This much I know is true

So much that fills our life is underscored by the subconscious assumption of recurrence. We take eager note of first times: first meetings, first travels to particular countries, first times we have thought a certain thought. But mostly we ignore the existence of the last time we will do something. We dress, and we know we will dress time and time again, we speak to a friend, eat scrambled eggs, read a book, remember a scene from childhood, walk down a particular street and stop at a particular tree, always assuming that these things are repeatable. Of course, most of the time, they are: we do eat scrambled eggs again, and maybe re-read that book, but there will eventually have to be a last time we do all of those things. In our final moments, we might look at a lifetime's collection of books, or think about people we have known, and realize that some of these things have already done what they were to do in our lives, and are not meant to do any more. One day, we will all eat scrambled eggs for the last time.

Of course, a last time is usually recognized only in retrospect, when we reach a certain age or condition and reluctantly accept that our time is finite. I imagine it like moving house, except much, much sadder, as when you have two boxes to ship and must decide what goes in: will I read this book again? are these old letters worth keeping? what music will I listen to again, what can I leave behind? When we know our life is ending, the process of selection becomes a kind of insistence on individuality, a laundry list of that which we find singularly valuable and beautiful. Things we became jaded to in the long course of our lives become new once more; we see things as if for the first time, not wanting to miss any detail, not knowing what might never come again.

Last times are usually recognized in retrospect, but I think there are certain rare and mysterious moments in our lives when we know, while they're happening, that this is the last one of its kind, this is something that will not come again. These moments become more and more frequent as we get older, as we experience more and more and run out of time to experience the same things again. Eventually we reach a point where all we do is last times, files snapping shut one after the other, until we run out of things to do for the last time. And each thing we leave behind is a step in our leaving of the world.

I am afraid that, when I enter the chapter of Last Times, I will watch helplessly as parts of me close themselves off like so many folding chairs, removed one by one from the floor and tucked away for night. At that point, of course, it will be too late to do anything about it. One day, I will never again be able to visit South America; I will never learn to speak Russian; I will never read that book that someone told me I'd love. There won't be the time. We arrive tumbling, sprawling exultantly into the world, creatures of infinite possibility; as Robert Heinlein says,

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Yes, we can do all those things and more, but as we run out of time we need to say goodbye to each of the possibilities that didn't work out, the things that always existed as "maybe" because they were still possible. The promise of our selves collapses into the reality of our selves. At the end, there will be no more use for ambition or discipline, no such thing as promise; there will only be what you have built and what there is.

So out of this frustration let there come a cry for love, love, love. The world is ending all the time, here and there, as pockets of it that you will never see again flicker and disappear. All around you, it is dismantling itself, shrinking and tightening its circumference as the Last Times of your experience pass by and never come again. The only way to push back against this inevitable constriction, as I see it, is to imbue every single fucking thing with an exuberance of love, love being energy and curiosity and patience and understanding. Love the whole stupid world and every stupid thing in it, and you keep it open until it comes down around you and drops like a curtain, as it must, in the end.

Devastated and lost

An article about grieving in this week's New Yorker mentions the interesting phenomenon of social grieving, which is what happens when a public figure, such as Princess Di or Michael Jackson, dies. For me, the defining aspect of public grieving is the fact that most mourners don't know the deceased personally. When a non-celebrity dies, each person who mourns will mourn in a highly individual way: as a husband, sister, mother, friend, daughter, acquaintance. If a man is survived by his father and his wife, I've wondered, can those two help one another in their grief? How different, or how similar, are the loss of a son and the loss of a husband?

I have never lost anyone close to me, but I would think that I would consider my memories of those I love personal, and would want to protect them. After all, no one else has shared x with this person, no one else had a conversation about y. Death brings people together, but it also separates them; death splits a person into versions, one for each survivor. In life there was a body, a mind where all our impressions were centered - I may have known him as a friend, you as your father, but the real he exists somewhere, anchors our divergent experiences. Death is like a cord cutting: in our grief, we take our different pieces, our separate versions, and hide them away in ourselves.

But social grief is different, because in social grief we all share the same memories, to a large extent. If neither of us knew someone personally, then we are on even ground with respect to what we have lost. This is why social grieving, I think, establishes communities, and why it feels like people pouring into the streets when private grief is more like the drawing of curtains. If someone in our mutual circle dies, I cannot say I know how you feel, even if we both loved the one who is missing. The thing that makes social grief different is the acute sense that people all over the world are feeling precisely what you are feeling, that you are united with others in a mutual and corresponding sense of loss.

The reason I am writing all of this is because the article made me think of my one experience with social grieving, which happened not with Princess Diana nor Michael Jackson but with the American writer David Foster Wallace. And as I sit here and ponder this, DFW begins to fill my thoughts as he tends to do; thinking about it is making me go through it all over again.

A Happy Man

Fyodor gripped the envelope in a bird-like fist and stared into the fire. They would be coming now, soon: the telephone calls from family and friends he had not spoken to in years, hoping to make up for past abandonments by being first in line. Reporters. He looked at the pitiable mound of pink slips on his desk, bills that taunted, threatened, and ruled him only a few days ago, and he felt with a horrible sinking in his chest that they had no power over him any more.

Six months ago everything had been different. First, his wife’s affair, well-documented by the local press, became so messy and sensational that his supervisor had been forced to fire him. The shock of losing his wife and his livelihood all at once caused him to begin having panic attacks again, after which even those who remained by him after the scandal were too embarrassed to accompany him in public.

He had been, in a word, miserable. He never left his apartment, which began to smell like the home of someone who had recently died and whose corpse had not been found. Eventually he pulled out a novel he had started writing shortly after getting married, and occupied himself by making revisions. He crossed out more than he added. Whole sheets crinkled and disappeared in the fire. These small acts of destruction buoyed him, gave him hope, but there was soon little left to destroy – and so he began to write, long uneven pages of it, a writing that was as violent as the destruction had been.

He prayed, yes, he prayed that the book would lead him out, he prayed to the book, for it was all that was left to him, a hope of thinnest glass. Oh, but that he could feel happiness once again before his days ran out! He did not know if it was possible.

But the curious thing about memory is that it has no capacity for pain. One can remember times of suffering, of course, but try as one might one will not conjure the feeling of suffering itself, the claustrophobia and the terror: these are gifts that leave you when you leave them. And so it went that Fyodor pulled himself together, he scraped by with a night shift at a gas station, cut his hair, began – once more – to hum. One night he saw a pair of squirrels perching silently on a branch, their small faces toward the light of the full moon, and he remarked how curious it was. And then he got the letter.

He wanted, now, desperately to turn back the clock, to go back a few days before he had read the news, to a time when everything was gloriously uncertain. Yes, he had been doing better, but he never deluded himself that he was in the clear, that – as the stories go – he would live happily ever after. Then, the world could still have ended. Now the world sided annoyingly with him, giving him exactly what he had asked for, all of it, and it made him sick to think about.

And then he thought, what if this is a sign that I am not yet happy? What if my feeling sick means that I am not actually there, but that just the outward conditions that I always assumed led to happiness have been fulfilled? For now the curtain is raised, there is no escaping the truth anymore: where before I could have blamed my lack of happiness on a lack of things, I now lack no more and yet still feel a lack. I cannot live in the charade any more. I have done all that I can, and yet I still lack.

And with this thought relief rushed through him like fresh rain.

China, a start

A lot of people know a little bit about China's one-child policy, which I learned today has been in place since 1979 and will likely remain for at least the next ten years. If you know as little about this as I did a few hours ago (and I only know a very little more now), I might ask you to stop with me before we go further and agree that we ought not to be looking for an equivocal stance on whether the policy is good or not – a discussion which always seems to implicate China as a whole, as if our opinion of the regulation of family sizes would indicate an opinion of China as either a practical, prosperous economic engine or as a faceless government-controlled land bereft of basic human rights. Issues that are this complicated do not have on/off switches for answers, and there may not exist a single person anywhere who understands the history and circumstances of the issue well enough to make a judgment that approximates something like objectivity. All we can do – all we can ever do – is learn as much as we can, and remember that our own understanding is always partial. Only then will we be open to others' partial understandings and more reasonable in our suggestions of what might be done.

