HOW THE WEST WAS ONE, 3

Finally this brings me to the two Westerns paired last Friday at the WHC: My Darling Clementine and Paris, Texas, films separated by more than 40 years of film-making, with a difference of style and substance obvious enough to make clear that the way in which they are comparable has to do with an almost archetypal sense of the hero as a figure committed to a change of the status quo. His is an intervention made necessary by circumstances; though how that intervention plays out has not much in common, there is a noticeable kinship in the films’ iconic structure: hero emerges from the wasteland, rights certain wrongs, rides off into the distance, in both cases leaving behind a woman.

In Clementine there is a promise to return; in Paris, no such expectation – and that can be said to be a major difference in the two men and their respective situations as heroes. Henry Fonda, as Wyatt Earp, gives us a tense, knowing hero, a man committed to his own vision of what is right – which means not only that he will avenge his brothers’ deaths, but will also do right by the town, Tombstone, to the best of his ability. He’s a lawman in that self-reliant and carefully modulated way that inspires respect. His courtship of Clementine (Cathy Downs), who comes to Tombstone in search of Doc Holliday (Victor Mature), boasts the kind of restraint generally found among knights enacting a code of chivalry as a self-effacing version of heroism – something almost wholly missing amidst the show-boating, wise-cracking heroes to which we’ve become accustomed, from Harrison Ford to Bruce Willis to the various Bonds and whoever else is generally cast as a good guy taking arms against a sea of troubles and threats.

What’s amusing is that Harry Dean Stanton’s Travis Henderson in Paris is cut from that same “strong, silent type” mold, only moreso. If Henry “yup” Fonda is laconic, Stanton is literally mute in the film’s early going. Even after he starts talking again, his voice is low, dispassionate, firm but not deep or assertive. In fact what most impresses as masculine in his character is his willingness to play the fool, if necessary, to get the attention, and eventually allegiance, of his estranged son, Hunter, a young boy who has grown to about 8 or 9 without knowing his father. Stanton manages something that most of our loner, badass heroes rarely manage: a camaraderie with a child. In the John Wayne Westerns I spoke of earlier, we see much of the generational clash – the older man’s testing of the younger man, the younger man’s bid for respect. But to see the father figure working for the son’s respect and acceptance is in many ways truer to the times we’ve lived through since, not simply in the proliferation of “dead beat dads,” but in the sense of an older generation that “went off the rails,” so to speak – if not literally wandering in the desert like Travis, then at least wandering spiritually away from the kind of fixity and secure fortunes that “the West” has always cast doubt upon, from the time of the settling of its wildness, to the Gold Rush, to the Siren Song of Hollywood (“any mechanic can be a panic”) to the era, perhaps still not wholly eclipsed, of its “get here and we’ll do the rest” come-on to the nomadic drop-out subculture of the 60s and 70s. To emerge from four years of wandering in a 1984 film is to say that the 70s are over . . .

But, to return to the topic I began this trilogy of comments with, what of the relation of these men, however heroic their status or mundane their comportment, to their women? Fonda’s Earp is a romantic hero in the sense of one who knows “the real thing” when he sees it: he never doubts his feelings for Clementine, even though she is at first fixated on the fickle and ailing Doc. But the book-ends of Earp’s revenge play against the callous rancher Old Man Clanton (Walter Brennan) and his courtship of Clementine is a period with his brothers in the wilderness as cattle-drivers, and a return to the wilderness to bear the tidings of the family’s loss to their father. In other words, his trajectory is a bit Biblical and, if God’s in his heaven, Earp’s path will lead him back to his true love. But it may be that untold adventures await and the settling down – the accepted union that is clearly prepared for Matt Garth in Red River or for Martin Pawley in The Searchers – could be denied indefinitely. Earp, in other words, is still a man with a mission, and “woman” is perhaps a prize at the end of one’s necessary tasks, a goal or object for the end of action, not a cause of action.

It’s hard to imagine what Travis’ mission is once he has brought his son and his missing former wife together again. There are ways, no doubt, to read him as a symbolic figure of fate, a way of saying that the time is up on this unnatural sundering of mother and child and only a dogged hero, obeying convictions born during his sojourn in the desert, can effect that change. But the film also gives us elements that work against this romantic heroism: the settled and unremarkable family life in which Hunter lives with Travis’ brother and his wife – the disruption of this world is clearly for the sake of something, but what that is the film doesn’t really help us recognize. It’s Travis’ conviction that his son and the boy’s mother should be reunited, but it was Jane (Natassia Kinski) who surrendered the boy to her in-laws, and, though she sends them money for Hunter, she keeps her distance (in Houston, while the boy lives in Los Angeles).

