand; away!
King Lear hath lost, he and his daughter ta'en:
Give me thy hand; come on.

GLOUCESTER:
No farther, sir; a man may rot even here.

EDGAR:
What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither;
Ripeness is all: come on.

GLOUCESTER:
And that's true too.

Exeunt

Robert Silverberg, DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH

Frank Frazetta, 1970. Click for a better jpeg.

Having waded for too many years through too many stories by Robert Silverberg, I was done with suffering. Yet in 1979, I had set one of his books above the rest: a book with a consistency of tone, a concern for visual detail, and an unsuspected emotional engagement that cracked his robotic facade.

The book was DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH, from 1969. Reading it now, I find it better than much of the supposedly ambitious work he had written up to his retreat to the safe zone in the 1980s, and vastly better than his bland, smoothly competent yet risk-free, emotionally-detached, endlessly-repetitive stories from that decade onward.

DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH is more than competent. I could recommend it as one model for anyone who wants to craft a visually-detailed story with understated, economical, straight-forward and transparent prose.

A typical passage:

"Generally now the mist was light at ground level, and often there was none at all for an hour or more. But it congealed far overhead as an unbroken veil, hiding the sky. Gundersen became accustomed to the barren soil, the angular branches of so many bare trees, the chilly penetrating dampness that was so different from the jungle’s humidity. He came to find beauty in the starkness. When fleecy coils of mist drifted like ghosts across a wide gray stream, when furry beasts sprinted over glazed fields of ice, when some hoarse ragged cry broke the incredible stillness, when the marchers turned an angle in the path and came upon a white tableau of harsh wintry emptiness, Gundersen responded with a strange kind of delight. In the mist country, he thought, the hour is always the hour just after dawn, when everything is clean and new."

Another:

"The mist came in close, bringing jewels of frost that hung from every tree, every hut; and by the brink of the leaden lake Gundersen cremated Cullen’s wasted body with one long fiery burst of the fusion torch, while sulidoror looked on, silent, solemn. The soil sizzled a while when he was done, and the mist whirled wildly as cold air rushed in to fill the zone of warmth his torch had made. Within the hut were a few unimportant possessions. Gundersen searched through them, hoping to find a journal, a memoir, anything with the imprint of Cedric Cullen’s soul and personality. But he found only some rusted tools, and a box of dried insects and lizards, and faded clothing. He left these things where he found them."

Hardly brilliant, but never bad: clear, functional prose.

Yet even as I read this book with respect (and relief -- I had not wanted to squirm and yawn through another typically-repetitive Silverberg typing session), I still felt the nagging tug of other writers with styles more lively, more engaging, more compelling.

For all of its undeniably good qualities, the prose of DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH is impersonal. It has a job to do, and it gets the job done, but with little hint of any human face at work behind the pages.

What do I mean by hint?

Quite often, you can sense the personality of a writer through the play of metaphor. Consider this:

"Evening shadows came across the spaceport in long strides. It was the one time of day when you could almost feel the world rotating. In the rays of the sinking sun, dusty palms round the spaceport looked like so many varnished cardboard props. By day, these palms seemed metal; by evening, so much papier mache. In the tropics, nothing was itself, merely fabric stretched over heat, poses over pulses."

That was the opening of VANGUARD FROM ALPHA (in the UK, EQUATOR), which is nowhere near the best work by Brian W. Aldiss, but which does come to life with sparks of metaphor in a recognizably Aldiss way. Yet the visual detail in DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH is not presented metaphorically, but through direct comparisons with creatures, plants, and landscapes that we know.

Nor does Robert Silverberg (in this book at least) allow himself to write omniscient comments, like those of Brian Aldiss; instead, he remains within the focus and thoughts of his protagonist. This is good traditional story-telling, but it also means that he cannot offer passages like this one, from Elizabeth Bowen's "The Disinherited."

"Autumn had set in early. While the days were still glowing, the woods took on from a distance a yellow, unreal sheen, like a reflection from metal; their fretted outlines hardened against the blond open hills that the vibrations of summer no longer disturbed. In the early mornings, dew spread a bright white bloom between long indigo shadows; the afternoon air quickened, but after sunset mists diluted the moon. The first phase of autumn was lovely; decay first made itself felt as an extreme sweetness: with just such a touch of delicious morbidity a lover might contemplate the idea of death."

