Bizet: Carmen (1875) (Metropolitan Opera 1987)

Agnes Baltsa is apparently a great singer, though I wouldn’t know since this is the first opera I’ve ever audited, but what I do know, without a doubt, is that she’s too old for the role of Carmen. To be sure, all four of the leads in the 1987 Met version of Carmen are vastly too old for their roles. All the makeup in the world doesn’t hide it, and I become fairly uncomfortable watching them prance around performing the roles of teenagers, really sexy teenagers, and I keep thinking of Hamlet telling his mother “you cannot call it love; for at your age / The hey-day in the blood is tame, it’s humble, / And waits upon the judgment.” And I cry, and I cry, and I cry, and I cry.

A note by the Royal Opera House mentioned that contemporary reviews found the music replete with dissonance, which is difficult to imagine in an age when Carmen feels like a three-hour salad dressing commercial (by the way: salad comes from the Latin for ‘salt’–which means that a plate of vegetables is nothing but a plate of vegetables until you dress it, fool). A note by the San Francisco Opera described Carmen’s death as being the ultimate act of love for herself and Don José. I don’t see any evidence for this, partially because Carmen reads her fate in the cards and only afterwards seems bent on seeking its reality. But most of all, I think she’s just a fickle whore for whom such an ending, if truly an act of love, is too good.

Anyway, seeing as I don’t know anything about opera and thus shouldn’t make comments, I’ll briefly mention the things I find interesting about the character of Micaela:

“To illustrate: opera, as a matter of convention, demands solo voices…a soprano, contralto, tenor and bass in primary roles; there are vocal combinations of these four timbres, a chorus, orchestral interludes and accompaniments. The heroine, Carmen, conceived by the composer as a contralto, needed the light, lyric quality of a soprano voice as a foil. Mérimée’s gypsy had no female rival, so that Bizet felt obliged to invent one: Micaela” (Nowinski).
…

“The most frequently criticized artistic concession, on the part of Bizet, is his creation of Micaela. She springs to life, fully grown like Athena, based on a single mention in Mérimée. Purists invariably conclude that she represents a violation of the author’s original story. Don José’s reminiscence of a Basque maiden is simply personified–a legitimate, conventional tool, used by dramatists. Seen in this light, and as a vocal foil for Carmen’s contralto voice, Micaela assumes genuine validity.”

I need a soprano, so how about an imaginary soprano who always knows where to find Don José, with whom other characters don’t particularly interact (except the soldiers at the outset, the situation that, according to San Francisco Opera, illustrates her pluck and tenacity), who acts as a convenient reminder of an absent mother, and disappears when the protagonist forgets to shave. Micaela. These are loose ends, that we don’t know what becomes of her, or the mother, and unfortunately I just don’t care.

And that’s the problem so far. When I see this I feel like I’m watching ART. Levine waves at the audience before each act, and after each act the players come out and bow and hold hands and we’re constantly reminded, as if their wrinkles didn’t do it for us, that this isn’t real. It’s ART. They each spent a minimum of five years learning how to breathe properly, and the emotions they draw from us aren’t nearly so important as the emotions we imagine should be drawn from us. It’s heavy-handed.

“Complex problems confront us when we seek to define ‘meaning.’ . . .Cone maintains that when the [composer] sets a poem to music, he actually chooses ‘one among all its forms,’ that ‘he delimits one sub-set within the complete set of all possible forms.’ This unique concept, Cone suggests, ‘might be termed a latent form of the poem; and . . . the composer’s task is to make the latent form patent by presenting it through the more specific, inflexible, and immediate medium of music.’ In summary, he asserts: ‘Ultimately there can be only one justification for the serious composition of a song; it must be an attempt to increase our understanding of the poem.’“

This reminds me of the second line in Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise: “His father, an ineffectual, inarticulate man with a taste for Byron,” a line that effects in me considerable discomfort. Art must be created for somebody, mustn’t it? I mean, somebody who gleans something more than cocktail-talk from it. And to sit here and watch an orchestra of secretaries, and a stage of secretaries (witness: Micaela’s two minutes of sighs and breast-clutching as she awaits the audience to shut the hell up), and to be told that This is ART, this is brilliance…I simply cannot believe it. Anything gained or understood from this must be purely from our own expectations of its gravity and depth, not from what’s actually there. What should be a combination of all these forms at their greatest heights rather feels like mediocrity, mediocrity, mediocrity, and I feel nothing, though I swear I try.

Anyway, I suppose what I’m getting at is that I enjoy What a Girl Wants so much because even if I don’t believe it, I can at least pretend to believe it because Amanda Bynes’ prettiness merits it. I pretend because I want it to be real because she’s pretty. So, in short, if opera is to gain my adoration, either the players must become younger, or the stories all have to be about old people and whatever their concerns happen to be, I dunno, groceries or Medicare.

Obviously, I saw the 1987 version from the Met. I read “Sense and Sound in Georges Bizet’s Carmen”, by Judith Nowinski. The French Review © 1970. And the lectures I heard from the Royal Opera House and the San Francisco Opera, I honestly don’t have any details on them.

Ballroom #3

“Now, when you close it’s a pet peeve of mine that your shoes…hm…” he crouched in front of me, “your knees don’t touch. Well, I suppose that can’t be helped now, can it. It’s just how you’re built. So…well, don’t lose any sleep over the fact that your knees don’t touch, there’s nothing we can do about it.” All the while I kept trying to make my knees touch, and just now in the kitchen I’ve been standing here seeing how I might make them commit this unnatural, abominable act, which seems to me achievable by a combination of rotating, clenching, god knows, I’m a monster! “And when you begin competing you can just wear baggy pants.” I’m a monster!