In other words, playwright Sam Shepard’s script gives us a situation where, for some reason never made clear, only a male, paternalistic solution is possible. And we also have no basis for understanding why Jane and Hunter can live together happily ever after now, but couldn’t before Travis returned, only to leave again. We have to accept, in old archetypal Western fashion, that women and children and ineffectual common folk (like Travis’ brother, played by Dean Stockwell) can’t overcome their own inertia and lack of grit. We can almost hear them mutter “who was that masked man” as Travis rides off in his beat-up truck-bed Caddy. Much as I admire the film and Travis’ long monologue to Jane on a phone, separated from her by a one-way glass, I’m always brought up short by the script’s inability or unwillingness (for it amounts to the same thing) to imagine a role for Kinski. She listens mutely and accepting to the version of their history that Travis describes, but what her life was or is now is left to hang as though, at some profound level, she needed only to be given meaning again by Travis’ intervention.

Which is to say that, in the 40 years between My Darling Clementine and Paris, Texas, the West can become a state of mind a man carries within him, but it borders on a self-fulfillment fantasy – one that Hollywood films will continue to try to sell in various forms and occasionally interrogate (Clint Eastwood’s The Unforgiven, 1992) – that leads, perhaps inevitably, to a “sins of the father” struggle in which the foundational crime – as Prof. Pippin emphasized in his discussion of Red River and Tom’s departure from the wagon train and the woman who loves him – is leaving the women out.

HOW THE WEST WAS ONE, 2

The point, as I see it, is that the West as Hollywood gives it to us is forever caught up with the iconic images of its heroes. And that fact is the theme of The Assassination of Jesse James. For this study of male bonding and rivalry finds its focus in what was always an underlying assumption of the Hollywood Western: that the fame of the Old West -- for figures such as Jesse James, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Billy the Kid, and so on -- extends in an unbroken line to the fame of Western film stars such as Tom Mix, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood. In other words, the myth of the West is perpetuated in Hollywood as its own birthright, and only rarely does the story of "how the West was won" extend to a consideration of "how the West was one": in the sense of always male and always about fame and proving oneself -- for a woman sometimes, but mainly to and for other men.

I would've liked to attend the screening of and Prof. Pippin's lecture on The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance because I'm sure the film would have offered interesting points of comparison to The Assassination -- because both are concerned with actual legendary killings. But I'm pretty sure (I need to see The Man again to test this) that the Wayne persona again places a certain whimsy at the heart of the tale. The Assassination limits -- to its strength -- that comradely ribbing that inhabits every Wayne Western: Jesse (Brad Pitt) is a loner, essentially, though he always works with a gang, but that gang, though indulging in "the band of brothers" mentality when it suits, is always uneasy with their role as his henchmen and, like any "band of thieves," is always ready to look squarely at the advantage to be found in betrayal.

The complexity of the tale comes in the character of Robert Ford (Casey Affleck) who is infatuated with Jesse, not so much as a man, but as a living legend, as the stuff of which his own dreams of glory is made. We're clearly away from the Oedipal struggle, or the struggle of Abraham and Isaac, or even the struggle of Cain and Abel and into the realm of Jesus and Judas, but the film doesn't make that comparison overly explicit, if only because Jesse, whether as family man or outlaw, is never perceived by anyone but Ford as a mythic being. Rather than Biblical archetypes, the film is more firmly rooted in American betrayals: in Ford's expectation that he would be canonized for his killing of the outlaw we hear echoes of how John Wilkes Booth expected a hero's welcome in the South for the killing of Lincoln, and in the public killing of Ford by a man who simply took it upon himself to do it, there is a forerunner of Jack Ruby, the assassin of another famous assassin.

Suffice to say that what makes The Assassination interesting -- besides its stately pace, highly literate voice-over narration, and finely nuanced performance by Affleck in a role he perfectly suits -- is the sense that the male world of the West is ultimately about a relation to history, to fable, to the tales we tell of the men in a man's world who make a difference, who seize the moment. Freed of the sentimental attachment to camaraderie that infuses the world of Wayne and Ward Bond, or Wayne and Walter Brennan, The Assassination is a more somber affair in which there really isn't anyone to like or to root for.