These are not the observations of the story's protagonist, but the comments of Elizabeth Bowen "the implied narrator." Silverberg's approach in DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH avoids any such glimpse behind the mask, which is good for the story, but which also limits what he can write. In this case, I agree with Silverberg, but I also find Bowen more fun to read.

Writers can also reveal their personalities by their choice of rhetorical methods. Here is Avram Davidson, being himself in THE PHOENIX AND THE MIRROR:

"Cyprus was another world.

"The city of Paphos might have been designed and built by a Grecian architect dreamy with the drugs called talaquin or mandragora: in marble yellow as unmixed cream, marble pink as sweetmeats, marble the green of pistuquim nuts, veined marble and grained marble, honey-colored and rose-red, the buildings climbed along the hills and frothed among the hollows. Tier after tier of overtall pillars, capitals of a profusion of carvings to make Corinthian seem ascetic, pediments lush with bas-reliefs, four-fold arches at every corner and crossing, statues so huge that they loomed over the housetops, statues so small that whole troops of them flocked and frolicked under every building’s eaves, groves and gardens everywhere, fountains playing, water spouting....

"Paphos."

Note the disciplined use of alliteration (dreamy with the drugs), parallel clauses (marble yellow, marble pink, marble green), assonance (veined marble and grained marble), the nouns and verbs that make the passage vivid (statues that loom, statues that flock and frolic).

You could argue that rhetorical exuberance would have no place in a sober, sombre story like DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH, and I would probably agree. One of the stylistic strengths of that book is consistency of tone, which in itself is a fine achievement. (How many writers fail to maintain consistency, even within paragraphs? I could name a few....)

As I have said many times, the ways to write badly are limited and easy to label, but the ways to write well might almost be infinite. Objectively, I would say that Robert Silverberg wrote DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH quite well, but subjectively, I still find more to savour, more to love, in the styles of other writers.

Energy and passion in prose are qualities hard to measure, harder to describe, but for all of their will-o'-the-wisp nature, I know them, I feel them when I see them. I can also feel their absence, which is one of the many reasons why Silverberg, even at what is clearly his best, has never been someone I could read with passion.

The Western Crisis of Literacy

Having read too many essays and articles on the Western crisis of literacy, I believe that most of them miss the point. They focus on teaching and learning methods, but neglect the broader crisis of life beyond the classroom. If people in the Western world no longer read for intellectual engagement, instruction, or pleasure, how is anything a student learns at school to be applied outside of school?

Even before I began to read as a child, I noticed that everyone around me lived with books. My parents, who had no money during the early years of their marriage, took me on weekly trips to the local public library, and even though both worked at the time, they read to me, or asked babysitters to read. Either way, I grew up with piles of books at hand, and I was encouraged to love them.

My point, here, is not that my parents were good people. (They were.) My point is that we lived within a culture of books, which made the skills of literacy easy to learn, and easy to apply.

This Western culture of books and applied literacy is dying. If we took note of the loss, and chose to save this culture, we could do it, but the task would be the work of generations, and we would really have to give a damn. So far, we seem willing to let the culture of reading fade into dead history. We have chosen to be ignorant, inarticulate fools; we did this by, and to, ourselves. And now, here we are: nowhere.

Strength versus Power

While strength of character, strength of will, strength of body help us to reach our personal goals, power compels other people to do our self-directed work for us. In this way, power spoils character, corrupts will, enfeebles the body. One glance at our mindless, bloated "leaders" will prove this.

Click for a better jpeg, if not for better people.

When the Weak Support the Powerful

No matter how poor, marginalized, or frustrated they might be, a shocking number of people side consistently with power against their own self-interest. The sources of power, the motives of power, stretch beyond their understanding, yet they support the punitive actions of power against any group they resent.

Jim Rockhill's New Book on Sheridan Le Fanu

Click for a better jpeg.

A MIND TURNED IN UPON ITSELF: WRITINGS ON J. S. LE FANU, by Jim Rockhill. Swan River Press, Dublin, 2025.

Between 2002 and 2005, Ash-Tree Press released a three-volume set of stories by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, with introductory essays by Jim Rockhill. These can be ranked with the most important contributions to Le Fanu scholarship in our field since the Dover collections edited by the great E. F. Bleiler (BEST GHOST STORIES OF J. S. LEFANU, 1964; GHOST STORIES AND MYSTERIES, 1975), and the long essays on Le Fanu written by Jack Sullivan (ELEGANT NIGHTMARES, Ohio University Press, 1978 -- one of the best studies of horror fiction I've read).