Today we focused on waltz. He said that if I didn’t happen to have any waltz to practice with then I should just imagine it–but I happen to have an obscene amount of Anton Karas and other Viennese Favorites sitting around ready to be abused by my steps. I have significant trouble hearing British accents because I tend to associate them with my numerous personal failings, and also with BBC journalists. But I found my instructor quite agreeable and, because from what I can tell he’s built like I am, I’ve even more courage concerning all this, is there an ounce of grace in me?–today was focused almost exclusively on technique, I can’t remember all the words I’m supposed to remember–footwork; another word for lilt, which is what I learned when I was studying a Russian method of classical piano; ___; ___; and in the meantime they count tempo by bars per minute rather than beats, so I quickly convert 29 – 32 bars per minute into 90 bpm, which seems rather slow until I’m lilting around a chair. Best of all, though, is that already I’ve become significantly less anxious about this whole ordeal–whereas at my first lesson I was mournful over not having time to get drunk beforehand (as I did for my first singing lesson), I’m now easily manipulated, observed, touched, critiqued, willing to follow instructions, to imitate, to totally fuck up.

film: Godard: Pierrot le Fou (1965)

pierrot Dear Meg,

I really am trying to write. Actually, the truth is that I haven’t begun writing at all. I have all the materials I need to begin writing, but there’s this present lack of something in me that leads me to a persistent inability not only to finding my words, but also to having real thoughts. Letter writing has failed me, travel has failed me, adventures have failed me, digging up family ghosts have failed me, I’ve tried all these things in the past few weeks and I find myself unable to write like I once could. It’s terrifying. So now I’ve been watching Godard and some opera (I don’t mean just any ol’ opera, I mean un certain opéra) and hoping desperately that forcing myself to write about these things will bring me quickly back to my senses. If nothing else will, then that’s that, I simply am unable to write ever again and I will have to just be ilwriterishly for ever after.

In the meantime I’ve been reading a lot of old reviews regarding works I’ve been involved with—and it seems to me that critics are quite possibly the dullest bunch ever formed by god, and I can only hope that someday a new sort of criticism will emerge, in which the critic will begin under the assumption that the artist knows precisely what he or she

(must I include ‘or she’–or can I just go along with the old rules of grammar in which the masculine gender is attributed to an indeterminate subject? or am I supposed to switch back and forth, like in the science safety videos where all the kids always have names we’ve never heard before? honestly, Meg, sometimes I can’t even lift my pen because I don’t know what to do with my pronouns! How do you deal with this?)

has created, has made every decision with infinite deliberation. That’s how I always tried to approach creative writing classes, in which I’d assume typos to be artistic statements. That’s how critics should be approaching everything—with a reasonable touch of taste, but mostly with confidence in the artist. Full disclosure: I was a critic for a big newspaper for four years, so I can assuredly say that there are few critical sins I did not leave uncommitted. But I suppose the special hell for critics will look very much like a Ben Franklin arts and crafts supply store.

The thing about these films that so agonizes me is how they speak to such vast numbers of people. The memory of France I most wish to rid myself of is of that smiling idiot and his expensive camera and his adorable ‘I make websites for a living and go camping on weekends’ outfit photographing Brassai’s old apartment building and the Bunuel/Henry Miller/etc etc etc etc cafe beneath it. I want them to speak only to me. When I saw Jules et Jim originally, in the ‘foreign language lab’ I’d sneaked into so I could borrow the film from the French department and watch it wearing rubber headphones on a tiny yellowed television. The brilliance I drew from it was the following: it was made to be a very long and boring film so that at the very end the audience could be shocked by the casual treatment of death and cremation. Last I saw it I found it unspeakably beautiful, it was a whole world. So with Godard, my introduction to him, all on the large screen, was quite similar, looking for his funny sound-effects, his references to other films, his odd usage of the camera for conveying dialogue, his breaking of the rules. I understood that he was making art for its own sake, not for the sake of beauty, not because he might be able to make things new. I once looked at art as something to only be dissected, to be treated like a vial of blood to be separated and analyzed, to eke out cell-counts and percentages and meaning, when the truth of the matter is that George Michael refuses to get himself checked for HIV because he’s afraid of what the results might be—and if we took some of his blood and scientists analyzed it for every possible measurement it could yield, those scientists would find nothing telling of his sweet singing voice. That’s a proper comparison, isn’t it? Because although George Michael’s HIV status won’t change what he’s accomplished as a singer and what he still accomplishes today, his knowing the status could be helpful in prolonging his life and whatever other good that might effect. So perhaps although treating a film like a picky child treats a chicken leg might be useless in terms of understanding its beauty, perhaps it comes in useful when determining its longevity. But I sure hope not.

My great fear is that with age, if I’m finding these films beautiful now, that I someday might end up like that proto-emo kid in American Beauty who videotapes plastic bags blowing in the wind. He can go to hell too, along with everyone who gathers in big groups and lets go of balloons. But besides that, once you reach the point of finding beauty in plastic bags you’ve probably lost all usefulness to humanity. One needs standards. Here’s a standard: Sri Lanka is actually an island, and its political boundaries are not at all shaped like Vietnam.

