Deeblog

Part one of a short story ("Letter to a young lady in Paris") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

Andrée, truly, I did not want to come live in your apartment on Suipacha street.  Not so much for the bunnies, but rather because it pains me to intrude upon a closed order, built up through the finest mosquito nets, those which in your house preserve the music of the lavender, the fluttering of a powder puff, the playing of the violin and the viola in Rará's little room.  I resent entering a place that someone who lives beautifully has furnished as the visible reiteration of her soul: books here (on one side Spanish, in French and English on the other); green cushions there; on that precise part of the coffee table, a crystal ashtray that seems to be a section of a soap bubble; and always some perfume, some sound, some rising plants, a photograph of a dead friend, the ritual tea trays and sugar cube tongs. 

Oh, dearest Andrée, how difficult it is to be opposed -- and in so doing, resign oneself to the complete submission of one's own being -- to the meticulous order that a woman installs in her frivolous residence.  How guilty one would feel if one took a little metal cup and placed on the other end of the coffee table simply because of the English dictionaries one had brought over to this end, where they needed to be, within easy reach.  Moving this cup counts as a horrible, unexpected red amidst Ozenfant's modulation, as if all the double basses' strings suddenly snapped in unison like a terrifying whip at the most silent moment of a Mozart symphony.  Moving this cup alters the relations of the entire house, of every object with every other, of every moment of its soul with the soul of the entire house and its distant inhabitant.  Scarcely can my fingers approach a book, absorb the cone of light from a lamp, or take the top off a music box, without a feeling of outrage and defiance passing before my eyes like a flock of sparrows.

You know full well why I came to your house, to this quiet, popular noonday salon.  Everything seems so natural, as is always the case when the truth is not known.  You left for Paris; I was left with this apartment on Suipacha street.  So let us work out a satisfactory plan of mutual convenience until September brings you back to Buenos Aires and forces me to another house where, perhaps ... but this is not why I am writing you.  It seems fair to tell you that I am sending you this letter because of the bunnies, because I like writing letters, and perhaps because it is raining.

I moved last Thursday, at five o'clock in the afternoon, between fog and tedium.  I have closed so many suitcases in my life and made so many trips that have ended up nowhere, that Thursday was a day filled with shadows and straps.  Because whenever I see the straps of a suitcase it is as if I were seeing shadows, elements of a whip that lash me indirectly, in the most subtle and horrible way.  But I packed my bags, informed the maid who had just moved me in, and went up in the elevator.  Somewhere between the first and second floor I felt that I was going to vomit the first bunny.  This had never been explained before, do not think for disloyalty; but, of course, one does not simply tell people that from time to time one vomits up bunnies.  As always, I managed to do all this alone, keeping it to myself just as so many proofs of what happens (or what one makes happen) in complete privacy are kept.  Do not reproach me, Andrée, I beg you, do not reproach me.  From time to time I happen to vomit up a bunny.  This is no reason not to live in a particular house; nor for someone to have to be embarrassed, live in isolation, and walk the streets in silence.

When I feel like I'm going to vomit a bunny, I put my fingers in my mouth like an open forceps and wait to feel that warm fuzziness rise in my throat like an effervescence of liver salt.  Everything is rapid and hygienic; everything takes place in the briefest of moments.  I remove my fingers from my mouth and they come out holding a white bunny by the ears.  The bunny seems happy: it's a normal, perfect bunny, only very small, like a chocolate bunny, the only difference is that it is white and entirely a bunny.  I place the bunny in the palm of my hand and raise his fur by caressing him with my fingers.  With the look of a bunny perfectly content with having been born, he responds by pressing and rubbing his snout against my skin, moving it in that silent, ticklish grinding particular to a bunny snout in the skin of one's hand.  He searches for something to eat, so I (I speak of that time when this took place in my house on the outskirts) take him with me out on the balcony and place him in the big flowerpot next to a clover which I just so happened to have planted.  The bunny raises his ears high and envelops the tender clover with a rapid spin of his snout, and I know that I could leave him and go, continuing for a while a life indistinct from the lives of those who buy their bunnies on a farm.