Such a notion of the Western was anathema to Ford and Hawks and Wayne and Eastwood and its lesser practitioners, but for that very reason the film is refreshing. It would be easy to imagine a Western à la George Clooney's Ocean films with the usual banter among guys being cute and cut-throat by turns, as the situation demands, but The Assassination is not after our entertaining sense of the Old West and of Hollywood as mutually supportive myths, it's after that darker side of American celebrity where the Booths and Oswalds and Mark David Chapmans reside, waiting to burst into history for committing the unthinkable act of vengeance against their own obscurity by bringing down the fortunate son, the maker of history, to make of the born leader the dead martyr. Ford, unlike those other assassins, does become his victim's friend and companion and, Judas-like, most deliberate "follower," but etched on his face at every moment is "the coward"'s ambition -- to overcome his status as a non-entity by, first, recognition from his hero and then, when it becomes clear that the hero -- a remorseless murderer when his designs require it -- will soon do away with Ford and his brother, by putting on the mantle of fame as "the man" who ended the life behind the fabled name.

Given that the Oscars just aired last night and that there seems a general consensus, voiced perhaps most emphatically by David Carr in the NYTimes, that the films nominated were somber and lacking in the charms generally associated with blockbuster Hollywood, it might be worth remarking that The Assassination, as a Western, doesn't do what is expected, and that may be true of a number of the films this year. So perhaps there has been recently an eclipse of what Hollywood is best noted for: on the one hand its willingness to be mawkish and bathetic in grand tear-jerker style, on the other its gusto for smart-alecky, winking insouciance. Banter of any sort was almost entirely missing from the dramas nominated for Best Picture, and banter was all Juno had to offer. The writers had been on strike till recently and film-making came to a stop, but it seems that a certain kind of film-making, Tinseltown's most identifiable product, has ceased for want of writers equal to the task. After all, it may be hard to use the tried-and-true methods to tell "how the west was lost."

HOW THE WEST WAS ONE

The West is a manly place, that's the conclusion I've come to after watching this week several different kinds of Westerns made in different eras -- two by John Ford: My Darling Clementine (1946) and The Searchers (1956), one -- Paris, Texas (1984) -- by the German director Wim Wenders, set in the '80s, and one from last year: made by Andrew Dominick, an Australian director, it's the film of a novel on the relationship between two famous figures of the Old West: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. To this list, I'll add Howard Hawks' Big River (1948), which was featured in the first Castle lecture last Monday given by Robert B. Pippin of University of Chicago on that film's theme of male rivalry -- seemingly Oedipal, in this case -- and of the male bonds that constitute the construction of the West, bonds which seem to be the point of the entire conception of the West as cinema gives it to us, with women not so much a prize as an afterthought, nor so much an afterthought as a conceptual reference point -- something implied, even by absence, rather than present; something sought, rather than kept; something valued, if largely avoided.

In Pippin's discussion, the relation between Tom Dunson (John Wayne) and Matt Garth (Monty Clift) in Red River set up a generational struggle which is unusual for the fact that it transpires entirely in a male world -- there is no mother at stake as in the traditional Oedipal story. Matt, a foundling, manages to claim his "birthright" from patriarch Dunson after a struggle that is not to the death, as the film threatens, but is instead broken up by Matt's future wife who threatens them with a gun and sobs "you both love each other, anyone can see that." It's not only that the scene is hokey, badly acted (by Colleen Gray), and a happy Hollywood ending, it's also that it conforms to the Wayne persona of irascible maleness: first hard-hearted, then nearly a half-mad, wrathful Ahab figure, finally a loveable old coot. The story Pippin wants the film to tell is the film before it reverts to Wayne-schtick with Clift as wonderstruck sidekick (he reminded me of Owen Wilson at the end).

John Wayne, as a star, can't be made to conform to what the story requires -- this is again the case in The Searchers, which was screened after the lecture, where Wayne's character, Ethan Edwards, is a driven man with a definite task: to avenge the death of his relatives at the hands of Comanche, but also to kill his niece Debbie (Natalie Wood) when he learns that she has become a Comanche squaw. In other words, the female role -- as in traditional tribal cultures -- is a means of exchange. If a woman is taken forcibly and "converted" to another race's ways, then she doesn't deserve to live. This is the ethical code of Ethan -- but not the code of John Wayne, who embraces the girl at the end after she has agreed to be rescued by Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), her adopted brother, a halfbreed who antagonizes Ethan by tagging along but who also gets his "birthright" when Ethan bequeaths all his possessions to him.