Swan River Press has now collected revised and expanded versions of these Ash-Tree Press essays, along with supplementary articles, in a book essential for those with an interest in Le Fanu, in his place within the history of British ghost fiction, and in the aesthetics and techniques that he brought to the writing of horror stories.

Le Fanu remains a top figure in horror fiction, not only as a key influence on M. R. James and other British writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but as a living example of innovation within our field. Like Ambrose Bierce in the United States, Le Fanu was a pioneer of modern horror fiction. He brought a new control of tone and pacing, a new brevity and sensory specificity to the craftsmanship of horror fiction that took it beyond the influence of Gothic romance. In this way, he resembled the writers who succeeded him far more than he resembled those writers, like Poe, who came before. He emphasized atmosphere and psychology above mere sensationalism, and introduced a new type of ghost that was neither an external intrusion nor a clear manifestation of internal states; instead, the ghosts of Le Fanu were inextricably entwined invaders from within and without. Were the ghosts real? Were they hallucinations? None of this mattered. What was important, instead, was how the ghost was perceived, and how this perception destroyed the minds of witnesses.

This modern approach, with its claustrophobically-subjective emphasis on personal perception and secret anxieties, would go on to be developed by M. R. James, Walter de la Mare, and others who preferred the strangeness of the unknown to the clearly-motivated and often moralistic ghosts of the past. Le Fanu showed the way. And yet, as Jim Rockhill writes:

"For all the honour bestowed upon him over the decades by such percipient scholar-creators of supernatural fiction as E. F. Benson, Elizabeth Bowen, Glen Cavaliero, Gary William Crawford, Dorothy L. Sayers, August Derleth, Henry James, M. R. James, Rosemary Pardoe, V. S. Pritchett, Montague Summers, and others, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is still given insufficient credit as a craftsman and often very little credit at all as a visionary in the field of spectral horror."

Part of the reason for this neglect in the early 20th Century was the unavailability of his books, especially in the United States. Le Fanu was ignored or dismissed by important surveyors of the field (like H. P. Lovecraft), because they could not find much of his work to read.

Recent decades have corrected this. Yet facts about the man's life have long remained elusive:

"Rumours concerning the man's life and death still run rampant. Many scholarly editions of his work still cannot even be bothered to provide the correct day of his death."

Jim Rockhill sets out to repair this:

"It has been the goal of this volume to provide a biographical context in which to help dispel any myths still distorting perceptions of the man, and offer commentary that might help liberate the works from those purely psychological interpretations and other limited critical pigeonholes into which they have been forced over the years. If any of this has caused the reader to linger and perhaps shudder a little longer over the terrors in Le Fanu's pages, we can count this project a success."

Jim Rockhill's book is indeed a success.

He begins with the unsettled political climate of Le Fanu's Ireland:

"Although [Le Fanu] has left no direct record of these events, it is difficult not to recognise it as one more factor contributing to the sense of instability, the visions of ancestral mansions tottering on their foundations, and the continual presence of something lying in wait just out of sight which haunt not only his ghost stories, but much of his other fiction as well."

A troubled life of political upheavals and family tragedies took its toll on Le Fanu:

"Grief-stricken and guilt-ridden, disaffected politically, saddled with debts and responsibilities related to his ventures in journalism, and attempting to raise four children on his own, Le Fanu retired to his home at 18 Merrion Square for the remaining sixteen years of his life. His thus virtually shutting himself off from society led Dublin to dub Le Fanu the 'Invisible Prince', an apt appellation considering the results of this isolation: a string of long, complex novels and a body of supernatural fiction remarkable in its atmosphere, intensity, and dark implication....

"By all accounts he was a fascinating if cryptic individual, but if the details of his external life are scarce during these years, the products of his imagination are prodigal."

Jim Rockhill goes on to consider these works in detail, with accounts of their often complicated publishing histories, and their often complex narratives.