The Wikipedia entry on the one-child policy is a good start, and led me to one article that seems an example of What Not To Do. It’s a petition published ten years ago in the Washington Times that aims to browbeat its readers into adopting the author’s rather extreme views, and thereby attempts to prevent the funding of population control programs like China’s family planning policy. Many of the points raised by the author – such as the very real problems concerning the favouring of sons over daughters, a cultural proclivity which results in a staggering imbalance in the gender ratio, something like 120-100 nationwide – have also been raised by other, more even-handed writers, but the present author mixes in what might be truth with such obviously militant pronouncements and rhetoric that it’s hard to take him seriously. It is of course a good thing that many will be introduced to the subject through this article, and will hopefully be motivated to read further and think for themselves, but the corollary danger is that the real injustices and crimes mentioned, the rates of infanticide and the cultural bias against girls, may be dismissed by readers who object to the writer’s caustic, bullish prose.

Stephen Moore (the author) writes that “no sane person” would subscribe to the view he objects to, which, if you think about it, is sort of just a mild way of saying “you’re all crazy.” It’s not a long stretch from this to the adjectives he appends to any mention of the fund or the family planning policy, which include “genocidal,” “fanatical,” and “demon-like.” With the exception of “genocidal,” which is a real and serious accusation, the language Moore employs is emotional and imprecise, and doesn’t tell us very much. I always think in situations like this: if this person thinks a system is “fanatical,” there must be one other person who thinks it isn’t, and wouldn’t it be nice if I had a glimpse of the opposing argument to compare? But Moore’s article is staunch and impenetrable.

I don’t want to turn this in to a catalogue of all the pros and cons of family planning in countries such as China, because I don’t know enough on the subject and don’t pretend to. That being said, I know enough already to raise my eyebrows when Moore writes that

family planning services do not promote women's and children's health; they come at its expense. There are many Third World hospitals that lack bandages, needles and basic medicines but are filled to the brim with boxes of condoms -- stamped UNFPA or USAID.

It’s not clear how the lack of resources in third world hospitals is related to the promotion of smaller families, but I would think that increasing the number of births in such hospitals would not in itself lead to better all-round sanitation. I also don’t see the connection to condoms, which are freely distributed in clinics in many other countries, including in the west. Contraception, whose purpose is to curtail unwanted pregnancies, is surely good sense and has nothing to do with the ability of couples to control the number of offspring they have, except perhaps to improve it. Moore thus makes a false monster (or a straw man) out of a population-control initiative that I can’t imagine anyone objecting to: that of reducing the number of unplanned, accidental and unwanted pregnancies in a population already bursting at the seams.

I will only say one more thing here, which is that Moore’s own solution to the problem seems to be that we ought to inject more capitalism into China and watch as it solves everything. This is evident even before his last paragraph, in which he basically says that all Third World countries should model themselves after the U.S. in order to improve themselves. I won’t address Moore’s contentions directly, except to say that when the problem is as complex and variegated as this one is, in a country as large and politically bristly as China, and your solution is a one-liner combined with a dismissal of all the cultural, economic, social and historical realities that underscore the daily lives of nearly a billion and a half people - well, your solution may not get us very far.

Not much to ask

I'll try to reveal as little as I can. I recently watched a certain movie about which I knew very little, except that it was considered by some to be the best film of the last decade. My lack of knowledge was deliberate, as it always is with movies I know I will watch, but as I loaded the movie on my computer I accidentally read the one-line "summary" that ran under the video window. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem - except in this case that one line provided information not known to the viewer until the very end of the movie, information that, when known, changes the experience of watching the first 90% of the movie dramatically and irrevocably.

But hey, we live in a film culture where "the element of surprise," as they say, is battered and beaten into a corner. Even if you don't read reviews or watch trailers online (both of which I do), it is nearly impossible to avoid promotional posters, TV spots, trailers played before movies. These can ruin a lot more than people seem to realize. Take the poster for Antichrist, which features one of the most striking, surprising and terrifying images in the movie, that of hands reaching out of the roots of a large tree toward the two characters, having sex. If you were at all interested in this movie, you will have seen this picture, which means that nearly no one experienced this scene in the movie as a discovery, as the uncovering of something strange and new.

Because surprises are not only plot surprises, and surprises in film are not the same as surprises in life. Film is, after all, a medium built on images, and images can be some of the most surprising things that movies offer us. Put another way: one of the most important things movies give us is new images, in the same way that new music can give us sounds that never existed before. Art creates new realities that are added to our collective repertory, so that the entirety of the world becomes richer for it. When you see an image for the first time, it offers its secret to you; later viewings of the same can still be powerful, but only the first viewing is like discovery, has the thrill of fear and the sense of some illicit transaction being made.

If you hold a surprise party for me and I find out about your plans, it doesn't mean I won't go because the surprise is ruined. Rather, I go because the pleasure and shock of my friends gathered together for me is still meaningful, in a way that the loss of surprise does not diminish. Surprise in life is only the mode of communication; it does not make less the substance of surprise, the party, the baby announcement, the loss of job. But film is no more and no less than a mode of communication - it's "how it's told," as people like to say. The surprise itself is the content of the surprise.

Why is it so important to defend our right to be surprised? I think back to all the moments I remember vividly from films, and they all combine powerful scenes with surprise. Somehow the surprise part is crucial. After all, it wouldn't do for us to walk around our houses, being surprised at everything. Surprise is the recognition that something different has just happened, and we need to pay attention. It is when our focus is at its most acute, and our memory like blank film stock, waiting for the light to hit. It makes us the best possible receiver for new thoughts.

This is what I want, or more precisely, what I don't want: I don't want to see any scene, any image, from the film. I don't want to know who the director is or which actors are in it. Hell, I don't want to know if it's comedy or a thriller or drama. I just watched Vicky Christina Barcelona and somehow forgot that Penelope Cruz is in it, and when she stormed in halfway through I almost fell out of my chair. Surprise is a good thing, and worth fighting for.

Rewatching Half-Blood Prince

The first time I saw Half-Blood Prince in the summer I was prepared to dislike it. It was directed by David Yates, whose Order of the Phoenix did something worse than leave a bad impression on me - it left no impression at all. I can't now recall a single scene from that movie, which makes you wonder what the purpose is of making film versions of Harry Potter in the first place - or, to rephrase, Why do we watch these movies? But I'll get to purpose later. Let's consider Half-Blood Prince first.

It must be hard to follow Alfonso Cuaron, I kept thinking to myself. That man understood. In 6, Harry looks positively astounded as Dumbledore cleans up Slughorn's house with a flick of his wand - really? After six years? You're still bowled over by a clean-up charm?

Compare with Azkaban, which has the most subtle, unfussy touches of magic, sometimes presented in such banal fashion that you catch them only on a second viewing. I remember noticing, as I watched the movie a second time, that the barman in the Leaky Cauldron waves his hand at the chairs and doesn't even pay heed as they raise themselves up and tuck themselves neatly in. It's an astounding piece of CGI that isn't given a second thought. Magic, of course, is commonplace for those on-screen, and that is what makes it so special for us, that something so alien to us could be so boring in their world. By contrast, Yates is like a kid showing off his lunch Twinkies, making sure the camera zooms in on every bit of lame magic and every visual gag, so that what might have been charming or whimsical if left at the periphery becomes overburdened and even a little embarrassing.

My sense is also that the actors don't feel quite as comfortable working with Yates as they did with any of the previous directors. There are so many scenes dependent on dialog that fall utterly flat; scenes that should end with a rise, as with a good punchline, instead feel horribly dead, end with a leaden awkwardness. Yet there are some really wonderful exceptions, such as all the moments having to do with the Hermione-Ron-Cormac love triangle: watch Hermione as she picks up the love potion in Slughorn's class, looks at Cormac, and puts the bottle back. I don't think she's ever acted better.

And I must mention as well my favourite scene in the movie, which is not in the book. It's when Slughorn tells the story of the petal in the bowl of water that Lily gave him as a gift, which sank to the bottom and transformed into a tiny fish. "It was beautiful magic, wondrous magic," he says, his eyes lost in the past. The existence of this scene is what saves the movie from being dispensable; it gives us something of Slughorn and, more importantly, of Lily, that the books don't.

But why does there have to be so much garbage in there too? Like the movie Ginny, who is so over-sexed the character most similar to her on screen is Bellatrix Lestrange - and that's a problem. Yes, Ginny grows older and more confident, and a part of that is a bloom in sexuality, but there is also a component of character in the book, in which Ginny defends her actions to a jealous Ron and manages irony when she comes across the same snogging Lavender. In the movie the sex sprouts ahead and the character is left behind, so that she seems little more than a whore - or a "scarlet woman," as Molly would put it.