In both films, the strong male figure, a maverick played by Wayne, softens toward the handsome young ephebe and eventually blesses him. In Red River, he also is impressed by a woman's love for Matt; in The Searchers, his niece is at first vilified then accepted, and much of the humor of the film is the romantic interest of the not-so-patiently waiting Laurie (a young and plucky Vera Miles) who gets to be the object of a brawl between her suitors. But the film's close is the return of Debbie to the homestead, not the successful courtship. The strength of Miles' pioneer woman -- passionate and focused -- is a good foil to the dogged, "aw shucks" persona of Martin, but the film is never really a story of settling down. It's a male movie that treats the fortunes of frontier lovers as comic relief and finds in woman the traditional status of victim, then damsel in distress, then returned prodigal -- only briefly is the possibility of Debbie as a brave new harbinger of an inter-racial America glanced at, and the film's myopia toward the Native Americans is possibly most overt in the comic and then tragic figure of "Look," the Indian squaw who attaches herself to Martin and is eventually killed in a raid by white rangers.

I dislike finding myself in the position of offering those tired standards of "the other" -- race and gender -- as positions from which to condemn the white male ethic of these movies, and I think both movies do more than simply perpetuate assumptions about how people who aren't upstanding white men deserve to be treated (in The Searchers the only other enemy besides the Indians is the Jew Futterman who tries to double-cross Ethan), they also give us a view of the West as the province of a certain kind of male ethic that -- in each film -- has something to learn. But the reason, I feel, that the viewer doesn't learn as well is that both films play the hand dealt by the John Wayne Old West Machine: the necessity of the "let bygones be bygones" ending that both Red River and The Searchers indulge so as to allow Wayne to keep his n'er do wrong persona intact, instead of confronting the viewer with the hard fact of the sins of the fathers in their intransigent claim to authority, racial purity, white right, and freedom from petticoat government.

Enough for now. As Ethan would say, "put an Amen to it!" To be continued...

MY GOD, iPOD

It's been over a year since I first received an iPod and I can attest to its influence on my life. I walk a fair amount, even if it's only the well-trodden and not very varied streets that lead into town, and the existence of this lightweight means of trucking a substantial collection of music with me on any given walk has cut considerably into the boredom factor. It's 20-25 minutes on foot from my house to the library area of campus and that makes for a good stretch of the legs and a good stretch of listening. Fun are the times when I'm not walking into town for any particular reason and can immediately turn around and head back, by a slightly different route, without ever breaking stride or stopping the music.

Choice of music has always been a big part of my day anyway. Though usually it's only the choice of what will constitute "background" as I work at my desk. I use the term "background" advisedly -- it would be better to say "what will constitute surroundings," but that might seem an odd idea. Sure, the music is used to drown out any distracting sounds which might annoy me (it doesn't always work, and I live in an area that is, for the most part, remarkably quiet -- or rather it's worth remarking when it isn't quiet), but, more to the point, it's to form a kind of protective mental cocoon of familiar ambience. And I've noticed that the iPod -- thanks to those odd little things called mp3s -- has started to influence the ambience, as it were.

Time was, arranging songs for the purposes of playback was a regular creative activity. I have mix tapes that go back to Feb. 1978 -- 30 years ago this month, it just now occurs to me -- when I first acquired a Teac tape deck and set about to put together collections of songs for nocturnal drives. My neighborhood to Philadelphia was about an hour in those days, and music while covering distance was de rigueur. Eventually, round about that fabled summer of '78, the tapes started to appear autobiographical to their maker, a conceit that I more or less indulged for the next 21 years, till, in the summer of '99 and my 40th birthday, I brought "the saga" to an end. But didn't stop making tapes. By then my tape-making had gone well-beyond my own "story" to include a steady series for my younger brothers and another for my daughter. The tape-making addiction couldn't be satisfied by the exigencies of making tapes for my own listening, since those required a certain "tell it like it is" mentality in picking songs. Tapes for others could be motivated by simply wanting to give someone else certain tunes, but even so, surprising associative packages were sometimes created, 45 minutes -- generally 11 songs -- per side.

I was satisfied with that format. I liked having two "openings" and two "endings," just like the A and B side of "long-playing" (ha!) albums, of roughly 20 minutes a side. Fact was, the brevity of the vinyl LPs made tape-making seem so spacious and "epic" in its sweep. All that was to change with CDs which often were upwards of 60 minutes in length. Couldn't fit on a 45 min. tape side, and thus began the decline in the fortunes of tape. Soon (enough) it was possible to just burn copies of CDs, no need to tape them. But that fact didn't help the tape-making addict -- because burning playlists has precious little in common with the joys of taping a selection of songs, DJ like, in a little performative burst which -- no matter how long it actually takes -- amount to 90-minute movies for your ears. A goodly length, indeed.