Between the first and second floors, Andrée, as if announcing what my life would be in your house, I knew that I was going to vomit up a bunny.  Consequently I was afraid (was it fear or surprise?  No, fear of this surprise, perhaps) because before leaving my house but two days before, I had vomited up a bunny, and so I was safe for a month, five weeks, maybe for six weeks with a bit of luck.  Now you should understand that I have the bunny problem completely resolved.  I planted a clover on the balcony of my other house, vomited up a bunny, placed the bunny by the clover, and at the end of the month when I suspected that at any moment ... and so I would then give the bunny as a present to Mrs. de Molina, who believed it to be a 'hobby' and said nothing.  When, in the other flowerpot, a tender, propitious clover began to grow, I waited insouciantly for that morning when the tickle of rising fur would dam my throat.  And from that moment on the new bunny would repeat the life and habits of its predecessor.  Habits, Andrée, are the concrete forms of rhythm, the quota of rhythm that helps us live.  Vomiting up bunnies was not so terrible if one had already entered the invariable cycle, the method. 

You might like to know the reason for all this work, the reason for all these clovers and for Mrs. de Molina.  It would have been preferable to kill the bunny immediately and ...ah, but you really need to vomit up just one of them yourself, take it with your fingers, and place it upon your open palm as it clings to you for this very act, for the ineffable aura of your hardly broken proximity.  One month is distance enough; in one month it will have grown, its hair will be long, it will have savage eyes and leap all about the place.  A complete and absolute difference, Andrée: one month makes a rabbit, it really makes a rabbit.  But that first minute, when a warm, bubbling ball conceals an inalienable presence ... Like a poem in those first minutes, a fruit from a night in Edom: more like you than you yourself ... Yet at the same time, so not like you, so isolated and distant in his plain white world the size of a letter.

I decided nevertheless to kill the newborn bunny.  At this point I might have been living in your house for four months already: four -- perhaps, with some luck, three -- spoonfuls of alcohol in the snout.  (Did you know that mercy allows one to murder a bunny instantaneously by giving it a spoonful of alcohol to drink?   His flesh will evince the flavor later, they say, although I ... three or four spoonfuls of alcohol then the bathroom or one more bag joining the rest of the trash.)

As we crossed the third floor, the bunny was moving in my open palm.  Sara was waiting upstairs so as to help get the suitcases in ...  How can one explain this to her as a whim, as a pet store?  I wrapped the bunny in my handkerchief and placed it in the pocket of my overcoat, leaving the overcoat unbuttoned so as not to stifle the animal.  It was hardly moving.  Its tiny consciousness ought to have been revealing important facts: that life is a movement upwards with a final click; and that life is also a low sky, white, enveloping, and smelling of lavender, at the bottom of a warm well.

Sara saw nothing: she was too fascinated by the arduous problem of adjusting her sense of order to my garment bag, my papers, and my offhand manner in the face of her elaborate explanations which teemed with the expression, 'for example.'  I was scarcely able to lock myself in the bathroom; now I would kill it.  A fine zone of heat surrounded the handkerchief; the bunny was utterly white and, I believe, more beautiful than the others.  He was not looking at me, but simply remained fidgety and happy, which is the most horrible way to look at me.  I locked it in the medicine chest and went back to unpacking my bags, disoriented but not unhappy, not guilty, not washing my hands to strip them of a final convulsion.

I understood that I could not kill it.  But that same evening I vomited up a black bunny.  And two days later a white one.  And on the fourth night, a gray bunny.

For the first few minutes of this film we simply hover.  We are drawn down slowly to a street mime, then to a respectable-looking gentleman in a trench coat holding a coffee cup who makes sure that the street mime doesn't accost him.  Just as that gentleman comes into focus, however, we start hearing some odd sounds (we are still, it should be noted, a low-flying hawk).  Soon we are taken to the possible source of those sounds who is, of course, perfectly soundless, and the crosshairs of his long, slender sniper rifle.  Yet this is not a rifle.  Only after enduring a variety of angles do we understand that positioned on the roof of an elegant San Francisco office building is an ultramodern microphone.  We are still in the process of witnessing an assassination, albeit one of character not of mortal coil, and the device's symbolism as a weapon cannot be understated.  What we thought was a rifle is indeed trying to open hearts and minds, to make them bleed for all to see – or at least for some to hear.  The targets are a young couple, Ann (Cindy Williams) and Mark (Frederic Forrest), and the mastermind behind this eavesdropping operation is a respectable-looking gentleman in a trench coat by the name of Harry Caul (Gene Hackman).