“You speak to me with words, and I look at you with emotions.”

This is spoken by the woman to the man in a conversation I feel central to one of Godard’s concerns here, which is the failure of communication between men and women.

Briefly: Belmondo runs off with his babysitter, Anna Karina, and the two of them do what everyone does in Godard films. But they do it while being criminals and committing many crimes it’s difficult to slight them for, also Belmondo gets water-boarded twice without the camera cutting away from him

(which, if you’re counting, means that the actor Belmondo was water-boarded at least as many times as was once claimed of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed)–

but what’s most important is that the two of them run away together and there’s never really any motive established except their love for one another (ultimately questionable) and an equally fierce longing for romanticism in life. Do you know what a Carioca is? A native of Rio de Janeiro. Can you imagine how different things would be if Columbus had thought he’d landed at Rio de Janeiro, and then he’d call everyone Cariocans. It’d be such a mess. Belmondo finds himself at peace when they live by the sea, quite romantic, he reads and writes, she says “I don’t give a damn about books” and declares herself quite bored. By the time they lose each other in a brief accident involving murder, dancing, and water-boarding, I’m led to believe that she didn’t want to stick around, and when they find each other again, I don’t entirely believe in her love anymore.

The problem is that I identify with both of them. How many times a day do I not give a damn about art before rushing and clutching its limp bodies off the floor to cover them with kisses? I think if anyone else I know identifies, you do, because I’ve seen you take both sides. Is that everyone’s eternal struggle? I don’t quite know what it is to be a man or to be a woman. I don’t know if I speak with words or with emotions, I don’t know if I look with words or with emotions. I’m afraid I’m quite changeable. What is certain, regardless, is that both their dreams I love instantly—and even their violent ends seem terribly merciful of Godard, because it would be much worse to led them languish in a courtroom.

But to the point: how should I be taking this film? intellectually or emotionally? All the essays in the world don’t change the fact that Brecht consistently found factory workers easily comprehending his plays while intellectuals got it wrong, and got it wrong, and got it wrong. They didn’t begin writing the screenplay for this until the day before shooting began. Yet some assert that every film of Godard’s deserves a book to dissect it. Does it? Or is that too simple and insulting? Is it supposed to be experienced and sensed, or is it supposed to be turned into words? is it supposed to be felt or reduced to concepts? is it meant for everyone or is it only for wealthy undergrads? What does it show me to be attainable in life? What’s most attractive and what’s worth sacrificing? Have I learned anything about myself? I hope so.

Could I have written this better? Absolutely? Could I have? No. I’ve totally failed.

—

For this I also read Review: [untitled], by Michael Klein. Film Quarterly. 1966. University of California Press, which was a bunch of shit, as most everything ever written about film is apt to be.

In the next thing I write I’ll be writing about Une Femme est une Femme—and I’ll write about the people who don’t deserve to enjoy French new wave cinema and why.

China

Note: I don’t know anything about Communism, Socialism, China, or Russia. Seriously.

Certainly I fell in love at once with the poetry of Li Po and of Tu Fu, but aside from that very little has struck me in Chinese history as memorable, just the endless succession of names and dynasties, it struck me quite the same ten years ago as it does now. Durant expresses precisely this, at an ideal moment commenting that ‘it is part of the bathos of distance that our long removal from alien scenes obscures variety in places and men, and submerges the most diverse personalities in a dull uniformity of appearance and character’ (Our Oriental Heritage, 724).

I was once told that Russia fell into the hands of Communism so easily not because it was weak, but because it had been communist all along, that historically Russia was a communist land. I don’t know if this is true. So I’ve had my eye out for indications that something in the Chinese character is similar, that there’s some governing philosophy that’s held sway the Chinese mind for thousands of years. Confucianism seems to be the philosophy they continually fall into. And I don’t feel like looking into the parallels, if there are any, right now, because that’s not why I began writing this.

“Above all, Chinese architecture suffered from the absence of three institutions present in almost every other great nation of antiquity: an hereditary aristocracy, a powerful priesthood, and a strong and wealthy central government. These are the forces that in the past have paid for the larger works of art–for the temples and palaces, the masses and operas, the great frescoes and sculptured tombs. And China was fortunate and unique: she had none of these institutions” (741).

“The general impression left by Chinese architecture upon the foreign and untechnical observer is one of charming frailty. Color dominates form, and beauty here has to do without the aid of sublimity. The Chinese temple or palace seeks not to dominate nature, but to cooperate with it in that perfect harmony of the whole which depends upon the modesty of the parts. Those qualities that give a structure strength, security and permanence are absent here, as if the builders feared that earthquakes would stultify their pains. Those buildings hardly belong to the same art as that which raised its monuments at Karnak and Persepolis, and on the Acropolis; they are not architecture as we of the Occident have known it, but rather the carving of wood, the glazing of pottery and the sculpture of stone; they harmonize better with porcelain and jade than with the ponderous edifices that a mixture of engineering and architecture gave to India, Mesopotamia or Rome. If we do not ask of them the grandeur and the solidity which their makers may never have cared to give them, if we accept them willingly as architectural cameos expressing the most delicate of tastes in the most fragile of structural forms, then they take their place as a natural and appropriate variety of Chinese art, and among the most gracious shapes ever fashioned by men” (744).