"The characters in his folkloric tales tread along the convergence of three lines linking this world with the world of fairy tale and the world of nightmare. In the other tales, his characters are tied to reality by the same dull occupations and concerns that dog us to this day. These characters are soon made to feel the presence of another world, impinging upon and inexorably intruding into their own, a world capable of affecting not only the individual, but even the world around him."

Like the narrators of several Walter de la Mare stories, Le Fanu's victims often seem haunted not merely by ghosts, but by crowded alternate realities: nightmarish, destructive, and without consolation. If Le Fanu believed in heaven, he offered no hints of it, but he clearly believed in the "machineries of hell."

Jim Rockhill takes a close look at the influence of Swedenborg on Le Fanu's work, at conflicting accounts of his legendary death-by-nightmare, at stories once attributed to Le Fanu without strong evidence, and at stories that appeared in multiple versions as Le Fanu developed and expanded their ideas. In effect, A MIND TURNED IN UPON ITSELF is a work of scholarship for scholars, a work of bibliography for bibliographers, a work of exploration for those who travel in the worlds of horror fiction, and, above all, a fine tribute to one of our field's greatest writers.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN, 1982.

Click for a better jpeg.

Now and then, a film not only exceeds my expectations, it leaps beyond them. If a film is older, this impact owes nothing to nostalgia, but shows how definitively the film has remained a living work.

This applies especially to CONAN THE BARBARIAN. I never saw the film in 1982; instead, I bought the MCA record album of the Basil Poledouris score. Despite the lousy sound of that vinyl pressing, despite the often-muddy recording of an under-rehearsed orchestra, the music stood out for me in its mood of melancholy introspection. I fell in love with it, and this love has endured.

Sometimes, good film composers write music not based on the films on screen, but on the films that play in their heads. Jerry Goldsmith did this often: no matter how wretched the film, he was able, time after time, to find something worthwhile in the garbage heap. For all that I knew, Basil Poledouris might have done the same with CONAN THE BARBARIAN, but I would not find out for certain until I had seen the film without interruption, at its full length of 130 minutes, just two or three years ago.

To my happy surprise, the film turned out not only to deserve its musical score, but to reflect it. The music was not glitter on a dull rag, not a pleasing mask on a bland face, but an accurate reflection of what the film showed and implied.

The 1980s brought a surprising number of brutally violent yet humanistic films, films that emphasized action without sacrificing human concerns. I think of THE ROAD WARRIOR, BLADE RUNNER, ALIENS, THE TERMINATOR, ROBOCOP: films of unexpected emotional resonance, "pulp" fantasies that somehow managed to convey something honest about human sorrows and human strengths. CONAN not only fits within this category, it defines the category.

What CONAN emphasizes even more than these other films is the melancholy, the isolation, of heroism, and this element shines out beyond the film's details of spurting blood and brutal deaths.

Much could be said about the technical excellence of this film. Its director, John Milius, might not be Akira Kurosawa, but he shows undeniable skill with the blocking of actors, the staging of action, the emotional and thematic values of lingering moments, the effectiveness of editing. His use of landscapes, of crowds, to support emotions and implications reveals a genuine vision.

In choosing his cast for their physicality, Milius ran the risk of poor performances. To counter this, he puts emphasis on eye gestures, on moments of stillness to convey suffering or sorrow. Even if someone like Sandahl Bergman lacks the voice of an actress, Milius ensures that her face, her movements, overcome this limitation. As a result, her character becomes not only convincing, but heart-breaking. Visual details make all of the difference.

The film is also less about well-rounded people than about the roles they serve. In moments like the introduction of the wizard, of Subotai, of Valeria, a character is not so much encountered by the hero, as recognized. This actually works in the films favour: these characters are not like us; they are mythic patterns, representations, within their own fantasy world.

All of this appears on screen, and is clear to anyone who pays attention, yet the meaning of CONAN, at least at first glance, can seem less clear, if only because the film would rather show its implications than spell them out. Some people have called this film a right-wing power fantasy, yet I doubt this, if only because the film adds layers to its apparent simplicity.

Early in the film, when Conan makes a name for himself as a gladiatorial slave, he is asked by a sponsor, "What is best in life?"

Conan replies, "Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women."

The sponsor approves, yet the film goes on to suggest better things in life. Subotai shows Conan the value of friendship and loyal companionship. Valeria shows him the value of love and a sexual relationship between equals. Osric shows him the value of family, of paternal devotion. And Thulsa Doom, ironically, shows him the value of purpose in life, of the strength and freedom to achieve this purpose.