Harry, we soon learn, is a superstar in his field.  To avail myself of a contemporary analogy – we are ironically nearing the end of the Nixon era, although Coppola conceived and composed The Conversation years before – Harry is the Jackal of all wiretapping trades.  His assignment, which he has accepted with the same sang-froid as so many previous jobs, is to follow Ann and Mark, record every word the lovebirds exchange, remaster the recordings to crystal clarity, then sell them to an unscrupulous corporate aide (a diabolical Harrison Ford).  Harry’s collaborators Stan (John Cazale) and Paul (Michael Higgins) wonder and joke about their subjects because “that’s human nature,” but Harry insists on remaining aloof and impassive.  “The only thing I want from this is a pile of tape,” he says so peremptorily that Stan quits his employ.  After circumstances lead Harry, a guilt-stricken if impious Catholic, to visit his father confessor (a terse scene whose abrupt ending renders it disingenuous), we learn that his vocation has resulted in people getting hurt before.  He doesn’t ask questions of those deep-pocketed and curious enough to hire him, so why should be responsible for the consequences of his snooping?  This trope, the notion of responsibility for taking orders, be they staked on self-preservation or, far more unforgivably, large financial gain, is one of cinema’s and indeed art’s oldest (you may have seen a movie or two about an emotionless ‘driver’ who takes anyone anywhere for exorbitant fees), and it is one that informs the shape and being of Harry Caul.  He may be but a middle-aged nobody, but even middle-aged nobodies can have mistresses (Terri Garr) and hobbies, in Harry’s case, a saxophone always played in accompaniment to, well, a recording.   

With the tapes more or less remastered, Harry makes an appointment with the aide for a cash handoff, especially generous for a day's work and perhaps a week's planning.  But something irks him; something isn't right or, at least, what it appears to be.  Admittedly, the sleek, serpentine aide, whose name is Martin Stett, and his crooked smile do not inspire much confidence.  Harry won't even try an allegedly homemade Christmas cookie until his host has swallowed one and survived.  Stett repeatedly prevents Harry from meeting the corporate director bankrolling this scheme -- so adamantly, in fact, that, if it weren't for his youth, one would have suspected Stett of being the man he claimed to serve.  Somehow, however, we sense that the aide is not the font of evil, but gleefully in the thrall of a greater demon.  Reviewing The Conversation I am convinced Harry changes his mind about just about everything due solely to the timbre of Martin Stett's voice.  To his trained, musical ear so adept at making the finest adjustments to achieve perfect audio, something is hideously wrong.  In Stett he detects a profound wickedness and becomes terrified (the Catholic elements of Harry's personality, which wax and wane at some of the most inopportune moments, may have played a role).  In the film's best scene Harry storms out of Stett's office only to espy someone he never expected to see by the elevators.  As he turns away in surprise he glimpses, at the other end of the long hall, a fuzzy, writhe-like figure gently waving a triumphant envelope.  Stett seems far away, yet as Harry escapes to the elevator the doors close upon the aide's devious grin like the shutters to some witch's cottage.  Thus it is no coincidence that Amy, Harry's unbearably young and unbearably naïve part-time lover, is angelic in every respect and that he subsidizes her apartment with money from people like Stett.  Just as uncoincidental is the fact that his birthday comes on the day on which he achieves his masterpiece of surveillance of those two young lovebirds, because a new life has begun.  Perhaps, however, unbeknownst to Harry.

Other characters float in Harry's vicinity but their invariable aim is to shed light on our protagonist.  Amy's inquiries into Harry's line of work -- her discovery that it was his birthday makes her feel like they have come closer -- exiles her for the rest of the film.  Paul and, in particular, Stan gaze upon Harry in awe, although awe may be the last earthly thing their colleague desires.  Harry may be regarded by people in his field as a hero and a genius, but his passion has not made him wealthy; to liken him to an impoverished poet only appreciated by other poets is more than a bit plausible.  His counterpart, then, must be a rich fraud envious of Harry's untouchable reputation and keen on embarrassing him in front of those who respect him.  We get this cardboard cutout in William P. "Bernie" Moran (Allen Garfield).  Reviewers have praised Garfield's performance, but his every word and gesture is boilerplate, and we are very relieved when he finally completes his mission (humiliating Harry) and disappears.  Yet his annoying presence illuminates aspects of the plot and Harry's scruples, both of which converge in a magnificent warehouse scene where Harry is pursued by Moran's slinky assistant, who turns out to be available on an hourly basis.  Harry and this lady, who is neither young nor old, a perfect way to pass a night, will split some sheets, an encounter that evokes a gorgeous nightmare and an explanation for our hero's surname.