My daughter -- who by the time I ended the "saga" was also a fairly dedicated tape-maker, being (I'm proud to say), the only person I've been able to involve regularly in tape trade-offs with me (Some people play chess or backgammon together. We make tapes.) -- was amused by my alteration of the title of Radiohead's landmark CD, Ok, Computer to "Screw U, Computer." Because there's no telling how many discs refused for some reason or other to be burned, or to be ripped, or whatever. And there's no telling how many times the wrong "click" has undone what had been done, or selected what was not meant to be selected. I have enjoyed cracking CDs in half. I have deposited offending discs in my garbage can beneath heaps of coffee grounds with a kind of savage glee. I have pummeled chair cushions rather than stick my fist through the monitor, or, "do like Elvis did and shoot the damn thing out." The monitor is not to blame, surely. But it is vulnerable. Though I do admit to the occasional fantasy of watching -- in slow motion playback -- what a shotgun blast would do to the hard-drive.

All of which is to say that I was the type who would resist iPod. My daughter still doesn't have one, so close does the acorn sometimes drop. But ol' Dad has joined the 21st century because he managed to outlast the 20th with (maybe) about the same amount of years in each, so what the fuck. And mirabile dictu, the length of playlists on iPod are limited only by one's patience in compiling them. My patience so far hasn't extended to trying to tamper with recording levels -- which used to be fairly hands-on in the old magnetic tape days when Nakamichis walked the earth, younglings -- and so I don't feel I have the utter carte blanche freedom tape-making gave -- O for the days when even tape-to-tape duping via Nakamichi and his lesser cousin Yamaha was not only manipulable but resulted in precious little drop in quality to the listening human ear. But the listening ear has grown accustomed to digital sound, just as its owner has grown to accept that the versions of things as provided by computers -- images, information, relationships -- are, if lacking in roundedness and sensuality, here to stay, at least until some "crash" moment not yet to be foreseen.

Which is also to say that the computer, which puts music on my iPod, also lets me compile mp3s on disc which, like the one I'm hearing as I write this, can stretch for nearly 10 hours. This disc is for my god-daughter and charts lots of music from the '80s which she missed out on by not being born till '89. And -- I won't detail the bursts of foul epithets that could be heard while I tried to get my blythe laptop and its minion iTunes to do what I wanted them to do -- while playing it back I had occasion to think what this format indicates:

First of all, when writing I sometimes found that even a 5 disc changer annoyed me by ending when I wanted it to keep going. And the iPod playlists I've made rarely go beyond 2-3 hours, occasionally 4, which is to say, they're generally shorter than 5 CDs played in succession. But mp3 discs can create a surround for all the hours of the day. Continuous. Which might bode well for that next writing project, given that my writing projects, grace à l'ordinateur, tend to just go on endlessly in virtual, computer-constituted reality. Of course, because I refuse to let Ms IBM be my music source (even though it's filling that role today), I'd have to invest in a mp3-playing CD player...

Second of all, think of the ten hour drive or ten hour train-ride or ten hour plane-flight, or even ten hour hike . . .

As the people here grow colder
I turn to my computer
And spend my evenings with it
Like a friend.
--Kate Bush, "Deeper Understanding" (1989)

IL Y A ILYA

Late in January, the young Russian poet Ilya Kaminsky gave a reading at Yale from his book Dancing in Odessa (2004), which I’ve subsequently read. The poems are written in English, Kaminsky’s adopted language, study of which he began in 1993 after coming to America. To hear Kaminsky read the poems aloud is to hear the English language treated in a manner that is a bit disconcerting, but which is also a bit intoxicating. It’s not only Kaminsky’s strong accent that distorts the sound of the English words as he speaks them, there’s also the fact that he chants his words with a musical intonation so that every line of every poem is almost sung, almost wept. It is a sound I associate with prayers in Hebrew and Kaminsky is Jewish, so perhaps that is the real source of his spoken cadence. I say spoken because, on the page, the words don’t strike me with the same worked-up passion of his delivery. What comes across on the page that gets lost in his vocal presentation is a spirit much more unassuming, gentle, folksy, less emotional, but full of what Milan Kundera calls “the unbearable lightness of being” – which I take to mean a way of bearing witness to what is so haplessly ephemeral in our lives, so fleeting because so much a part of other times now gone.

In Kaminsky’s volume some of those times now gone are the times of distinct figures – poetic forebears – whose memory and music and lightness have become a part of Kaminsky’s own poetic stance. The long poem evoking the life and times of Osip Mandelstam, for instance, rings with a lived imagining that goes beyond simple tribute or evocation. Mandelstam lives in the poem as a persona of himself and as a voice for Kaminsky.