But we could go on all night like this, exchanging checks and crosses. It all comes to down this question: why, when we already have read and loved the books, do we go to the movie? There are a lot of simplistic and snide answers to this, but I still think it's worth asking. What, exactly, are we looking for? The movie will never be as "authentic" as the book, so we are not looking for authenticity, which means that the movie should feel free to veer from the material and surprise us.

I think about some of the moments in the movies that have stuck with me - Slughorn's memory of Lily, the moment in 4 when Neville gathers his courage and steps forward, first to dance - these have given me emotional jolts that live alongside those I've gotten from reading the books. The greatest weakness of the last two movies has been their reliability, because their reliability has made them forgettable. What might, might give them reason to exist is what newness they have to offer us, what moment or shot that is expressed better than we could conceive of it ourselves. We should be looking for sensory experiences that amplify our experience of reading, that give texture and substance and sound to the solitary act of imagination.

The sound and the sublime

The first image in Lars von Trier's Antichrist is of falling droplets of water. The second is the shot of Willem Dafoe, above, and what you can't entirely see is the shower of droplets that fill the right side of the screen, here left out. Even without the droplets, though, my sense is that the picture above points downward; there is something directional in the gravity of the composition, maybe the downward drooping left eye or the shadow that gains along the underside of his chin.

And so the opening sequence of Antichrist is full of the imagery of falling, which makes sense for a film about original sin. Toothbrushes and cups are knocked over, figurines are swept off the table, snow drifts down and bodies fall to the floor, all of which surround the fall of Nic from his bedroom window. And a shot I find almost unbearably poetic: that of Nic's feet reaching slowly to the ground as he climbs out of his crib, the white stars on the bottoms of his socks visible, a reversal of heaven and earth.

After the prologue, things keep falling. The beautifully filmed white bathroom where the couple makes love is now a dirty, wan place where Charlotte Gainsbourgh crawls and bleeds. And in Eden, nature quite literally falls all around them, from the acorns that pelt their cabin to the trees and birds that simply fall out of the sky. Underscoring all of these events is a kind of aesthetic fall, from the beauty and light of the opening sequence to the brutal sexual violence that turned so many viewers away. It is a far, far drop from Handel and droplets of water to some of the places Lars von Trier takes us in the second half of the film.

I believe this is why the epilogue is so effective, set to the same Handel as the beginning but now working against the dogged downward gaze of the rest of the film, working against the gravity that had been tugging down at the edges of the screen. The Nature of stillbirths and violence and hostility, of twisted tree trunks and dark forests, is now again a benevolent Nature, one that offers Dafoe sustenance through its berries. We, with Dafoe, rise out of the pit, and then comes the image that sets our sense of aesthetic balance right - first a few, then more, then a migration of women rising up a hill, climbing the slope where Dafoe stands and moving on past the upper edge of the screen. Fall, fall, fall, and then a reversal at the end: the simple and tremendously moving form of Antichrist.

Late into the night

Rachel Getting Married is theatre. There are a lot of superficial ways in which this makes sense - the limited set, the focus on character and dialog, and the subject of a dysfunctional family with a secret that slowly emerges through the night, reminiscent of plays as various as Long Day's Journey Into Night and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - but the identity with stage rather than film goes deeper, I think, than that. It has to do with the way stage and film communicate fiction to us. There are certain things that you can and can't do in either, and this shapes the stories and how they are told. We hear all the time about directors or novelists who have a story to tell and who tell it, truthfully and directly, in the medium of their choice, but I think we don't as often stop to consider how different the story would be if the novelist were a playright, or the playwright a director. I am talking not only about changes in dialog and narrative voice and so on, but also fundamental matters of tone and character, and even plot.

I have often heard that stage actors must learn to be subtler in their facial gestures when they transition to film, and that film actors must learn to go big. This is self-evident. I wonder, though, if the necessities of acting in either medium have influenced the way their stories are written. A playwright simply can't depend on every member of an audience catching a sideways glance in the eyes, a slight downturn in the mouth, to advance a crucial point; the strokes must be drawn large. Subtlety and layer must be conveyed not physically, but with words, since half the audience is always behind the speaker and you can't always depend on the actor to deliver exactly what you want. Here is a pretty general rule: films are driven by faces, plays by words. The result is two totally different types of fiction.

I have to admit that there are some pretty great faces in Rachel Getting Married, but it is nevertheless written like a play. I have been trying to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes me sure of this, and I think it has to do with us. We are a character in Rachel. We walk through the house and listen to the speeches. We dance in the night and leave in the morning. This is not normally how film works, which is to render us invisible and non-existent. The filmic eye is kind of like the eye of God; we never question that it can show us whatever the director wants us to see, including a character's dreams. It can go everywhere, and disturbs no one.

Plays, on the other hand, are a spectator sport. The whole idea of a soliloquy (which would be totally inimical to film) is of a character speaking solely for the benefit of the audience, even if he or she is not aware of it. But even this is not always the case: Iago frighteningly addresses the audience in Othello, and Salieri conjures us out of thin air, because he needs an audience for his recollections, in Peter Schaffer's Amadeus. Note that when Amadeus was made into a movie, a new character was added: the priest, who replaces the audience as the recipient of Salieri's thoughts. It would have been inconceivable for Salieri in the movie to address the audience in the movie theatre, or to speak to no one. That is not how the language of film works.

But back to Rachel: no one addresses the screen in this movie, but we are nevertheless there. I am not sure exactly how I know this. There is something confessional in the way the camera is held, a dangerous sort of veering in and out, too close to their faces and then back again. There is also a lack of what we might call a directorial voice. What sets theatre apart from any other narrative art is that you are free to look where you choose. Movies always tell us where to look, and even though we may notice important details in the background, it is always in spite of a focus somewhere else. There is always a guiding lens that we can either work with or against. Novels are perhaps the most controlling of media - we can't look in the background (or hardly) even if we wanted. But plays, even if they have ways to direct our attention, essentially have no control over our focus. We can watch the speaker or the listener, or the actor standing closest to us. Of course we can't change what happens, or who speaks, and so this may seem like a small freedom, but it is actually a tremendous one. All observation is achieved through perspective; we don't ask "why is this green?" but rather "why did Shelley or Ibsen or Scorsese make this green?". Perspective is what connects a work of art to the artist. To give the audience control of their own perspective is, therefore, to fundamentally change the way art is received.

My sense in watching Rachel is always of a stage larger than what we are shown. Take the crowd scenes, when the extended family is gathered around some table and the camera follows those who speak. I am always aware that I can see only a small part, in the same way that I choose who or what to look at on stage. I know I am missing things with every choice. The camera in Rachel also has an uncanny ability to track exactly who you most want to see, so that the motion of the camera around the table, from person to person, feels like a wandering gaze.

Here is a test. Step 1: Watch Rachel Getting Married. Step 2: After you watch the rehearsal dinner with all the toasts, notice how you felt through every stage of the process. You probably felt very uncomfortable at some point, and probably noticed that most people around the table were as uncomfortable as you were. We can be scared, nauseated, shocked by movies, but it is not often that we are made to feel uncomfortable in this way, as if we were there and this was our sister or sister-in-law. This is the discomfort of someone who is there and who wishes he were somewhere else.

Basterds

I saw Inglourious Basterds, hesitated, wrote a review, saw it again. Hesitated. This is really and truly a controversial film, but not (only) because it is about Nazis and Jews. It’s controversial because it makes us question things that reveal our inner critic, shows us what kind of watchers we are, what we value in art, what we think an artist’s responsibilities are – or are not.

So many essays and responses have already surfaced online for this film that I find it difficult to add to the mess. I always hate reading about something if I am in the process of thinking about it myself, and the more I read the more my own thought feels recycled and unnecessary. Thus: I’ve tried to abstain as much as possible from reading what others have written about IG. And I will only bring up two points that I feel would be irresponsible, for me, to ignore.

One review that I have read is Daniel Mendelsohn’s brief but welcome rebuttal to critics who assert that IG is more about film than it is about Nazis, and is therefore not historically or morally problematic. Yes, it is a film about film, and like Tarantino’s other movies the main player is his wild and audacious artistic vision. But as Mendelsohn says, it is nevertheless a movie populated with accurate depictions of real people – at no point does Tarantino suggest that the Germans in the theatre might not be real Germans during the war – and that is why Inglourious Basterds is not the same film as Kill Bill, for instance, and why its violence cannot be thought of in the same way.