What we have intentionally omitted, of course, is the conversation itself.  Without spoiling what has been revealed in countless reviews, the distinct advantage for the audience of The Conversation -- and indeed, the film would otherwise be unwatchable -- is the pan to Mark and Ann's faces as snippets of dialogue (perhaps the most important has to do with an old hobo) are restored by Harry's wizardry.  Are we privy to emotions that Harry can only imagine, or are we seeing what Harry imagines and which did not happen at all?  That matter is never resolved, even at the end when some loose ends do appear nicely bowed; as such, we must remain at the full mercy of Harry's interpretation.  The innuendo when Harry spends that long and regrettable night with Moran's assistant is heightened by his very conscious choice to fall asleep to the conversation, to let it invade and alter his dreamscape.  Harry, you see, is really a Romantic poet in disguise.  A Romantic poet who, like a cloud, sits upon the air to dart upon his spellbound prey.

Apart from one unfortunate line, this famous story is absolutely perfect -- a miniscule flaw, admittedly, but a telling one.  Nevertheless, The Insanity of Jones still ranks as one of the most spellbinding tales of suspense ever composed, even if its suspense is a matter of when not what.  Its genius resides in its convictions; that is to say, our narrator is utterly convinced that John Enderby Jones can see something we cannot see.   In that particular argument our narrator cannot lose.  What Jones sees, however, and more importantly why, shall remain the subject of unflagging speculation.

Our Jones leads a "strictly impersonal life" in the type of clerical position which, in our modern times renowned for dehumanizing the mediocre with bureaucracy and insignificance, has spawned many a maniac.  We know nothing of his family or his future, in no small part because Jones cares little for what has yet to happen; instead, he is focused on what has already happened.  But if Jones floats in the plainest and most colorless of ponds, what events could possibly have shaped his turning squarely towards the past?  We must answer that question by first understanding what Jones sees as his past:    

Among the things that he knew, and therefore never cared to speak or speculate about, one was that he plainly saw himself as the inheritor of a long series of past lives, the net result of painful evolution, always as himself, of course, but in numerous different bodies each determined by the behaviour of the preceding one.  The present John Jones was the last result to date of all the previous thinking, feeling, and doing of John Jones in earlier bodies and in other centuries.  He pretended to no details, nor claimed distinguished ancestry, for he realised his past must have been utterly commonplace and insignificant to have produced his present; but he was just as sure he had been at this weary game for ages as that he breathed, and it never occurred to him to argue, to doubt, or to ask questions.

Why did he never consider that his sentiments might be flawed?  Do we all from time to time not have doubts about our dearest convictions?  A rather simplistic mind will answer that precisely because Jones does not have doubts is why the story is not called 'The Wisdom of Jones' or 'The Clairvoyance of Jones,' or even plainly 'The Knowledge of Jones.'  But Jones does harbor doubts: he wonders throughout our tale as to whether he may be deceived, especially by a man whom our narrator describes as unflatteringly as possible, a being only known as the Manager.

Perhaps it is important to note that Jones and his supervisor are strangers ("Jones had never exchanged a single word with him, or been so much as noticed ... by the great man"); indeed, in personality they are as opposite as two members of the same species could be.  While Jones remains lean in both physique and conversation, the Manager is fat, myopic, bald, sweaty ("in hot weather a sort of thin slime covered his cheeks") and red-faced, purple-faced "in moments of temper, which were not infrequent."  Lest we think him the epitome of pasty privileges -- the description befits a debauched Roman emperor -- a sidelight on the manager reveals him to be "an excellent business man, of sane judgment and firm will."  What is the truth behind this portraiture?  And why can't the truth be both?  Why can't an oppressive man (our Manager is "coarse, brutal almost to savagery, without consideration for others, and ... often cruelly unjust") who has never sullied his fingers with daily labor also excel in his particular field?  Because we need an unadulterated villain, a monolith of evil, to be able to side with Jones and his instincts about, well, a prior existence in which he and the Manager were acquainted under very different circumstances.  Such ambiguity would never survive a lesser tale; but The Insanity of Jones is not about ambiguity, it is the exemplary short text that can be read two entirely different ways with equal plausibility.  So when Jones retreats as he does every night to his dinner in a French restaurant in Soho, he senses a "half-remembered appointment."  This turns out to be with a former colleague, "an elderly clerk who had occupied the next desk to his own when he first entered the service of the insurance company," a man by the name of Thorpe.  He sits down at Thorpe's table and they engage in serious exchanges, although those in their vicinity do not quite see it that way:

There was a wonderful soothing quality in the man’s voice, like the whispering of a great wind, and the clerk felt calmer at once.  They sat a little while longer, but he could not remember that they talked much or ate anything.  He only recalled afterwards that the head waiter came up and whispered something in his ear, and that he glanced round and saw the other people were looking at him curiously, some of them laughing, and that his companion then got up and led the way out of the restaurant.

Where this lonesome duo ventures and what the ultimate subject of their dialogues involves shall not be revealed here.  Despite his somewhat cadaverous appearance, Thorpe clearly holds some sway over his erstwhile coworker, who acknowledges Thorpe as a key component to an understanding of his multifaceted reality.  That Thorpe "had been dead at least five years" does not bother Jones, although it may indeed bother us.

Reading Blackwood is invariably a rewarding experience because even his missteps are the errors of genius.  The wayward line in Jones's narrative is less of a line and more of a phrase, but it taints the substance of what we are witnessing with wholly unnecessary psychological mumbo-jumbo (mumbo-jumbo is too massive and unwieldy; perhaps we should say mumbo-mini).  What may be most interesting about Mr. Jones is how he resists reveling in publications that would buttress his world view ("he read no modern books on the subjects that interested him") as well as finding acceptance in a group of like-minded individuals ("nor belonged to any society that dabbled with half-told mysteries").  No, no one can quite relate to Jones, because he offers almost nothing to the outside world, firmly ensconced as he is in a realm within.  A realm, I might add, of a thousand screaming souls who all coalesce into the screaming of just one.  

A work ("Spring") by this French man of letters.  You can read the original here.

In frenzy drift long days of love and light!
March and soft smiling April give us spring
In friendly months: May flowers, June burns bright!
Sweet sleeping brooks to poplars in warmth cling, 

Swept like great palms, they curve in tender pleas;  
Yon in the warm, calm woods, a songbird throbs; 
Old nature laughs alone!  And those green trees,
United, glad, now versify their sobs.

Most fresh and gentle dawn shall crown day's rise;
In evening, love is full; at night, we hear
Knells through thick shadows and the blessed skies, 
Eternal joyous singing of one near.

Until May 6th, 2002 (my maternal grandmother's 92nd birthday), the Netherlands was viewed as the European nation in which multicultural integration had proven to be most successful.  Despite a long history as colonizers on four continents the Dutch were economically stable, upwardly mobile (they are widely considered the center of modern European architecture), and generally bereft of the class, race, or religious divisions that usually result in violent crime.  Still, certain voices did not like the Netherlands of tomorrow.  They claimed that all was nice now, but coming borderless years would just saturate what was already one of the world's more densely populated countries.   These immigrants would do all the bad things immigrants are known for doing: pilfering jobs, school desks, and hospital beds, and not giving a lick in return (you may have heard this argument elsewhere).  Some of them will get across our boundaries whatever measures we take, they said, but we should make sure that most of them don't.

The leader of this "they" was not who you might expect.  He was an erstwhile professor of sociology at this university.  He was also completely bald, openly homosexual, a lifelong Catholic, and dressed to the nines on every possible occasion.  To him the word "charismatic" did not apply, it clung.  With dandy–like flourishes, he would remind audiences about the rich intellectual and artistic history of their homeland, which in terms of historical production of great works of art per capita might well rank second in Europe after Greece.  I suppose few people nowadays learn Dutch to delve into Grotius and Erasmus; but the language still holds currency for the student of painting.  And Pim Fortuyn, assassinated by a gunman on May 6th, 2002 after a radio interview, was in every way a Dutch painting.  