This, of course, leads me to think of Spengler’s chapter on mathematics in early civilizations, of Kenneth Clark’s discussion of viking shipbuilding, and Will Durant’s own on prehistoric Greek dwellings–because I think a Western notion of confidence as an overarching thesis may fail here–however, Durant was writing before those banners of Chairman Mao were hung, before the tanks in my memory, of the stadiums and the smog and the mass-production (the slavery that shocks us now has yet always been a component of Chinese civilization), nothing about modern China, not the convents and epidemics of The Painted Veil, and not the drug dens and orgies of The Good Earth, is what I am trying to think of now…I won’t pretend to understand the Chinese character–as much time as I’ve spent trying to understand the British or the French, I still haven’t come to terms with either, they make absolutely no sense to me, I feel as if I’m rolling dice; so much more so, the Chinese.

Concerning its poetry: “we may tire, at times, of a certain sentimentality in [Chinese poetry], a vainly wistful mood of regret that time will not stop in its flight and let men and states be young forever” (713). And concerning its architecture: “drawings . . . show that through its long history of over twenty-three centuries Chinese architecture has been content with the same designs, and the same modest proportions” (741). And, on poetry, again,

“what we do see is, above all, brevity. . . . But the Chinese believe that all poetry must be brief; that a long poem is a contradiction in terms–since poetry, to them, is a moment’s ecstasy, and dies when dragged out in epic reams. Its mission is to see and paint a picture with a stroke, and write a philosophy in a dozen lines; its ideal is infinite meaning in a little rhythm. Since pictures are of the essence of poetry, and the essence of Chinese writing is pictography, the written language of China is spontaneously poetic; it lends itself to writing in pictures, and shuns abstractions that cannot be phrased as things seen. Since abstractions multiply with civilization, the Chinese language, in its written form, has become a secret code of subtle suggestions; and in like manner, and perhaps for a like reason, Chinese poetry combines suggestion with concentration, and aims to reveal, through the picture it draws, some deeper thing invisible. It does not discuss, it intimates; it leaves out more than it says; and only an Oriental can fill it in. . . . Like Chinese manners and art, Chinese poetry is a matter of infinite grace concealed in a placid simplicity. It foregoes metaphor, comparison and allusion, but relies on showing the thing itself, with a hint of its implications. It avoids exaggeration and passion [I immediately recall that hotel orgy that lasted for days and involved hundreds upon hundreds of people in a major Chinese city a few years ago…], but appeals to the mature mind by understatement and restraint; it is seldom romantically excited in form, but knows how to express intense feeling in its own quietly classic way” (712).

Compare, then, to the poetry of Tagore, whose every word I think is so laden with poetic ambiguity that at times I think his work suffers–in the same way that Vedic architecture so discomforts and sometimes horrifies me.

Not that I live a simple life, not for one heartbeat. But, the whole point is that there is a thread I see running through Chinese history, through its art and philosophy, which is one of simplicity, but when attached to my opinions on Confidence, I think it does have a role, which is that until recently, confidence in China was related to restraint, restraint and nuance performed the role of grandeur and obtuseness we’ve so come to adore. And where is the necessity of living forever? Perhaps as in Judaism, placing the emphasis on living during life rather than on fame and posterity and eternity etc. is what has produced so little in terms of Western greatness. Hm, yes, I do believe in subtlety above all. So I live a life of subtlety when I can, this is true.

Byron – Occasional Pieces (1813)

1813 has been the most strenuous to get through so far, because by this point I don’t even feel like he’s trying, and perhaps he isn’t, these may very well be the ones he’s writing from the shitter or when he can’t sleep. I mean, there’s nothing I can say about these except that they’re characteristically Byron, that odd mixture of self-pity and sharp disdain and inundating adoration. I can’t quote anything. I need to force myself to write something. No, I don’t want to.

novel: Lawrence: The Trespasser (1912)

Lawrence is one of these authors whose books I’ve always collected, but whose work I’ve never really found the courage to read. Where does one begin? It was my mother who handed me a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover when I was still a teenager, which was all I ever really received as far as a ‘birds and the bees’ talk goes, and I would skim through it looking for some magical description of the female orgasm. But, you see, I viewed it as pornography before literature, so that I looked towards the end of the book, and, finding nothing of interest, tossed it aside, figuring, I mean, hell, what could anyone know about sex way back then anyway. Anais Nin’s Unprofessional Study and how it brought her together with Henry Miller is when I began considering that perhaps I should be reading his works, and so a few years ago I did read The Fox, which I recall as being a cross between Jules et Jim and Bergman’s Persona, nothing ever really feels cleared up. We all giggled nervously at age 17 when masturbation was brought to light in “The Rockinghorse Winner”–but, without a doubt, Lawrence has become one of the most important writers of my life. Yes, I came to my sexuality with my best friend Anais Nin in one hand, I came to my senses with Henry Miller in the other (no, let’s be serious, it was the same hand. just kidding!), but I came to understand my masculinity thanks to Lawrence, and furthermore, it’s in this early novel of his that I find the truest illustration of your complete servitude to the most ephemeral of feelings, feelings that must in truth be something like little bats clumsily bobbing through the air, avoiding Siegmund by scent and smacking into the faces of Helena, who, well, reacts as you characteristically do his myopic and oppressive male chauvinism. And so, it is this book which has led me to make firm my conclusion that I’ve been unsure about for ages, but now am quite certain, because all these games must finally end: I must hide myself, and this may be the only way to finally shake you to your senses, to remind you of reality, there needs to be a complete restructuring of the existing social organization so as to produce full and equal status and protection of both sexes and all genders in order that we might attune our natural with our cultural rights, and perhaps then, perhaps then, the universe will be okay.