Mendelsohn points out that the burning of the theatre is an inversion of the gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps, in which Jews were locked into a confined space and killed en masse. Now it is Jews who do the killing, and who do so thoroughly: by Shosanna’s fire, by the Basterds’ machine guns, and by explosives. If this is really and truly a revenge flick, which Tarantino has claimed it is, the absurdly excessive firepower levied against the Nazis would indicate a correspondingly excessive amount of hate, on our part, for those who perpetrated crimes more than sixty years ago.

I am not saying that the Nazis should be forgiven because of how much time has passed. As a culture, we don’t have to let them off the hook for anything, but that doesn’t mean that we have to delight in watching them suffer – which is, after all, the entire point of a revenge flick. We identify (for example) with Shosanna, because she is innocent and is wounded, and thus share her desire for retribution. Certainly the film thinks we should. From the beginning, IG has much in common with Kill Bill, a less problematic (because fictitious) revenge flick. Just as Beatrix Kiddo had her hit list, so too do we see prominent Nazis identified on screen. We don’t even meet some of them, such as Göring and Bormann; they are named solely as targets to be knocked off. Indeed, when we are introduced to the chief of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, we see a brief clip in which he spouts some horribly racist garbage about American blacks (more on this later); then, FREEZE FRAME! and Goebbels’s name emblazoned across the screen. We are clearly meant to know only enough about him to hate him; the scene’s only purpose is to mark him as one of the revenge movie’s villains, as a target to be later taken down.

This is all according to plan for a revenge flick until we come to the movie premiere, which is the film’s big climax. If we accept that this is a revenge narrative (and Tarantino has given us no reason to believe that we shouldn’t), then, as an audience that has both literally and psychologically bought into the film, we ought to subsequently cheer at the deaths of the hundreds of men and women in that theatre. That is, after all, how narratives in this genre end. This is actually quite sly, because at no point do we want Shoshanna’s plan to fail, or the Basterds’ pathetic Italian cover to be blown. Yet we (I hope) did not actively yearn for the deaths of the 350 or so Nazis in the hall, in the same way that we hoped for Shoshanna to succeed and the Americans to survive. But one must of course follow from the other.

When the fire begins to eat up the screen, and the Basterds open fire on the Nazis down below, the movie changes abruptly. The problem is that IG begins as a revenge narrative, but because these are real humans and not fictitious constructions, Tarantino takes us someplace morally we’d rather not go. We find ourselves, in fact, in the exact same situation as the Nazis in that theatre: we are watching a film that asks us to cheer at human massacre. If we do cheer, then we are no better than the Nazis at the premiere of “Nation’s Pride.” If we don’t, then we break the implicit contract with Tarantino, who sold us a revenge flick. I imagine that he might say: “This is how you wanted it to end, isn’t it? Didn’t you want them to die? I am giving you exactly what you paid for.”

I mentioned earlier that Mendelsohn recognized an inversion in the burning of Nazis by Jews. Here is another inversion, because Tarantino now turns our theatre, the theatre in which we sit, inside-out. As the Parisian theatre burns down, all that is left is the Cineplex or whatever that we are in, and the Nazi audience watching a revenge flick in which hundreds die becomes us, watching a revenge flick in which hundreds die – and the challenge to our own morality seems clear. It’s easy to judge the Nazis for celebrating what looks like a terrible film that delights in the deaths of other human beings, but how far off are we from they? We all knew, going in, that this was a revenge movie in which a band of Jews hunt the Nazis. We knew we would see Nazis die, and fantastically, because this is a Tarantino movie. I think Tarantino might have also worked in a dig against himself, in the scene in which Hitler praises Goebbels for making his best film yet; I can’t help but wonder if Tarantino was making an ironic gesture toward the critical success of his own violent films.

This might all sound like a stretch, but consider that Shosanna delivers her final monologue not in French, nor German, but English, a language foreign to both herself (she, after all, did not speak it at the beginning of the movie) and the German audience. Why, then, would Marcel remind her to deliver the words in English? Inglourious Basterds is, above all else, above even the subject of World War II, a movie about language. Tarantino is an American, and an English speaker. I believe the same thing happens in the movie’s first scene, when LaPadite and Landa switch to English from French; this is ostensibly so that the Jews cannot understand, but it is really so that we, Tarantino’s English audience, can understand. He wanted the directness of language, not subtitles, in that crucial exchange. Perhaps Shosanna speaks in English because her audience has changed. The Germans, after all, are either dead or can’t hear her in their scramble for the door; she is speaking to the only audience left in the theatre, and that is us.

***

If Tarantino is a master of anything, it is timing. He knows his audience cold. Roger Ebert likes to quote from Hitchcock, “A good movie should play the audience like a piano,” and I think that this is exactly what Tarantino does. His real art happens not on screen, in spite of all its visual and referential splendour, but rather in the hall where we sit. The second time I saw IG, it was in a 150-seat theatre in Germany, filled with Germans, and it was astonishing listening to them and then watching their faces as they walked out. It is both impressive and sort of frightening what he can do with us. I think to myself: it cannot, cannot, cannot be an accident that, at the end of the movie, it is directly at us that Brad Pitt gazes when he says, “I think this might just be my masterpiece.”

Here I am

Here I am, I am not drunk but I’ve been drinking again, and as always I feel compelled to put pen to paper and write. The motivation for this seems perfectly clear – I don’t know if this is an objective standard or if this is just an aesthetic prejudice of the age, but I feel that alcohol impedes the stops and starts of the thinking mind, the mind that paradoxically kills the pure, direct thought. I feel, when I’ve been drinking, not that my thinking is better but rather less muddled, like an overgrown forest after a flash fire. It's not more alive, in fact it is by definition less alive than the thorny, natural mess it once was, but at least you can see light between the trunks, count the trees. A cleared forest can be apprehended in the mind in a way that a fully grown forest with its million species of insects and millions of newly unfurling leaves never can be, shifting and brambled as it is like a brain.

The search as always is for the thought that strikes to the core of somebody, yourself maybe but better someone else. It would be expected here to complain that a cruelty of the universal order is responsible for our cleverest thoughts to appear weak or confusing to others, and those with which we are not satisfied to be perceived as (at best) a fragment of genius. Are we so blind to ourselves? What is responsible for us being our own worst readers? It would make sense, in a world in which we are spared pain, that someday we should gain a hard-won objectivity, an ability to see our words as others see them. But this can never happen. A mother can never be objective about her child – she can be unreasonably proud, or unfairly cruel, but the perspective can never be the same as that of the neighbour across the street. I think that we can either write for ourselves or write for others, and only one party can ever be satisfied with the result. For a writer this is no choice at all, since he must either sacrifice himself or his audience, and is thus doomed to some kind of defeat. It’s a winless enterprise, really, and in spite of the terrible options we have we do it anyway because the alternative is still far, far worse. We are bodies spinning in space, held tenuously together by a faint gravity, and shouting soundlessly at each other because the alternative is to be silent, to not speak and only spin absurdly in our shared proximity.

…

My fingers are numb. I see people standing around me, talking, staring at a screen that flickers, renews itself with numbers that speak delay and anticipation. They are beautiful and glow inside their own private spheres. I think: orbit. They shuffle obliquely around a central grain, the wide vibrato of electrons in a space so vast it may as well be empty.

LF

His arms glowed like alabaster. From a height, he watched the faint limns of orange light come off his hot skin, the sleep of alcohol nestling deep into the rivulets of his brain.

He felt, a little foolishly, like a child, as he maneuvered his bear's hands to grip the iridescent glass, once golden, now filmy with sud. It took a particular effort to track his eyes across the room, now lighting on the candle, the bright hot centre of it, now the slanted dark faces of strangers, now the waitress's receding ass. His point of focus like the pointer on an oversensitive mouse, he thought, careening across the screen of his vision, no no pull back pull back. There.

The candle's flame burned deep through his retinas, as if burning past vision into some other sense. Touch, perhaps - though he could not say what he was touching with. He reached for it, swatting helplessly with ham-sized palms, flickering the light. No, not touch - but the centre of the light, not the light itself but the dark hole within it, it communicated itself to him in a way that superseded vision, bypassed it entirely. There was no distance to travel, no conversion of sensory data into clarifying flashes of neurons. It was more like truth, a thing simply known, a thing that exists without reason or whyfore and resistant, above all, to worry. The opposite of truth is worry, he thought, as he sat in the certain worry-free glow of the dark heart of the candle.