I remember Fortuyn's speeches (often shown at length on German television) quite well.  He was knighted with every possible disparaging term for a political conservative; yet it appeared that his views only coincided with traditional right–wingers on the matter of immigration.  The problem perhaps lay in Fortuyn's timing: he railed against Islam, which he saw as a major threat in its fundamentalist manifestations, in the 1990s, a prescient stance in light of the world events during the last nine months of his life.  For that reason he was often accused of fear–mongering and xenophobic exploitation, charges whose truthfulness will ever remain the speculation of biographers.  He was also revered by director Theo Van Gogh, himself a murder victim, and his film presents an alternative to the official explanation of Fortuyn's demise.

I have said little about the film, based on the novel by Tomas Ross (the Dutch master of the historical thriller) because there is little to say that you might not be able to infer from a few clues.  We have an unshaven, heroic photographer (Thijs Römer), a pretty immigrant (Tara Elders) with an ungodly amount of bone structures in her closet (plenty of room there with such a scanty wardrobe), plus the typical assortment of sinister security agents, nosy neighbors, and helpful coworkers.  Somehow this young lady is involved with the animal rights group that slew Fortuyn (the official explanation), although Ross and Van Gogh have other ideas on the subject.  The pieces come together as we might hope with a few twists to alleviate the predictability.  Highlights include a gargantuan wheezing spymaster whose cellular ring tone is a neighing horse, and a one–word Google search that yielded the same results for me as it did for one of the characters.  Who says it's all at random? 

Yet the primary reason to see the film are the dozens of newsclips, mostly of Fortuyn.  On a variety of subjects and often very much to Fortuyn's disadvantage, the clips accompany the action and events as if Fortuyn himself were guiding the investigation of the first peacetime political assassination in the Netherlands in over three hundred years.  What we have in the end is fiction, but the topic has been sufficiently engaged to make us realize what a shock this murder was.  The bust of Pim Fortuyn in Rotterdam reads loquendi libertatem custodiamos -- let us protect the freedom of speech.  A beautiful sentiment, an inalienable right, and perhaps the one right we most often abuse.  When we say things to do purposeful harm, we have lost the sense of self-determination and expression that Fortuyn, for better or for worse, defended until his death.  And with his death?  I think he would agree that with his death came forgiveness and light.

An essay on this Georgian poet by this Russian man of letters and translator from the Georgian.  You can read the original as part of this collection.

Among Baratashvili's poems is "Georgia's Fate."  Its hero, the last Georgian Tsar Heraclius II, is on the cusp of letting his war-plagued homeland fall under Russia's protection.  He excuses such a desire with the understanding that he can spare his country further incursions by its Eastern neighbors.  Once free from violence it could, he imagines, finally enjoy the fruits of peacetime diligence and enlightenment.

This was the Georgia into which Nikoloz Baratashvili, the greatest Georgian poet of the new era, was born.  The Georgian nobility married into the Russian nobility and, in so doing, entered the arena of Russian governmental concerns and the highest intellectual interests of both Petersburg and Europe.  The previously existent Western influence was now strengthened.

The circle of several princely families in which Nikoloz Baratashvili grew up was the same progressive circle where, thanks in all likelihood to Griboedov, both Pushkin and Lermontov ended up in the Georgian Caucasus. 

In addition to this motley eastern foreign land, which Tbilisi certainly offered its visitors, they also encountered a powerful, kindred leaven which evoked life in their souls, propelling to the surface the most natural, the most slumbering, and the most repressed elements from within them.  Everything in this circle was much like it was in Petersburg: wine, cards, razor-sharp wit, French conversation, skirt-chasing, and that audacious pride ever ready to parry the slightest slip into arrogance.  The circle was just as well-acquainted with debts and creditors, hatching plots, and landing in military jails as it was with endless blather, plaintive tears, and the composition, at the age of eighteen, of burning, impetuous verse of unrepeatable spiritualization -- and, after all this, with dying young.

The father of Nikoloz Baratashvili was an impoverished marshal of the Georgian nobility who had squandered his fortune on receptions and banquets.  The life of his son Nikoloz was marked by few happenings and spent in penury and obscurity, the price for his father's luxuries.