Now, memory, pour some beer,
salt the rim of the glass; you
who are writing me, have what you want:
a golden coin, my tongue to put it under.
(“Musica Humana,” an elegy for Osip Mandelstam)

Which is to say that Kaminsky is able to inhabit with his verses poetic personae that are versions of himself as much as they are comments on other writers, such as Paul Celan, Joseph Brodsky, Isaac Babel. It’s an enviable gift to be able to open one’s poems to give voice to a relation to another poet that speaks the poet rather than simply speaking about the poet.

I tried to imitate you for two years. It feels like burning
and singing about burning. I stand
as if someone spat at me.
(“Elegy for Joseph Brodsky”)

Kaminsky’s stance toward other poets, and his self-effacing evocations of them, works I think because Kaminsky is at heart an ecstatic and poetry as he practices it is a form of prayer, of prayer conceived as praise: “Lord, give us what you have already given” is the closing line of “Envoi,” a poem about the sea-change of exchanging Russian for American verse, but also a poem of blessing, of thanks for the gift of poetic sensibility.

There are five sections: in the first, “Dancing in Odessa,” the poems mainly recreate, in at times surrealist fashion (Marc Chagall immediately comes to mind -- particularly with that pony on the balcony), family life and history in the poet’s native land; the second is the elegy for Mandelstam; the third, “Natalia,” chronicles a love affair; the fourth, “Traveling Musicians,” consists of poems about other poets; the fifth, “Praise,” is a five page poem that comes closest to a sustained ecstasy of invention.

Love, a one-legged bird
I bought for forty cents as a child, and released,

is coming back, my soul in reckless feathers.
O the language of birds

with no word of complaint!--
the balconies, the wind.

Kaminsky’s poetry contains celebratory joy even in the midst of dire scenes such as Mandelstam’s arrest and persecution in Soviet Russia; the imagery is always fresh with the kind of direct but fanciful choices I associate with Russian poetry I’ve read in translation, but also post-symbolist French and Italian and Spanish poetry, which is to say that his work is refreshingly spare and passionate, at times whimsical. And which is to say that though this is English language poetry it feels European, even when Kaminsky writes what are clearly intended as American poems. It will be interesting to see how this develops in his subsequent verse: will his poetry become more noticeably American, not simply in terms of American place names, subjects and objects, but in terms of the positioning of a voice and a self that throws off the borrowed robes of his forebears and the land of his fathers?

I was born in the city named after Odysseus
and I praise no nation –
(“Praise”)

THE OPPRESSION OF OBJECTS

This week the assignments in Daily Themes ask students to write about objects in a variety of ways. None of the assignments require the consideration of how things oppress us, but that was my pointed little reflection this morning as I made coffee. My thoughts might have been inspired by DT, but more likely it had something to do with a certain "morning after" flavor to the start of the day. Not that Friday night was hot and wild, but I will admit to feeling no pain -- well, more or less -- thanks to a nice perky Chilean red I drank more of than was strictly necessary as dinner libation.

No matter. It felt good. But then in the morning came that perhaps inevitably jaundiced appraisal of the things around me. It's not that the things I own are so tired and threadbare, cracked and old and over-used -- though no doubt some of them are -- it's that they carry with them "little stories": each thing leapt to my mind as though tagged with the story of its origin in my life, the time and place it came aboard, joined itself to the ongoing tale of my life, bringing its note of newness long since faded, long since gone mute. It's as if, standing in my kitchen, no matter where my eye fell there was some object which had seen service for far too many years -- and those years seemed to accrue for no other reason than to suggest how far I'd come in time but with so little to show.

If it were an animated movie, the objects might come to life and declaim, sing, exhort, rebuke. But no. They just sit there, oppressing me with their object-ness, their tiresome ability to be always the same (unless they break or get lost). They don't look upon me the way a pet might; they simply cause me to look upon myself, surrounded by the familiar, by repetition. It's not even that one desires to bring the known to an end -- though at times it would seem an amazing breath of fresh air -- so much as not to have to contemplate the "eras" that have interposed between the first use and umpteenth.

This seems a theme I'm prone to; more than once the feeling of our own ephemerality when faced with the resolute stability of objects has been a theme in my writing. It may be simply another facet of a morbid fascination with time, but what interests me in the familiarity of objects is how it makes one feel old, whereas the familiarity of a movie or a book or a record album makes one feel younger, or at least lively with the joy of whatever about it gave one joy in the first place. But objects? Maybe there are works of art one could have around, made things that inspire, and those would fulfill the function of those eternal things -- like songs and so forth -- but what about the everyday objects, not meant for contemplation, meant only for use, when one finds oneself contemplating them, and the story, full of implication, they tell of who we are and were?