He briefly considered ordering another drink, and then forgot the idea almost immediately. There is something reassuring about the space between the fourth drink and the fifth, a perfect equilibrium of the mind and the body. It was like being returned to childhood, really, to a time before peripheral vision and the ugliness that such a vision affords. He remembered arriving at the pub, which looked more or less like the two that preceded it, being escorted up narrow stairs by the sleek waitress who crinkled her eyes when she smiled, just one eye, so that he saw it as a covert wink, an invitation. He fantasized about her thoroughly between the first drink and the third, imagining her warm skin in the rubber of his hands, her bitter tartness in a wedge of lime.

The sounds in the pub were now less sharp, yet clearer. He finished his beer, but it did not do what he had hoped for. Instead, leaning forward, he stared deep into the flame in front of him, closer, until it filled his vision and burnished everything in the same orange glow that rose from his skin.

Reading in the dark

I am pretty keen on moments of connection between people, I think this is pretty clear. Not only do they not happen a whole lot, but when they do, they usually don't last for long - and the only record that the moment ever happened is just the two of you, walking away and remembering. These moments as far as I know don't leave any indelible trace anywhere; they don't accumulate, don't build toward anything. And if we didn't have memory, it could be as if these moments hadn't happened at all.

Which is why I am always so startled when I come across a physical trace of such a connection, often between people who have never met and never talked, whose only connection is through me - as if I am the connection, and without me they might never have found each other, touched each other across the vast space. I will read something someone has written, and something about the thought or the way that it is captured or the way the writer tried to capture it but failed, something about the attempt strikes me in such a precise way as to pull me back instantly to another moment when I read something by somebody else, a piece of writing that made the same attempt.

It really makes no sense, how sometimes it takes so much effort to commit something to our memory, and other times memory works as if independent of our intentions. I just spent an hour studying words for the GRE, words I probably have mostly forgotten already, and yet I read a poem last night that made me immediately think of this other poem I read last summer maybe one time? The only reason I can give is that both writers were going for the same thing, something that burrows deeper than words; they were going for a feeling, and our capacity for remembering feeling is exquisite. Truth, as Anne Michaels says, must have an emotional dimension - we must feel it in the body. Appropriate, then, that the poem I was reading last night in bed was hers, and the line in question the following:

Rain makes its own night, long mornings with the lamps left on.

Which immediately and without warning drew the following line out of my memory, from a poem by Hart Crane:

Yet how much room for memory there is
in the loose girdle of soft rain.

Anne Michaels and Hart Crane could not be more different - one a young, rash, bohemian New Yorker from a world long disappeared, the other a twentyfirst century Earth mother, a bear-like woman with the voice and face of a girl. But I feel in these two lines that they are thinking the same thing, maybe not exactly the same thing but at least pretty close, and that the thought then comes out of their pen, is processed in a different way, results in a different line.

But the thought is the same. The thought has to do with the externalization of memory, the projecting of an inner state outward that happens to manifest in both cases as rain. In both poems, it is dark out - the Crane example is actually the second line of the poem, the first beginning "There are no stars tonight" - and darkness seems to accentuate the physical senses, makes us more aware of our bodies and what surrounds them; in essence, both authors dim the lights for us so that we experience memory as properties of feeling. For Michaels, it is through shadow, and through a childhood memory we all have of lamps lit during a dark rain; Crane, instead, manages it through sound. Michaels is usually the far more sensate poet; her poems are like a heat lamp before your face, a film of cold, hot, sticky, cool all along the outside and inside of your skin. But Crane, here, in the lovely visual of the loosened girdle, hides tiny flecks of rain-sound, gurgle in girdle and the ssshh of loose/soft. In the last line of the poem, when he returns to rain, there is the unmistakable pitter-patter of the line: "And the rain continues on the roof / With such a sound of gently pitying laughter."

While I am looking at Anne Michaels and Hart Crane, I might point out another uncanny connection, between the last lines of Michaels's first published poem and Crane's last. Here is Michaels in the last line of "Lake of Two Rivers":

The forest flies apart, trees are shaken loose
by my tears,

by love that doesn't fall to earth
but bursts up from the ground, fully formed.

And now Crane in, yes, "The Broken Tower":

--- lift down the eyes
That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower…
The commodious, tall decorum of that sky
Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.

What does this mean? I'm at a loss. Both have nature dissolving, the forest flung apart, the sky rending, and then an incredible inversion - love, which we associate instinctively with falling, here instead rising from the earth. Did Michaels read Crane? Does it matter? Here is a kind of connection - though not a connection by any definition we would ordinarily use - between two who tried for the same thing and left traces of their trials behind.

Questions

There is the life before your death, which belongs to you, and then there is the life after your death, which belongs to others. If you have made yourself heard, then they will gather in the empty moments just after your passing, when your life-before-death is no more and your life-after-death has not yet begun, to fill the space with memory and fabrication. They will construct you out of half-remembered wisps and unconditional generosities that may barely resemble you, but which are justified by a survivor's guilt and fear - and you will have no say over any of it. It is, after all, no longer your life to live. All the more reason to guard it jealously while it is yours.

By rough estimate, 100 billion beings have graced this earth to date. It occurs to you that being alive is not a default state, as it seems to be when surrounded daily by the living, but an exceptional one. Differently: it is an absurdity that we are alive at all. The rich (I think) don't spend all their time agonizing over what it would mean to be poor, so why do all the living agonize above all over death? It's strange, no, that we obsess over something that doesn't fuss those who have it, and will presumably no longer fuss us when we have it too. There has never been such universal insecurity amongst the members of an elite class.

I would not presume to suggest how you should spend your life-before-death, but if I were to say one thing, it would be to wonder about the use of asking what life is while you are still a member of the living, and not yet a member of the once-living. What is life?, says someone who inhales, breathes out the words, fibres them with a heart's beating blood. I hope it is clear that the question is not a true question, if by definition a question must have an answer. Call it instead a bleat of loneliness, which issues from one so vastly wealthy he knows not what to do with his riches, and is ashamed that this is his greatest dilemma. We, in truth, are crushed by our fortune; we are unable to comprehend, much less survive, the world's ceaseless treasures.

While we stand waiting

Tonight, I was convinced of the separateness of art, thinking about art, and life, and their mutual irrelevance. Maybe I shouldn't say "convinced," though, since there is an air of fatality about the word. (The Germans have it right with "überzeugt," which carries a dimension of excess and over-doing, and reminds me of a happy German accident. I received an e-mail a few days ago from a Québecois whose signature bore the following quote: "Il n'y a qu'un seul endroit où le mot "succès" vient avant le mot "travail"; c'est dans le dictionnaire." The same is true in English, where success comes before work, but not for the Germans, for whom Arbeit - even in the dictionary - comes before all.) In fact, as convinced as I am tonight of this one fact, I am also convinced of another: that one day I will know the opposite to be true, I will come to be certain about the harmony of all those parts that now appear to me as unrelated children. But that's another day. We need to court extremes to make sense of things, and for tonight, this one feels right.

How did this come about? I saw a show today that resisted my efforts to think at it. Yes, at it - because I now see (or am now convinced of something I've suspected for a while) that thinking about art is inimical to art; when we think about art, we are actually thinking about thinking, and art is left alone. To pretend that we can figure anything out about how art works on us is dangerous and potentially blinding (maybe because art introduces things that resist sense into our organized worlds). I saw Anne Michaels at a panel the other day, and scribbled something she said hastily onto the back of my programme, which was roughly: To know something you have to feel it in the body. All knowledge, to be absorbed, must have an emotional dimension. This, aside from being transcendently wise, is also liberating; it allows us to feel things and not have to give an explanation. So back to today: I felt strong emotional reactions to things that made seemingly little sense, and when I came instinctively to that bubble of experience with sharp tools of thought, I found that I could not bring myself to do it. I am sure that thought would have been richly rewarded today, if my tools were up to the task; but instead, for better or for worse, I chose to ride the subway in a suspended state, the bubble left intact.

Understand, I felt such a strong compulsion to make sense of what I saw. That is a hazard of my trade, and for a few moments I wondered if the best professions might not be those that exercise the body and not the mind, like house-building or field-plowing. I wanted to push Experience through my alchemist's apparatus and come out with Insight; but I realized that, no matter what insight I arrived at, I could not preserve or alter the emotional reaction I felt - only, at best, create a new, separate experience. At that moment art and criticism felt very far from each other, and art and life even more distant.