What’s most fascinating is the extent to which Lawrence clarifies the logic of his characters in a novel of which I see no signs of his biography, yet I see myself, and I see a confounding episode of my own life that takes place in the same settings as this novel does, under similar circumstances, and I had to deal with the same nonsense of it all–and while I had no answers before, I do now. I am a misogynist. But, before I leave an extended number of quotations that struck me for one reason or another, I will mention two things in particular:

In chapter 29, Lawrence breaks the rules pretty violently after writing up to this point in the past tense, suddenly he draws us out of the story and leads us to believe that there is something beyond the novel, something in reality that continues even after we close the book, something in the present [emphasis mine]:

Now Helena believed he was ill, perhaps very ill, perhaps she only could be of any avail. The miles of distance were like hot bars of iron across her breast, and against them it was impossible to strive. The train did what it could.

That day remains as a smear in the record of Helena’s life. In it there is no spacing of hours, no lettering of experience, merely a smear of suspense.

Towards six o’clock she alighted, at Surbiton station, deciding that this would be the quickest way of getting to Wimbledon. She paced the platform slowly, as if resigned, but her heart was crying out at the great injustice of delay. Presently the local train came in. She had planned to buy a local paper at Wimbledon, and if from that source she could learn nothing, she would go on to his house and inquire. She had prearranged everything minutely.

And then, not long afterwards, he draws us out of the narrative flow like this:

Helena stood still on the station for some time, looking at the print. Then she dropped the paper and wandered into the town, not knowing where she was going.

‘That was what I got,’ she said, months afterwards; ‘and it was like a brick, it was like a brick.’

She wandered on and on, until suddenly she found herself in the grassy lane with only a wire fence bounding her from the open fields on either side, beyond which fields, on the left, she could see Siegmund’s house standing florid by the road, catching the western sunlight. Then she stopped, realizing where she had come. For some time she stood looking at the house. It was no use her going there; it was of no use her going anywhere; the whole wide world was opened, but in it she had no destination, and there was no direction for her to take. As if marooned in the world, she stood desolate, looking from the house of Siegmund over the fields and the hills. Siegmund was gone; why had he not taken her with him?

This is all quite absurd, really, and quite brilliant, and perhaps in some way paying homage to the real Siegmund and the real Helena, whose story he used as his source, but I think goes quite a bit further than that. Chapter 27, as Siegmund is contemplating suicide, he finds solace in the idea that ‘the heart of life is implacable in its kindness. It may not be moved to fluttering of pity; it swings on uninterrupted by cries of anguish or of hate.’ And then furthermore,

Siegmund was thankful for this unfaltering sternness of life. There was no futile hesitation between doom and pity. Therefore, he could submit and have faith. If each man by his crying could swerve the slow, sheer universe, what a doom of guilt he might gain. If Life could swerve from its orbit for pity, what terror of vacillation; and who would wish to bear the responsibility of the deflection?

The novel begins many months after the suicide, Helena characteristically cold, playing with the affections of her best friend, and some guy, and yes, Siegmund is dead, but very clearly things aren’t so bad after all. And then the narrator takes us back to the beginning, through the suicide, and the aftermath through one year. And the narrator proves just what Siegmund believed, which is that the world does not even hesitate for the blink of an eye at one’s suicide, and even his wife only cries out of mere fear.

If I was faced with the girl I love, hanging in the doorway by the strap of her portmanteau, her face unrecognizable and distended, piss and excrement beneath the shadow of her nightgown, I suppose she’s the only person in all the world whom I could cut down, and place delicately on the bed. And I don’t know that I could leave her alone until her body was underground. And you can’t even text me. Well, such is love, the fairest, truest love.

So, while the opening chapter may be necessary for the sake of framing, the closing chapters are less so, but they function to illustrate that indeed, life does go on, very easily, and perhaps smoother than before, for both wife, children, and mistress. And in case the reader wonders whether things continue on so well, there’s no question, because the narrator drags us to the present tense for a moment, letting us know that, indeed, the death of one man means nothing at all, not to anyone.

* * *

So, now let’s move on to things I really love about this, which is the sorts of conversations I know all too well, in fact, these may be my conversations, not the protagonist’s, because in case you haven’t heard, generally you see no relationship between words and reality.

Chapter 4:

“When Helena drew away her lips, she was exhausted. She belonged to that class of ‘dreaming women’ with whom passion exhausts itself at the mouth. Her desire was accomplished in a real kiss. The fire, in heavy flames, had poured through her to Siegmund, from Siegmund to her. It sank, and she felt herself flagging. She had not the man’s brightness and vividness of blood. She lay upon his breast, dreaming how beautiful it would be to go to sleep, to swoon unconscious there, on that rare bed. She lay still on Siegmund’s breast, listening to his heavily beating heart.

With her the dream was always more than the actuality. Her dream of Siegmund was more to her than Siegmund himself. He might be less than her dream, which is as it may be. However, to the real man she was very cruel.”

Chapter 6:

“Then again, when he raised his head and found her mouth, his lips filled her with a hot flush like wine, a sweet, flaming flush of her whole body, most exquisite, as if she were nothing but a soft rosy flame of fire against him for a moment or two. That, she decided, was supreme, transcendental.”