Baratashvili was born on November 22, 1816 in Tbilisi.  He studied at a parish school and finished gymnasium.  His dreams of a military career were dashed just like the leg he had broken as a boy, leaving him lame his entire life.  His other wish -- to complete his education at a Russian university -- similarly did not come true.  His father's troubles and the need to support his family forced him to look for work as a government official.  After having served in minor positions with various administrative duties he was appointed as the assistant to a district commander in Ganja in 1845.  On the trip there he fell ill from a particularly pernicious form of malaria that was rampant in the area and died on October 9 of the same year. 

This series of bureaucratic positions diametrically opposes our notions of Baratashvili; in fact, it seems more like his reflection in a crooked mirror.  His true traits were sharp and significant.  These traits persisted in the minds of his contemporaries and were preserved with devotion.

As a child Baratashvili was a mischievous and venturesome lad; in school he was a good chum.  As an adult he would infuriate Tbilisi society with his pranks and the venom behind his mockery.  His habit of telling the truth to people's faces made him seem deranged.

It was the sister of Nino Griboedova, Princess Ekaterina Chavchavadze, whom he really loved.  But she married another man.  He would spend his whole life beset by this festering wound, a wound he salted with the tenderness and zeal of his lyric poetry and the scores he had to settle with the upper echelon of the Georgian aristocracy.  For him the sovereign Mingrelian Princess Dadiani was the beloved, the brightest star that could ever grace his firmament.

Baratashvili was surrounded by literati: Grigol Orbeliani was his uncle; Alexander Chavchavadze a friend of his father's. 

Yet his own writings were accorded so little significance that he could scarcely hope to see them in print in the near future.  His further projects were foiled by his premature demise.  Perhaps the way in which his poetry lies before us does not represent its definitive edition; perhaps the author would have preferred to subject his works to further selection and polishing.  The trace of genius that remained in these poems, however, is so great as to imbue them with perfection arguably more final, more significant than if the author had actually had more time to tend to their appearance.

Baratashvili's lyric poetry is distinguished by its notes of pessimism, motifs of solitude, and the general mood of Weltschmerz.

Happy days and their belief in man and the receptivity of posterity allow artists to express only the main idea in their works, almost not touching upon secondary matters, all in the hope that the reader's imagination alone will fill in the missing details.  Hence we can explain the imprecision in language and fecundity found in the classics, so natural in the ease of their very general and abstract problems.

Artist renegades of a gloomy stripe love talking to the very end.  They are meticulously clear from a lack of faith in the powers of others.  Lermontov's intelligibility is insistent and arrogant.  His details conquer us with almost supernatural force.  Between his hyphens we discover what we should have been left to figure out by ourselves.  This is the magical reading of our thoughts from a distance.  The secret to such an effect was possessed by Baratashvili.

His dreaminess commingled with fragments of life and everyday activity.  In his oeuvre one finds an individual imprint unique to him alone, in which nevertheless the particularities of his age are registered.  His descriptions in "Dusk on Mtatsminda" and "Nights on the Kabakhi" would not have exerted such a magical effect upon us if, along with being descriptions of the state of the soul, they had not been even more astonishing descriptions of nature.  The bursts in the visual element in his peerless, mad, and inspired "Merani" cannot be compared with anything else.  This is the symbol of the faith of a great personality in the throes of struggle, convinced of his immortality and that aim and meaning mark the movement of human history.  

Baratashvili's best verse has already been mentioned above: namely, the poems dedicated to Ekaterina Chavchavadze as well as all those from the final two years of his life, including the stunning "Blue flower."

In 1893 his ashes were transferred from Ganja to Tbilisi.  On October 21, 1945, following the lead of Georgia, his homeland, the entire country solemnly celebrated the centennial of his death.

There is undoubtedly no more romantic vocation than that of the Egyptologist.  Every young soul fascinated with the greatest civilization that ever was will at one time or another have fancied himself a decipherer of ancient riddles and symbols.  After years in splendid scholarly isolation, he will see the fruits of his labor as another gilded tomb is unearthed and another series of mystic rituals uncovered.  Whatever you may think of Ancient Egypt, it owns permanent property in our imagination precisely because so much of it has yet to be explained, the technology of the Pharaohs and their peons being so remarkably advanced (such as the embalming methods, which have never been duplicated) as to make many believe it the achievement of extraterrestrials.  And some elements of the otherworldly surely inform this well-known tale. 