All of this would suggest a film deeper and more nuanced than a simple power fantasy, and these layers become all the more clear at the film's ending. Unlike STAR WARS, with its final explosion and ceremonial medals, CONAN ends with a hero lost in thought, without purpose. After his defeat of Thulsa Doom, while surrounded and vastly out-numbered by the torch-bearing servants of Doom, Conan raises the broken sword of his father, and then drops it, discards it, as if to say, "Do whatever you like with me. My goal is completed. I'm finished."

Conan's moments of reflection, of isolation; Valeria's loneliness, her need for warmth and for someone who will not simply "pass by in the night;" Osric's realization, "There comes a time when the jewels cease to sparkle, when the gold loses its luster, when the throne room becomes a prison, and all that is left is a father's love for his child," these are not merely details. These are, I suspect, the foundation of what CONAN THE BARBARIAN means as a film.

A film that deals explicitly with violence and action can sometimes be misunderstood as being only about violence and action. Nobody would make this mistake while watching SEVEN SAMURAI, but many have been less willing to see nuance in CONAN THE BARBARIAN. I would urge them to take another look.

Neoliberalism, Oligarchy, the New McCarthyism: Can America Survive?

Walt Kelly, POGO, 1953. Click on the image for a better jpeg.

America has gone through this before, and survived. But will it survive this time?

The formation of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1938, The National Security Act of 1947, and the spectre of McCarthyism from the late 1940s to the early 1950s, all cast a cold spell on liberty and freedom of speech in the United States. These were terrible times, but certain features of American society allowed the country to endure:

-- A growing middle-class with increasing wealth and political influence, along with increased leisure time for thought, reflection, and civic participation.

-- The suddenly-opened doors of college and university education to people who could not have afforded such things before the introduction of the G.I. Bill (the Servicemen's Readjustment Act) of 1944, along with an explosion of affordable paperbacks that opened up worlds of thought and literature to the working class.

-- A strong civil society, formed of unions, churches, town halls, colleges and universities, fraternal organizations, and active public spaces where people could meet, mingle, and share concerns.

These pillars of democracy and civic participation no longer exist in post-1970s America. Neither Democrats nor Republicans consider such foundations important; what matters in their neoliberal non-society are transactions of the market, by the market, for the market. In such a world-view, merely human concerns are obsolete.

Over the course of decades, America has removed all of the defences that once protected the country from HUAC, from McCarthyism, from the power of oligarchs and demagogues. A crumbling, hollowed-out society must now face a neoliberal cliff, perhaps even fascism, but without organization, without solidarity, and without hope.

Can Americans prevail?

I want them to prevail. But I have my doubts.

Poetry Matters, But Why?

Why does it trouble me that poetry no longer seems to matter in our culture? What does poetry do, and why do we need it?

This question nagged at me for years, but recently, my thoughts have been clarified, thanks to a terrifying book by Iain McGilchrist, THE MATTER WITH THINGS. He writes at length about the different forms of attention provided by the two hemispheres of the brain. As human beings, we need both forms, but our societies often prioritize one form of attention above the other, or even pretend that only one form exists.

Click for a better jpeg.

To summarize badly what is, in McGilchrist's book, a detailed and nuanced argument: the right hemisphere of the brain is attentive to the broad scope of life, to time as flow, to experience as a shifting interaction with a living world. It recognizes that other people are as real as we are, and that they, too, harbour a concealed, subjective experience of life.

In opposition to this, the left hemisphere wields a set of specialized tools: it solves problems by turning living forms into abstractions or mechanisms, by reducing the flow of time to points on a graph, by transforming landscapes into maps. These reductive tools are essential to human survival, but the left hemisphere can lose itself in abstraction: then it mistakes abstract data for reality, living beings for machines, maps for terrain. It mistakes isolated moments of lifeless time as more objective and real than the flowing tangle of human experience.

The right hemisphere is able to integrate the abstract conclusions of the left into a broader, living perspective. The result is a back-and-forth communication between two necessary modes of responding to the world, but sometimes, this communication becomes one-sided. While the right hemisphere accepts a need for the reductive problem-solving tools of the left, the left often disregards the integrations, the reminders and insights, of the right. It assumes that its created abstractions are the real thing, that its reductive tools are the only valid ones for existence.