What else to say? Maybe only that this distance can be liberating in a strange and wonderful way - a way that I had not entertained before tonight. I've been having doubts recently about the value of certain things - art, thinking about art - and wondering how all these parts, these unrelated children, can coexist in a meaningful way. I have no answer today; as I said, that particular truth is yet to come. Today I found truth in separateness, because the paradox of art that comes close is that it makes you feel utterly alone.

Normally I retreat after live events into myself, shield myself with my thoughts from the chatter that sprouts from eager, art-addled mouths. To tell the truth, I use art to block life. But tonight art erased itself, and thought went with it, so that only life was left humming in the people and the floors of the subway. I was alone. And I thought of the Stanley Cavell quote that sits at the top of this blog, and inverted it in my mind: Art separates people. But it also brings them together.

Endings

As always, getting out of things is a trickier business than getting in.

There are rituals for getting into a work of art, but a lot of these happen outside the work. For every art 'event', there is the lead-up - getting dressed-up, entering the theatre, shuffling in the seats, waiting expectantly. The lights dim. The preparations can seem at times to be as elaborate as those for a shuttle launch, and I think this is right, because a certain transportation is meant to take place. When I read a book, itself having no built-in rituals, I sometimes create my own: I inspect the cover, turn it around in my hands, glance at each of the mostly blank pages that precede Page 1, the dedication, the publisher; then I read the first line very slowly.

But, having gotten in, it is the work's responsibility to get us out. This is a tremendous burden, and the consequences of its failure are too horrible to speak aloud. I get this feeling of dread all the time when I sit in student recitals, and a note slips - the kid looks worried - and I know he is thinking the same thing as me and everyone else in the audience, which is shit, shit, what would happen if I just stopped? What would happen? Would it be something worse than death? No - but I had to think about that for a second.

As I wrote in the introduction earlier, an ending is a place where a movie becomes movie, a novel becomes novel, where the art becomes about itself and shows us its artifice. Or, if you think of the content or story as artificial - its truth. Either way, having got us in, the work has to carefully extricate us from the world it has created, absorbed us into. There is no better example of this than the ubiquitous zoom-out from a city at the end of the movie. We literally leave the world the characters inhabit, and where their faces once filled the screen, they now disappear, tiny, tinier, until we can't possibly care about them any more as real people and can step gingerly out of our seats and into our lives.

There are two ways to read this. We feel genuinely, emotionally connected to art; the art world becomes our world. To return us, art has to show us its bag of tricks and say "Ha!" - we were duped. We forget that we are watching a movie, but now, at the end, we must remember it is only a movie; artifice, then, is a severing tool. The other way to read it - and this is both nobler and more desperate - is that art creates fragile worlds, ones that are easily burst. Art cannot stand up to the pitiless force of reality; it has tremendous power, but only in its own domain. Against actual lives, actual problems, its basic contradiction of reality and unreality would cause it to implode, not because it is less, but because its subject is completely different. Artifice, in this reading, is a buffer or a bridge; it protects art from the contaminating presence of reality by allowing us to leave the work behind, safely, and whole.

My favourite example of an ending is the one used in American Beauty, which is nearly preposterous in its artificiality but necessary to counterbalance the harrowing emotional impact of the movie's climax. Here we have the classic zoom-out from an American suburb, overlaid with the equally classic voice-over of the protagonist (the return to narrator being a borrowed marker of artifice from literature) - except Kevin Spacey was killed not five minutes before, and so is now apparently narrating after his death. But it works. As the camera zooms out, you slowly become aware of the edges of the TV (or movie screen), the room you are in, the people with you, the time of day, the light in the window. Half an hour before, you could have been in that suburb. But you already have your own suburb, and at the end of the day there can only be one.

Another example: musicologists Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker think they have smelled something shifty in Mozart; they say that the ending of Act II to The Marriage of Figaro reveals a discontinuity between music and action. Here, things are as confusing in the plot as they are likely to become - everyone is running around on stage, no one knows what the hell is going on. And yet the music is coming to a crash-bang dominant-tonic close - the epitome of musical certainty. A&P say, maybe music and action don't always have to correspond to one another. But I think that correspondence is still happening in the Act II finale, though it is not a correspondence of plot and music. It is a correspondence of music and the audience's relation with a work of art. We see that things are getting hairy on stage, but there is also an intermission coming, and we need to be ready. If the music ended on a note that reflected the stage, what would happen? It would end unexpectedly, we would be confused, and we would certainly not be ready to re-enter the work in the third Act. There is in fact a specific moment, as there is near the end of nearly every finale, when you know the work will be over within a minute or two. I can point to it exactly in Figaro: I always get caught up in the excitement of the Act II finale, and then there is a moment when the music suddenly jumps into a faster tempo, and I think Ah yes, it's almost time for the bathroom.

Are these codes learned, from watching lots of movies with zoom-outs and lots of operas that end with a crash-bang dominant-tonic? Probably, but that doesn't make them less real, and we need them besides. Think of these as tropes or devices used by artists to control a reader's position in relation to the work: close, middle, far? At the endings of things, I think most artists would say that they don't want the reader too close, where things are too specific and too much like life, or too far, where the work is held at arm's length and loses its relevance.

Instead: from a point of immersion, where the reader is in the world of the work, you pull back, up, and as you rise out of the work the universality of art stretches its relevance across the skin of the earth, encompassing everything. Everyone who has experienced this will know what I mean, and will not need me to describe it; it is an emergence, a moment that feels like rebirth or renewal. For a few delirious seconds after the work is finished, you are suspended halfway between the your world and the world of art, and touch both. Sometimes, I feel like art exists only for these moments.

Introduction to Endings

Does music tell a story? This is a valid question for many, and those who reject it generally do so because of a belief that music goes beyond storytelling, that it is beyond mere signification. But what if we could grant that music does not tell a specific story, that music does not mean or equal one thing? We would then be wondering, by asking the question "does music tell a story?", whether music is like a story, whether the two operate in the same way. For instance, I can tell you about something that happened to me today, and then you might go and listen to a CD of the Eroica. These are both temporal events; they rely on time for their existence. But are they the same kind of experience? And do they have the same relationship to time, or different relationships?

A clue is already given in the way we formulate our sentences. We might say that music tells a story, but we rarely say that music is a story. It is true that we do often say, "This song is about" or "This opera is about," but it is understood that we are actually referring to the story imbedded in the opera, and not the opera itself. The opera tells a story of such-and-such, but it is not the story of such-and-such. This is quite different from what I might say to a friend, namely, "This is the story of such-and-such" before launching into it. Storytelling is only one thing; but there is a distance in art, which means a distance between the part that is story (if it exists) and something else. It is this something else that I am interested in.

If music is unlike a story, and music is a temporal art, then we might guess that all temporal arts are unlike stories, and we can examine this thought further. This would include, of course, theatre, and even novels. To make this claim, we would have to say that Charlotte's Web is not the story of an unlikely friendship between a spider and a pig; but we can say that the novel Charlotte's Web tells that story. This may strike some as a ridiculous distinction to make, or even no distinction at all. How does the story of Charlotte's Web differ from Charlotte's Web?

I choose this particular book because it is a transparent, clear case of story-telling, which means that it is an important test for my argument, but not necessarily the easiest to tackle. Let's begin with a more straightforward case, which is by contrast a piece of opaque, metaphorical, deliberately artificial writing:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

This is the last paragraph of James Joyce's short story The Dead. Now imagine I was telling you this story - as in, "Hey dude, want to hear a story?" - and told you a story that ended with the above. What would you think? You would probably notice my mode of presentation - my rhetoric - as a separate feature from the plot. Yes, you can follow the story, but whereas you might not be aware of any particular mode or rhetoric in the hundreds of exchanges you have daily with people you meet, here the way it is said becomes a striking and even distracting element that exists alongside the what that is being said.

What if you simply read the passage above as part of the short story The Dead? You would still notice the prose, probably, though it would not seem so out of place, since writing never sounds like conversation to begin with. But not all writing can dare to be as heavy-handed in its metaphor, its alliteration, its repetition as the passage above; here Joyce pulls it off (I think miraculously) because the passage comes not only at the end of a short story, but also at the end of the whole Dubliners set. The above paragraph is simultaneously the close of a story and of a whole progression of stories, which latter gain in complexity and depth as they approach their end. The so-called "purple prose" of the above is still obvious, but given its placement and what it is meant to do, I would argue that the style is also necessary.