Chapter 7:

“‘I am her child, too,’ he dreamed, as a child murmurs unconscious in sleep. He had never felt her eyes so much as now, in the darkness, when he looked only into deep shadow. She had never before so entered and gathered his plaintive masculine soul to the bosom of her nurture.”

Chapter 8:

‘The best sort of women—the most interesting—are the worst for us,’ Hampson resumed. ‘By instinct they aim at suppressing the gross and animal in us. Then they are supersensitive—refined a bit beyond humanity. We, who are as little gross as need be, become their instruments. Life is grounded in them, like electricity in the earth; and we take from them their unrealized life, turn it into light or warmth or power for them. The ordinary woman is, alone, a great potential force, an accumulator, if you like, charged from the source of life. In us her force becomes evident.

‘She can’t live without us, but she destroys us. These deep, interesting women don’t want us; they want the flowers of the spirit they can gather of us. We, as natural men, are more or less degrading to them and to their love of us; therefore they destroy the natural man in us—that is, us altogether.’

‘I wonder,’ said Hampson softly, with strange bitterness, ‘that she can’t see it; I wonder she doesn’t cherish you. You are full and beautiful enough in the flesh—why will she help to destroy you, when she loved you to such extremity?’

Siegmund looked at him with awe-stricken eyes. The frail, swift man, with his intensely living eyes, laughed suddenly.

‘Fools—the fools, these women!’ he said. ‘Either they smash their own crystal, or it revolts, turns opaque, and leaps out of their hands. Look at me, I am whittled down to the quick; but your neck is thick with compressed life; it is a stem so tense with life that it will hold up by itself. I am very sorry.’

—

“Throwing himself down on the sand that was soft and warm as white fur, he lay glistening wet, panting, swelling with glad pride at having conquered also this small, inaccessible sea-cave, creeping into it like a white bee into a white virgin blossom that had waited, how long, for its bee.”

Chaptern 11:

“All she knew was that he was strong, and was knocking urgently with his heart on her breast.”

Chapter 16:

She made a moaning, loving sound. Full of passionate pity, she moved her mouth on his face, as a woman does on her child that has hurt itself.

‘Sometimes,’ she murmured, in a low, grieved confession, ‘you lose me.’

He gave a brief laugh.

‘I lose you!’ he repeated. ‘You mean I lose my attraction for you, or my hold over you, and then you—?’

He did not finish. She made the same grievous murmuring noise over him.

‘It shall not be any more,’ she said.

As usual, a man produces a billion sperms every hour, and a woman produces one egg each month, so women are often, highly economic with words when it comes to things that matter, things that demand discussion. This case illustrates it well. And then, here’s a rather pretty line: “turning to Helena, he found her face white and shining as the empty moon.”

Chapter 19:

‘I see it has,’ he answered. Then to himself he said: ‘She can’t translate herself into language. She is incommunicable; she can’t render herself to the intelligence. So she is alone and a law unto herself: she only wants me to explore me, like a rock-pool, and to bathe in me. After a while, when I am gone, she will see I was not indispensable….’

…

‘Is that why I have failed? I ought to have had her in love sufficiently to keep her these few days. I am not quick. I do not follow her or understand her swiftly enough. And I am always timid of compulsion. I cannot compel anybody to follow me.

‘So we are here. I am out of my depth. Like the bee, I was mad with the sight of so much joy, such a blue space, and now I shall find no footing to alight on. I have flown out into life beyond my strength to get back. When can I set my feet on when this is gone?’

A line I rather like is, ‘the naked body of heat was dreadful,’ and I was also struck by “‘If now,’ prayed Siegmund, ‘death would wipe the sweat from me, and it were dark….’” And it is essential to note that in both chapters 18 and 19 Helena is overly concerned with the time. Siegmund provides no commentary on this, but it’s a trait in you I’ve noticed quite a number of times, as you people have shown an offensive obsession with the time, with timetables, with minutes and hours and schedules and itineraries, and then without explanation, they don’t care anymore, they push aside the importance of time, and then eternity is something that makes sense to them again, and then back to timetables, the importance of being someplace at a certain time when nobody is waiting for you, and another train is leaving in half an hour anyway, but perhaps I’ll never understand because I’ve never gestated anything but diseases, and the only blood I ever anticipated with certainty concerned my wisdom teeth. So perhaps you have some frightening intrinsic connection to the clock, but god knows it’s offensive and superficial.

‘She does not understand,’ said Siegmund to himself. ‘And whatever I do I must not tell her. I should have thought she would understand.’

As he walked home beside her there mingled with his other feelings resentment against her. Almost he hated her.

–which aligns with something a line from chapter 31, when Helena is with her new boy-toy, Cecil, told from his perspective as Helena takes him through the exact spots she took Siegmund, exactly one year later:

He looked at her, wondering how much he was filling the place of a ghost with warmth. He thought of Siegmund, and seemed to see him swinging down the steep bank out of the wood exactly as he himself was doing at the moment, with Helena stepping carefully behind. He always felt a deep sympathy and kinship with Siegmund; sometimes he thought he hated Helena.