When societies grow in complexity, when they face more and more technical challenges, they rely more and more on left-hemisphere methods. They teach the methods in schools. They reward the methods with money. They often reach a point where they consider these methods the only "realistic" approach to life, and they dismiss the second thoughts, the warnings, the broad perspectives of the right hemisphere, as unprofitable distractions.

Iain McGilchrist argues that Western society has trapped itself within a cage of reductive left-hemisphere attention, that it disregards or dismisses the troubling yet living perspectives of the right.

In his own words:

"Public discourse in a culture can accentuate some ideas, concepts, beliefs and values at the expense of others. And when this happens, it is not as if these ideas, concepts, beliefs or values are atomistic; they bring with them a largely coherent world-picture, which gradually forms itself in the culture, and over time is expressed in a myriad of ways. I believe our own culture is unbalanced in the degree to which the left hemisphere’s take predominates. And, unfortunately, the left hemisphere is decidedly imperceptive -- and so is unaware there is a problem."

The result is a world of machine systems fit only for machine-people, of algorithms considered more intelligent than human consciousness, of a natural world increasingly exploited and poisoned, of human relationships and political systems rapidly falling apart. It often seems that our entire way of life has been designed to ignore the wider, deeper, empathetic awareness of the right hemisphere.

We still have right hemispheres, but many of us ignore them, or distrust them, or consider them irrelevant to our consumer-capitalist, oligarchic present. The cost of our denial is human misery.

How can we escape from this trap?

For a start, we can, each of us, begin to pay attention to our forsaken right hemispheres; we can begin to communicate with our own selves. One form of communication is complex melodic music; another is poetry.

Poetry and music are akin: both rely on sound, on complex yet regular rhythms, on suggestive and fleeting moods, on things not quite understood yet felt in the bones.

I would suggest that we no longer value poetry because we no longer value the broader, living perspectives of human attention. If we immerse ourselves in poetry, if we begin to appreciate its visceral impact, then we can train ourselves to recognize and to heed the promptings of the right hemisphere.

This argument for utility ignores an important truth: poetry, like music, is beautiful. Poetry, like music, can move us in ways hard to explain yet impossible to disregard. Poetry, like music, cultivates an aesthetic and emotional appreciation of life, and this appreciation can make us more complete, more aware, more human.

Poetry belongs to us in the way that webs belong to spiders, that hives belong to bees and hornets. We create poetry, we read and recite poetry, because we need it. Here in this appalling century, we have been taught to believe that poetry no longer matters, because we have been taught to believe that human lives no longer matter.

Both assumptions are wrong; both can be corrected, if we have the will to confront them.

Sometimes, When I Dare Myself To Read Robinson Jeffers

Photo by Edward Weston, 1929. Click for a better jpeg.

Sometimes, when I dare myself to read Robinson Jeffers, I think, "No no no, what if he's right?" But then I read him again, and think, "No no no, he's right." Either notion appalls me.

Rearmament
by Robinson Jeffers.

These grand and fatal movements toward death: the grandeur of the mass
Makes pity a fool, the tearing pity
For the atoms of the mass, the persons, the victims, makes it seem monstrous
To admire the tragic beauty they build.
It is beautiful as a river flowing or a slowly gathering
Glacier on a high mountain rock-face,
Bound to plow down a forest, or as frost in November,
The gold and flaming death-dance for leaves,
Or a girl in the night of her spent maidenhood, bleeding and kissing.
I would burn my right hand in a slow fire
To change the future... I should do foolishly. The beauty of modern
Man is not in the persons but in the
Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the
Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.

-- From
THE SELECTED POETRY OF ROBINSON JEFFERS.
Random House, New York, 1938 (Eighth Printing).

Originally appeared in
SOLSTICE AND OTHER POEMS.
New York: Random House, 1935.

Why Imagine Reality? Reality Is Here.

Imagine a Second World War, in which the Western governments all supported nazi Germany.

On second thought, never mind. Why imagine a state of corruption that exists right now in the daylight?

Apologists For Genocide Make the Same Excuses Over and Over Again

"Remember, kids: Israel has the right to defend itself against doctors, nurses, farmers, teachers, firefighters, reporters, the mutilated, the blinded, the crippled, the starved, and of course, children.

"Especially children. Ever and always, children."