Most importantly, the last paragraph of The Dead gives us an instance where the art of the literary work is discernible against the story, or content, of the literary work.

(SIDEBAR: I know we're trained to believe that art and technique, or style and substance, or art and story, are inseparable. It is a belief I've stood by and defended vehemently, often. I still stand by it, but I have started to suspect that there are points of separation, especially at the ends of things, and this is where I want to pick at.)

And if an overabundance of style over content is actually necessary, as I have claimed, then we can make a statement to the reverse: that without this overabundance, without this glaringly obvious dive into the machinations of rhetoric, the ending to The Dead and Dubliners would not feel like an ending at all.

Maybe I have taken too long to get here, but here I am: Even when art looks like storytelling, the two are not about the same thing. When I tell a story, there is not as strict an order in which my words must go, and few impositions on my style or delivery (aside from being clear, of course). Art can resemble story, as in novels, but always in their endings - and this applies to all temporal arts - there is a certain rhetorical acceleration, a point at which the style of art draws attention to itself, and indeed breaks the reader's concentration on the story of art. In storytelling, this concentration is maintained to the very last word; in art, the shift of focus from story to art - in the sense of its relation to artifice - is a necessary event. Without it, the work of art, be it opera, play, novel, risks losing its status as art; it risks becoming only story.

You and me, part 2

I want to speak to you, you, but I am afraid that everything I say is a lie. I feel the fraudulence rising from my sentences even as I write them, gaining in stench as I pile on words, each more false than the last. Here is the problem: I want to speak to you. You, I assume, also want to speak to me. But if lies are the only coin we have, then should we barter in lies rather than not barter at all?

What I am looking for most of all is a feeling. Meaning, after all, is a shared feeling. We cram words together clumsily and hope for meaning to pass, in the way that some cram their bodies together clumsily and hope for love to appear. We know, we should know, that love doesn't come from the mechanics of sex, but why should meaning come any more from the mechanics of language? The two are not the same, I know. But we often have one, and assume the other; we speak, and assume meaning; and never consider the possibility that our speech stops at speech, our words reach no further than themselves.

I would like to say that true meaning is as rare as true love. We go days or weeks or months without encountering a single living word, but instead walk through graveyards of words. They glint dully, the words you exchange with your barista or your wife or read in the paper or a novel - or a blog. Ask yourself: is there meaning behind these words, or are they simply transactions, and nothing more? We often say that if you could describe a piece of music in words, then you wouldn't need the music. But the same unspeakable, wondrous, felt quality is possible for words too, and when meaning happens the words themselves disappear, even as they mean.

If you seek to mean, then, know that you are in for a terrible time. But it can be done; as in the last lines from "Song of Myself":

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

Or these, from Hart Crane:

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

I once asked myself, upon reading difficult poetry, what it meant; I see now this is the wrong question, or not the most useful one. For even as I asked it, I felt a stirring as I read the words that I did not understand; perhaps words have to resist conventional meaning in order to carry something else. You might ask me to explain what these words by Whitman or Crane mean, or mean to me; but if I could, then why would we need these words by Whitman and Crane? I will not use words to explain meaning. Meaning and words are not the same; and when meaning is at its strongest, words can be its deadliest enemy.

As I say, we may all be in for a terrible time. But I think - I think - we must try. I admit that I'm impatient: I want clarity, focus, I want to find words only to forget them. I want to be pithy all the time, I want to be a human Pith-machine. But the road ahead is long; and what would be the value of meaning if it were easy?

What a mess

My parents and I watch movies very differently. I suppose it's a generational marker, one that just so happens, in our case, to be a cultural marker as well. To lay it flat: they grew up in a world with not much fiction, I grew up in a world suffused in it. The consequence of this - one consequence - is that I have developed a stout resistance to fiction, much as my parents inherited a resilience to the ginger and coriander that so easily defeat me. I can hold a movie at arm's length, observe it in the light; for them a movie is a loved one in distress, and is unquestionable.

Let me give an example. I was deeply moved, in a positive way, by There Will Be Blood. My dad hated it. Why? It ends with a guy killing another guy, senselessly. How can you love something that ends in murder? I think it's a good question, and one that I don't really have an answer to, only an evasion of sorts: that for me, the "murder" that ends the movie is not really murder, not murder in a real sense, and therefore I can hold it at arm's length and look at it in the light, whereas my dad saw murder, and reacted accordingly.

… and here I must confess that I had written more, I had written several different paragraphs, but rejected each one. This I think because I am trying to make sense of this line between fiction and reality, of what truth is (as in, is fiction truth?) and how we sense it, and nothing I wrote satisfied me because what I really have is a question, and not an answer. The question arose a few nights ago, though it has been in my mind for much longer before that, and perhaps the best I can do is try to capture the question here, and leave it unanswered.

So then - I was driving home on the 401 in mid-evening, and followed the highway as it rose gently above the city. Tall buildings in the distance appeared to float unmoored on an invisible floor, and for several minutes, the angle of the road aligned perfectly with the side of a faraway building. I was reminded of my crude childhood attempts to bring a third dimension to a flat page, which basically consisted of a square with short diagonal lines emerging from three points, and voilà! - depth. Against the strange yellow of the city's air at dusk, and at this precise angle, the building ahead looked exactly like those drawings.

In fact, the entire vista before me reminded me of something I had seen hundreds of times before as a teenager, watching Star Trek reruns after school: the painted backdrop, that staple of low-budget low-tech sci-fi. A camera would zoom slowly into a picture of a strange alien landscape, and sometimes you might even see real people standing in front of a picture of a weird desert, oddly-formed mountains, a backdrop whose purpose was to simulate reality by simulating depth. Of course you could tell they were painted, but sometimes you had to look carefully for the chink in the illusion - a certain dullness of colour, usually, or a frozen waterfall - and as I drove on this day I found myself staring at the scene before me, trying to find its chink, except this time the thing that made it real, the thing that set it apart from the fictions of my youth.

…

Why do we write?

You and me, part 1

Isn't it a strange feat that I can say something, and you can know exactly what I mean? At least that's what we believe - in fact our lives are based around this notion, not only in the company of others but also in the company of books. It seems instantaneous, the process of a thought formulating in your brain, which then transforms into slight muscular spasms that in turn become sound waves, scratches of ink, and then somehow the same thought reformulates itself in my brain, and I can say "Yes, I know just what you mean!" without having ever seen the shape of your original thought.

Sometimes, I find even the most banal daily exchanges miraculous; but if that is so, then how is it that I can read this passage from Emerson

There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of our time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages explained by the hours. Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation. All its properties consist in him. Each new fact in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises ...

and feel like I know exactly what he means? Of course, I don't, not really - I can't say that the entire sphere of my understanding of the passage maps on exactly with the sphere of his own understanding, though for me to feel such a strong sensation after reading this (which feels roughly like my gut is saying "Yes! Yes! Yes!" after each sentence), our spheres must overlap more than less, a Venn diagram that is closer to being a circle than a figure eight.

But what exactly is responsible for this thought getting from RWE's brain into my head? If you drop some of the fancy metaphors in the passage, words like "centrifugal" and "repositories," you're left with just a small handful of words that most of us use on an almost daily basis. That is, totally unremarkable, even boring words, drawn from the tiny vocabulary actually in use by most people - I've seen this figure cited at around 3 000 words. And each of these words isn't even a meaning, but rather a sign for a meaning, a plastic arrow pointing, more or less precisely, to the thing it wants to say, so that a paragraph or a sentence might look something like this:


Yet with a few of these words, Emerson is clear; with a few of these words, I get a feeling, a sensation that I think he wants me to get.

Of course the somewhat abstract problem of language and signs is really, fundamentally, a human problem - the problem of how two people can understand each other. When I become disheartened with language, when I feel like everything I write or say is a nervy tangle of obstacles that just gets in the way of understanding, real understanding - what I'm really beginning to doubt is the notion that we can ever understand another person, that we can be open and not closed, that aloneness is not an inescapable state. We demand so much from language; it is the link that allows two identical thoughts to vibrate in two separate minds at the same time - and on the tenuous strength of that bond alone is built everything in our world.