Chapter 20:

As Helena continues her flimsy companionship, sometimes overcome with senseless unexplained passions, like every time you’ve thrown yourself at me and then jumped away crying ‘no, I cannot, I cannot,’ only to wake me up hours later by flinging yourself at me again and pulling the same stunt, followed by a two hour rant about why Senator Clinton trumps Senator Obama any day of the week; let’s see how Siegmund fares:

She had a peculiar, childish wistfulness at times, and with this an intangible aloofness that pierced his heart. It seemed to him he should never know her. There was a remoteness about her, an estrangement between her and all natural daily things, as if she were of an unknown race that never can tell its own story. This feeling always moved Siegmund’s pity to its deepest, leaving him poignantly helpless. This same foreignness, revealed in other ways, sometimes made him hate her. It was as if she would sacrifice him rather than renounce her foreign birth. There was something in her he could never understand, so that never, never could he say he was master of her as she was of him the mistress.

Chapter 24:

Some rather nice lines:

“Her father’s quiet ‘H’m!’ her mother’s curt question, made her draw inwards like a snail which can never retreat far enough from condemning eyes. She made a careless pretence of eating. She was like a child which has done wrong, and will not be punished, but will be left with the humiliating smear of offence upon it.”

“The west opposite the door was smouldering with sunset. Darkness is only smoke that hangs suffocatingly over the low red heat of the sunken day. Such was Helena’s longed-for night.”

Chapter 25:

Siegmund dealing with his youngest child, after all his family has turned against him, his youngest daughter who conspicuously disappears after his suicide, a bit like Celia’s mysterious and unexplained lack of a single line in the entire final act of As You Like It, when she stands there dumbly as every difficulty is resolved. But seriously, isn’t this the truth? Dear children, the only ones who can see life as it is because they’re the only ones who can see life as it should be, and they’re only wrong because they discount all human constructs as being so false as they truly are.

He waited in a daze of suspense. The child shifted from one foot to another. He could just see the edge of her white-frilled drawers. He wanted, above all things, to take her in his arms, to have something against which to hide his face. Yet he was afraid. Often, when all the world was hostile, he had found her full of love, he had hidden his face against her, she had gone to sleep in his arms, she had been like a piece of apple-blossom in his arms. If she should come to him now—his heart halted again in suspense—he knew not what he would do. It would open, perhaps, the tumour of his sickness. He was quivering too fast with suspense to know what he feared, or wanted, or hoped.

Chapter 31:

The best evidence for why I should hide from you, right now, is during Helena’s discussion with Cecil:

‘More sorrow over one kitten brought to destruction than over all the sufferings of men,’ he said.

She glanced at him and laughed. He was smiling ironically.

‘For the latter, you see,’ she replied, ‘I am not responsible.’

Because although she sometimes loved Siegmund in all the right ways, even in his absence, she also has that peculiar chilliness about her, the separation of body and mind and life and morality and emotions. It’s all a lot of shit.

drama: Moliere: Tartuffe (1664)

Although I’m looking at Moliere through a translator, I haven’t been quite impressed by what I have read, which, I suppose is ignoring language altogether in favor of meaning. Tartuffe is a story of a prominent and wealthy man duped by a con-man, Tartuffe, who pretends to be excessively pious in such a way that is thorougly modern, considering the sorts of religious figures in Chaucer or even in Grapes of Wrath, in which the religion is the clothes one wears, this is entirely different because religion becomes Tartuffe’s very skin. Since those who term themselves non-denominational have grown to such prevalence in recent years, I only began studying religion because of such people who would ask me questions like, ‘yes, you read the bible, but did you READ it?’ So, I must relate one of the best examples of casuistry I’ve ever heard, which is only the finest example I know of a million others. I asked, ‘so…you said you’d never have sex again if he broke up with you…so, how is sleeping with all these guys possibly in line with the teachings of Jesus?’
‘Easy–I thought about it and I figured it out. You see, as a Christian I’m only supposed to sleep with the man I’m married to. And really, if you plan on marrying a guy it’s pretty much the same as if I’m already married to him, because my intentions are sincere. So, all I have to do is tell myself that this is the guy I’m going to marry, and it’s as if I’m already married to him, so that when I have sex with him it’s not against un-Christian of me.’
‘You know…finding loopholes in the bible is a bit dangerous.’
‘Why?’
‘Well…because you’re not going to outsmart god.’
‘It’s all right there in the bible.’
‘Well, that was very clever of you.’

This is how Tartuffe operates, convincing Orgon to sign over all his worldly possessions, force his daughter into marrying him, and giving him enough evidence to have him jailed as a traitor. With just a few pages to go, the king saves the day and the good are rewarded and the bad are punished. The emphasis everyone places on this play is over the criticism of religion–Moliere was nearly excommunicated over it, and the play was banned–over his depiction of a man falsely religious, whose religious logic makes sense for evil ends. And I don’t particularly care–the movie Saved does a better job of putting it together for me.

But there’s this question which isn’t entirely answered, being: how is it that Orgon can be so easily duped, and then so steadfast in believing in the goodness of Tartuffe, against all reason? Well, the answer is suggested in the introduction I read, too bad I didn’t come up with it on my own. In any case, nobody seems to discuss this one: Orgon is getting on in years, with a daughter on the verge of marriage, a young second wife for himself, and various spunky servants living with the family, and in his bitterness over his declining overall virility, his only answer is to force everyone else to lead the life time has doomed him to live, and his solution is found in Christianity and its ‘no fun allowed’ principles. While Tartuffe is exploiting Orgon for money and power, Orgon is exploiting Tartuffe as shackles over his family. This is all that gives him depth, and it takes Tartuffe’s near-rape of Orgon’s wife before Orgon is shaken out of bitterness. Orgon himself is never religious, but enamored by the religiosity of Tartuffe, and uses one for the substitute for the other.