Mama's in the factory
She ain't got no shoes
Daddy's in the alley
He's lookin' for food
And I'm in the kitchen
With the tombstone blues.--Bob Dylan, "Tombstone Blues" (1965)

POST-"EUROPE" EUROPE

I finally made it through Postwar (2005), Tony Judt's massive history of Europe since 1945, a reading experience that was worthwhile if only as an antidote to the US-centric reading I've been doing, more or less since graduate school, with the occasional foray into British authors of the early 20th century or of the former British Commonwealth countries. And Judt differs from something like Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Extremes, A History of the World 1914-1991 (1996) in his focus only on Europe and in chronicling the world bequeathed to us by a) the agreements and disagreements at the close of World War II, b) the fall of the Soviet Union, c) the increasingly inclusive and economically significant European Union.

The latter tale is rather boring -- a story of markets more than politics or culture -- but gives to the later chapters of the book something that could almost be called a thesis. Namely, that "Europe" as you learned of it in school, if you were in school at any point during the Cold War, is not that Europe any more. The reason being that, for the years from 1945 to 1989, Europe was a territory uneasily situated between the opposing powers of the United Soviet states and the United States, with their plucky sidekick Britain, and that a new consciousness of what Europe is will become clearer the further we move from that period which comprised the impressionable years of the baby boomers and their first wave of children. Judt does give us ground for saying "après ils, le déluge" -- where "le déluge" is conceived as a certain coarsening of the sensibilities of an older European culture, a certain homogenization caused by "everyone" desiring a certain kind of living standard with access to the most desired features of contemporary life, a certain loss of historical specificity as an entire generation ignores history in favor of "EuroCult for Eurotrash."

Judt pulls back from this thesis of EuroCult über alles in his Epilogue, "The House of the Dead," which argues (and it's one of the few parts of the book where one is met with something that feels argued rather than simply stated or asserted) that what binds Europe is its guilt over the fate of the Jews of World War II. It's a claim that seems already anachronistic once one has read of the trends of contemporary Europe -- trends which could be said to make the kind of history that Judt's book perpetuates, and argues for in the epilogue, irrelevant. So the question is brought before us, in part by the juxtaposition itself: is history ever irrelevant? Is there a necessity in the 21st century that the crimes and horrors and displacements and spying and betrayals and purges and suppressions and executions and mass deaths of the 20th century be remembered, be acknowledged, be assumed as a mantel of the past that can never be forgotten or forgiven?

The answer to this would be an easily voiced and resounding "yes" were it not for a certain restless skepticism intruded through the logic of an historical account that finds no meaning in history, that has no thesis for what events mean. Judt mourns not at all the passing of the Marxist-Soviet claims for historical necessity, and rightly so, but with the "end of ideology" that he seems more or less to embrace, there is also a loss of any opposition to "the West." With the loss of Soviet socialism, the West has no purpose whatsoever, no ideology other than making things to give some people something to do and other people something to buy and others something to put money into.

The story of the fall of the Soviet Union and the almost comical repetition of the stages each of its satellites went through as it acquired autonomy is interesting, as history, and part of the fascination of the tale is how an idea whose time had come became an idea whose time was up. But during the decades it took to move from one to the other, the "idea" was a critique of the West and also a cautionary tale. In other words, with the fall of the Socialist state went all the abstract accounts of history, and all we are left with is countries -- territories housing various populations -- that were managed either better or worse, that were more oppressive or less, that were more or less easily "converted" to capitalism and its noble cousin democracy. Thus another interesting tale that Judt tells -- the wars among the different political, ethnic and religious populations and fledgling states of the former Yugoslavia -- makes sense as the vexed tale of our own Civil War makes sense, as violence undertaken to refuse control by a power seen as inimical, but what's also clear is that, except among the participants, the historical meaning of the bloodshed is lost, becomes rather -- in the case of the Serbian wars -- a cause for intervention because war itself is out of step, out of keeping with the current state of the post-Soviet world.

But without a compelling argument for what history means -- other than things that happened in a certain place at a certain time to certain people -- or for what the world should be -- other than people living in different places at the same time getting along with one another -- what Germany did to its Jews or what the Soviets did to their dissidents can make no claim to be definitive, to be "an identity," to be anything other than a fact about the '40s -- a period that I doubt anyone reading these words had any direct experience of. That world is gone and to uphold it as meaningful is to make an argument -- the way one could once say the October Revolution is meaningful, the way the US likes to claim the Revolutionary War and the Civil War are meaningful as the groundwork of this most perfect union which continues to endure. But the Third Reich did not endure, neither did the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and why then should anyone claim the long delusions they espoused as formative, as, in this uncanny "House of the Dead" way, necessary?