Two things ought to be clear from the preceding, namely (1) We should choose our words carefully, and (2) Even if we do, communication is not guaranteed. I think poetry understands the problem of language better than any other medium. It is all about the careful choosing of words, and because of this, it embodies the struggle and anxiety of communication far better than the fluency of prose ever could. Prose can make it look easy, but poetry makes it look hard, and by this fact alone poetry is truer.

Lost fragments

It seems entirely impossible that now, as I slowly yet unfailingly lose my memory, my power to recollect, to navigate the labyrinths of people, places, times, the smells and sounds of years that roil beneath me like the sea and buoy me up to my present moment--that this curious ability should be stronger now than it has ever been, and strengthening still. Once, striding along the faded lawns of my alma mater, or otherwise enjoying my customary Asbach in an indistinct corner of a campus pub, I might have explained it thus: that as the sphere of human memory diminishes, as once agile neurons turn sluggish and obstinate with age, the sheer number of memories--if one can separate memories--is reduced from the infinite to the merely vast. And, as aging performs its irreversible work, the inchoate shapes and impressions of the past begin, slowly, to appear in their singularity, in the way that constellations gradually surface in the deepening night sky.

This thought may have brought me comfort, sitting enclosed (most likely) in a cloud of my own cigarette smoke, and guessing rhapsodically at truths I could not have hoped to know, though of course I did not need that comfort then. Now, when the one true record of my life seems at risk of erasure, the scientist in me might be reassured by the insistent, universal logic of the process, a charteable perfection: as the breadth of my remembered life decreases, so increases the force and vividness of those memories that remain, the two lines of hairlike thinness crossing somewhere on that infinite plane, extending infinitely. The rational comfort is there, reason's way out; but I find that I am more content to simply wander the well-worn paths I have wandered countless times before, to trace my way back through familiar roads that have led me faithfully to this point.

This is my most beautiful memory. It may be my first, though time has long ceased to be linear--an unsurprising consequence when little lies ahead, and the mind turns back. I am sitting in the garden. Under me is the grass, above the sky. My mother hands me an egg--perhaps it is Easter--and I carry it to where the tulips stand in straight rows, their flowers closed so early in the spring. And here is where memory, that devilish trickster, that laughing ghost, refutes all reason, meaning, sense, for the image of those green stalks arching upward to cupped, yellow hands has endured through all the joy and waste of my life. Of all that I have seen, I know that this will be the last to go: a blue egg, and a perfect yellow bulb.

The Enigma

If works of art have manifestos, they are revealed in their first moments and their last. An artist with a fine ear can suggest the breadth and the wholeness of the work to come in the first line, the first shot, and return us to that wholeness in its final moments. The Wrestler begins with an orgiastic array of newspaper headlines, rave flyers, and then a sequence twenty years later in which we follow the heaving, weathered wrestler through narrow halls into a high school gym. What intrigues me here is not what we see, but what we don't see - his face. Then, a fan appears, tells him he was his first match, and the camera tilts to reveal the hint of a profile - ah, I think, the fan melts him a little, here we get to see the man - but the moment passes, and the camera focuses again on his back, following as he walks out, walks on.

The movie falls into the perennial category of the biopic, a genre that all but promises to show us the hero's highest and lowest moments, his worst humiliations and his most private epiphanies. We see all of these, but still the camera returns to his back again and again, reminding us, maybe, that we are no closer to the man than the spectators who line his ring. We see him, in a long unbroken shot, walk from the staff bathroom of a grocery store through a depressing series of rooms and staircases to arrive at an open doorway: the portal to his new life behind the deli counter. This scene, powerful in itself, gains in significance when placed in the context of another, famous scene: the long unbroken shot in Scorcese's Goodfellas that follows Henry and Karen past the long line outside a nightclub through a back door, down a long staircase and right to the edge of the stage, the best seat in the house. Henry is a new initiate into the mafia, and here the camera shows us the ease with which things fall out of his way, the peripherality of the world when Henry and his girl are at its centre. In The Wrester, the walk becomes a long, anonymous descent into shame.

We see, maybe, things that his fans don't see - this moment, his many rejections at the hands of the few he cares to love, or thinks he loves - but does this mean that we know him? Almost all movies are based on the premise that we will understand and feel that we know these characters enough to care about what happens to them; this is both an explicit goal of writers (make your characters real) and a draw for audiences. But if we think of these characters as real people, as we are meant to, then isn't there something arrogant at the heart of the whole enterprise, that we can enter a theatre for two hours and say that we know the full measure of another person? We see what we are meant to see, but this does not mean that we know, and above all we have not gained the right to say we deserve to know.

Why should the wrestler tell us more than we need, or more than he wishes to divulge? The ending of The Wrestler cuts us off at a point where we may most want to know more, and this, understood along with the movie's opening scenes, becomes the source of its incredible poignancy and emotional power. For however involving a movie may be that shows us a character's naked interior, far more involving is a movie whose central character holds something back, out of dignity and pride. For the first time, the act of leaving the theatre felt, to me, somehow genuine - we do not know this man, we have only encountered him, and now we all exit our seats and return to our own, private lives, knowing little more than we did when we entered.

A fine balance

Some words are more interesting than others. I was reminded of this forcibly when I saw the trailer to the new movie Disgrace, based on a J. M. Coetzee novel. Single-word titles are always a tricky situation, because a writer’s craft is essentially one of arrangement – the true but annoying phrase “the music is between the notes” can equally be said of words. When you have a title with just one word, there is nothing you can do to add to its poetry, and so the task becomes one of selection rather than arrangement. Can your single word carry a book? Not all of them can.

Disgrace is a word I always thought I knew, until I saw the trailer. Putting a single word into a title is like putting it under a microscope, or hitting it with a floodlight – it becomes disassociated from other words, and bares itself for inspection. For instance, until now, I never thought of “disgrace” as a word with a prefix; it was just a single unit, like “honour,” which my thesaurus tells me is its antonym. But now I look at its two parts, “dis” and “grace,” and the word changes completely. It now becomes a word that means through negation, like “unnerve” or “misplace” – it has no definition, but rather un-definition.

The word itself continues to propel us down this path. Understood this way, “disgrace” is a negation of “grace,” which I find surprising. Have you ever thought of disgrace as the opposite of “grace”? What is grace? I want to steer clear of etymology and dictionary definitions as much as possible. It may be that they will help clarify, but I’m interested in my personal experience with these words and the strangeness of their meaning. Honour may be personal, but disgrace as its opposite strikes me as a social construct – disgraced by your family, your community. Grace is a much more interesting word than honour, I think, because it’s harder to pin down. To me it suggests elegance, simplicity, and what I can only describe as a profound awareness of mortality. To dis- a word whose definition is so fragile and ephemeral is almost a violent act, a collapse of all its subtlety of meaning into a monochrome negative.

But the negative, too, is interesting, because dis- is only one of many such prefixes. What if the word was not disgrace, but ungrace? Un is flat, neutral, mathematical – hinge/unhinge, wind/unwind, do/undo. It passes no judgment, adds no further meaning; it’s like a switch. Mis-, as in place/misplace, apprehend/misapprehend, always has a sense of mistake to it, of something not gone right. De- implies a reversal, a kind of rewind through time – deconstruct, desensitize – and is a less personal prefix than mis-. Which brings us to dis-. Dismantle, displace, disembark. There is something wilful about the prefix, a sense of human agency that doesn’t come through with the others. A useful comparison is misplace and displace – one is an accident, the other is a deliberate act, and I can’t help but think of the word disturb, which lies at the heart of all these dis- words.

What does it mean, then, to disgrace? The more I think about the word, the more unsettled I feel. I’m not exactly sure what grace is, but I know it’s a quality that I should aspire to. There is a rightness, a fineness and a beauty to it, that is smeared by that most deliberate and therefore cruel of prefixes; witness the sounds of the syllables, the “dih” and the “gray” both washed out by sibilance. The word is a terrible smear, terrible because it is personal and wilful, and gives us the intact word “grace” in the second syllable but shatters its sense with the first.

I am constantly amused and annoyed by single-word titles of romantic fiction novels, like Heartbeat or Lightning or Bittersweet or what have you (these all generated by an Amazon search for “Danielle Steel”). They pale under the spotlight, reveal their clumsiness and lack of depth. You delve into them, and hit a wall. A word like disgrace, by comparison, invites deeper and deeper listening. A title is always a risk, but a good writer, one that is sensitive to the musicality of words, can sort through the thousands of words that are dumb and find the one, the right one, that speaks.