Once a day I have a small ability to write, and this is not that once a day, because I just can’t convince myself to care right now!

George Michael vs. Beyonce

Let me preface this by saying that I’m a little bit in love with George Michael right now. I began voice lessons this week–what’s difficult about it all is the difference between ‘proper’ and what really works for me. For example, I’m learning to breathe through my nose. But I love the sound of in inhalations through one’s mouth–it’s a sexy sort of thing and I think ties in with the sounds of the mechanical aspects of the piano, of the fingers sliding against the guitar strings when changing positions, even the buzz of bass strings, I love things that remind us of the humanity behind the music, I mean, I often love mistakes, I love the way Miles Davis does something like ghost-notes in his mis-hitting notes that in anyone else would probably be a mistake, but with him and his classical background, we have to assume is intentional, or else we’re doubting his genius. Charlie Parker against the early Coltrane, both have their explosions, Coltrane even borrows suspiciously from Parker’s patterns, yet Coltrane seems somehow so precise, Parker seems almost racing himself with his head turned to see if he’s still in the lead, and when he stumbles, he really fucking stumbles (listen to Chi-Chi take 3, when they play the head at the end this is most apparent); I don’t know how I feel about Parker fucking up, the careless sound of it, is what I mean. I like dirt, but I like it to be dirty precisely where one is expecting it to be dirty, like that post-sex-day-in-bed sort of feeling, you’re simply covered in everything you’d expect to be covered in, regardless of how the performance went, and it’s delightful, and it’s that which makes Brandenberg Concerto no. 2 difficult to listen to while naked, and James Gang’s ‘Funk #49’ something that makes it difficult, at the very least, to keep one’s shirt on. I love these noises. But now I’m being asked to stop making them. Listen to Head Automatica’s ‘Beating Hearts Baby’ and you’ll hear they even dub these inhalations in to make them better. But…I want to sing like George Michael. I’m officially a high tenor. James Taylor is a tenor. I already knew I could sing anything James Taylor could, that at all times I can hit every note on a full three octaves, and on occassion, more than that. I love you, George Michael, I love you. But…there’s this one thing about you that bothers me:

On ‘Wake Me Up’ he jumps the word ‘up’ fairly consistently, sometimes worse than others. I don’t know if it’s intentional. Being ‘in the pocket’ is somehow very important in music, which means being a little behind the beat, perhaps it indicates a self-assurance, like crossing the street without looking, but George Michael is so far out of the pocket that it hurts my ears. In comparison, there’s Beyonce’s ‘Crazy in Love’ which at first I believed had a chorus in which she was simply off beat, or that someone had lined it up wrong. I don’t know if I can contribute the serious in-the-pocketness to her own vocal chops or if it’s just somebody moving everything over a little to the right on the computer. But I don’t care. One of them has something that screams out sex to me, even if it’s some dumb lyrics about being in love; the other one is about…well, being sad about not going dancing, and this is the guy who more or less brought rap to England, or made rap British, or something like that. I just don’t know if I can deal with it much longer without rationalizing it, and I’m trying really fucking hard.

And I finished something by Moliere today so I haven’t only been dicking around, I’ve also been reading a little bit. So fuck off.

Lily Allen – It’s Not Me, It’s You

Some days are easier than others, this past week has been the easiest so far.

Michael and I are in hell trying to to find something in the music world that we can really obsess over for more than a few weeks. I spent nearly three months all about the Strokes, replaced them with Nerina Pallot, then Sia, and lately have been listening to the same two tracks by Mylene Farmer and Lorie (I know, I know, I know) and otherwise have been memorizing Paul Desmond solos. And then I finally got my hands on this one. The first time I heard Lily Allen I nearly died, back in 2006 on MySpace, I couldn’t believe anything could be so wonderful. I got over it, I can’t even remember her first singles anymore…but I know they got tiresome, predictable, a little empty. Not this.

First, I’m a big fan of Bird and the Bee, but Lily Allen has something honest about her that is generally unheard of, because her idea of romance is about as real as it gets. Love isn’t really much more than television, boring conversations, traffic jams, shitty food, napping alone… but it’s kinda wonderful. Half the songs on this album don’t do it for me, the lyrics are the same as on the first album, the tunes don’t seem to have much love put into them. The other half are some of the most brilliant, optimistic, beautiful things I’ve ever known. And her voice, her voice has matured, it has such nuance, even in a single line she evokes so much of what I believe in. She helps me to believe in love.

And today I need it.

film: Resnais: Night and Fog (1955)

When it comes to this subject I’m not sure anyone can really say much of anything now. I find myself smeared with the same confusion that I face on a thousand other subjects, when some fact very obvious to me is left to wander away from truth and is entirely out of my control, that’s careers, that’s money, that’s fondness, that’s love, that’s fear, that’s my favorite recording of Ella Fitzgerald doing ‘How High the Moon’ being cheered on by thousands of ex-Nazis. But, I suppose I’d never actually seen the skin of human beings used for paper, nor their hair turned into cloth, nor their bodies bulldozed, nor baskets of their gawking heads, nor the footage of the people in the cattle-cars waving goodbye and helping the officers shut the doors, and I continually wonder why it is that nobody dares to address the situations that still occur throughout the world, I hear them on the news daily, as we send out warnings and all Africa says ‘please, just leave us alone, we’ve got it under control, really.’