Oh, but every time I look at you
I feel so low I don't know what to do
Well, every day just seems to bring bad news
Leaves me here with the post-World War II blues.
--Al Stewart, "The Post-World War II Blues" (1973)

RIVETING RIVETTE

From a literary work that can be read in about four hours, let's turn to a film that takes about four hours to view: Jacques Rivette's L'amour fou (1969) which the WHC screened a week ago. Watching the film is an interesting experience if only because anything you do for four hours at a stretch is bound to create a certain kind of self-awareness.

The film's naturalism is relentless, an almost documentary-like insistence on what "really" happens. This is particularly the case in the 16mm footage from a camera crew filming the rehearsals for a rather offhand, method-acted version of Racine's Andromaque. That idea alone is sufficiently daunting (at one point Sébastien, the play's director and the film's principle protagonist, muses that the actors are learning to speak the alexandrines as though they aren't alexandrines -- and it's true: the lines from the play rarely sound like Racine) to make the rehearsals somewhat interesting. Also, however it's managed by Rivette, the rehearsals feel like real rehearsals, not so much due to the acting of the actors in the play (who really aren't very good at being on stage), but because of Jean-Pierre Kalfon (Sébastien) who enacts so artlessly the role of director -- a director who, we feel, is only finding his footing by watching the rehearsals unfold. In fact, at various times he loses his footing -- the rehearsals limp along with no definitive readings or scenes taking place -- but Kalfon remains engaging because he seems so dedicated to an idea of performance that his cast is only groping toward.

Set against this process of possible discovery is Sébastien's loss of his wife Claire (Bulle Ogier) who is first engaged to play the part of Hermione. She quits the play and remains for a time as a kind of muse to her director husband, but when Marta, a former girlfriend, is contacted to play the role she has abdicated, the strain on the relationship of the couple becomes progressively more manifest.

What's particularly interesting is the way that this gradual dissolution of the couple plays itself out -- it begins to become dramatically more significant than the play towards the end of the first two hours, with Claire becoming somewhat amusingly flighty and moody (as for instance in her sudden effort to procure a certain kind of dog admired by her husband because its sad face reminds him of her), and with Sébastien attempting, in his sweetly diffident way, to work his charm on Marta. After the intermission, the stress of Claire's depression begins to take its toll on Sébastien -- without his knowing it, she impulsively contacts a former friend and has uninspired sex with him simply to be unfaithful to her husband. The tensions in their married life are presented with a kind of naked and deliberate absorption, but without any of the melodrama that most tales of marital strife wallow in. Rivette is able to register with amazing fidelity the simple, deliberate torture of two people living together when they've ceased to have any common ground -- in desire, affection, interests -- to reference together.

But the great triumph of the film is in the scenes in which Sébastien and Claire reunite -- Sébastien calls his assistant at the theater and says he'll be away for a few days, when instead he and Claire take to their bedroom and let themselves go in childlike abandonment to sex and high-spirited silliness -- drawing all over each other and the bedroom wallpaper, breaking through a door separating their bedroom and living-room, redecorating the latter as a kind of seraglio -- that lets us glimpse for the first time what the couple might have been like to begin with (when we first meet them the problem of the play and with Claire's decision to quit is already present).

What has emerged by the time we reach their orgy of togetherness is a sense of Sébastien having to grow by trying his ideas on the play, and of Claire trying to find a way to compete with his dedication to the rehearsals, or a way to replace his importance in her life. In other words, she seems a woman driven by a kind of gnawing resentment -- of the cast, of her husband's involvement, of his former girlfriend -- who places herself "on stage" within the couple's domestic space, providing cues and situations that Sébastien is expected to read and respond to. When he is unresponsive, she retaliates by going him one better till she seems nothing but a blank and silent mannequin in his presence. Then comes the revelation of joy and humor of the two together -- which ends with Claire's final withdrawal and, after her departure, Sébastien's inability to continue with the play. The drama of their lives -- "l'amour fou" between them is effectively portrayed, riveting for the most part, but only because the nuances are so close to unmannered, artless behavior (not performance) -- has superseded "l'amour fou" of Racine's grand tragedy, which never catches fire with the cast as they have found no way to translate its passionate rhetoric into effective performance.

The lesson seems to be that art is no consolation and that love -- its presence or its absence a state of being -- can only be lived, not acted.