We begin with a brief if cluttered review of the accomplishments of a young British academic by the name of John Vansittart Smith.  Our man may make some claim to lofty provenance, yet the bookends of his nomenclature could not be any more common.  Smith was once an up-and-coming zoologist, a "second Darwin" according to those compulsive labelers we find indigenous to all societies at all times, who eventually turned his attention to chemistry and garnered equal acclaim.  He dabbled in metals -- he is very much an alchemist in his relentless self-aggrandizement -- before shifting specializations once more and joining the Oriental Society.  Soon thereafter he was deemed a full-fledged expert on Ancient Egypt, as if that job description could ever really apply to the subject matter.  It is in this role, then, that our burgeoning academic finds his way to that most enchanting of European metropolises, the City of Lights:

He set himself to collect materials for a work which should unite the research of Lepsius and the ingenuity of Champollion.  The preparation of his magnum opus entailed many hurried visits to the magnificent Egyptian collections of the Louvre, upon the last of which, no longer ago than the middle of last October, he became involved in a most strange and noteworthy adventure.  The trains had been slow and the Channel had been rough, so that the student arrived in Paris in a somewhat befogged and feverish condition.  On reaching the Hotel de France, in the Rue Laffitte, he had thrown himself upon a sofa for a couple of hours, but finding that he was unable to sleep, he determined, in spite of his fatigue, to make his way to the Louvre, settle the point which he had come to decide, and take the evening train back to Dieppe.  Having come to his conclusion, he donned his greatcoat, for it was a raw rainy day, and made his way across the Boulevard des Italiens and down the Avenue de l'Opera.  Once in the Louvre he was on familiar ground, and he speedily made his way to the collection of papyri which it was his intention to consult.

A rainy Paris in October would be heaven enough for anyone with the faintest romantic streak, but we stand at merely the threshold of our discoveries.  Smith proceeds into the museum where our noticeably ornithic scholar ("His high-beaked nose and prominent chin had something of the same acute and incisive character which distinguished his intellect") overhears a snatch of conversation between two Englishmen punctuated by the observation, "What a queer-looking mortal!"  Further comments imply that they may be talking about Smith, whose birdlike features, odd "pecking motion with which, in conversation he threw out his objections and retorts," and general fineness of feature all suggest a resemblance to our titular god.  He turns to find out, "to his surprise and relief," that he was mistaken: the subject of discussion was "one of the Louvre attendants":

He moved his position slightly in order to catch a glimpse of the man's face.  He started as his eyes fell upon it.  It was indeed the very face with which his studies had made him familiar.  The regular statuesque features, broad brow, well-rounded chin, and dusky complexion were the exact counterpart of the innumerable statues, mummy-cases, and pictures which adorned the walls of the apartment.  The thing was beyond all coincidence.  The man must be an Egyptian.  The national angularity of the shoulders and narrowness of the hips were alone sufficient to identify him.

Who this alleged descendant of the pharaohs may be and what secrets he may possess need no further mention on these pages.  What we can say is Smith is such an exemplary student that he retreats to a dark corner of the world's most famous museum to edit his notes on those papyri and watch the soporific twilight limit his ambitions -- and that will do.

Our author is still read with avidity in dozens of languages, but almost exclusively thanks to the immortal glory of perhaps the most recognizable literary figure of all time (elsewhere I bestowed this honor upon this character but may have to retract that comment).  Such is the price of renown: even those of discernible public influence during their lifetimes such as Conan Doyle cannot possibly tame the vicissitudes of taste.  For better or worse Holmes and Conan Doyle will be bound together for all eternity, like Melville and his whale or Nabokov and his mermaid or nymphet or whatever that poor girl was in the end.  The creation outgrows the creator and assumes an uneven proportion of the laurels.  Laurels that (usually posthumously) adorn the brow of the literary genius whom all know by reputation, but not, sadly, by word and deed.  For that reason alone would the judicious reader be wise to explore the other works of Holmes's designer, if only to find passages as soft and menacing as this:

The complete silence was impressive.  Neither outside nor inside was there a creak or a murmur.  He was alone with the dead men of a dead civilisation.  What though the outer city reeked of the garish nineteenth century!  In all this chamber there was scarce an article, from the shrivelled ear of wheat to the pigment-box of the painter, which had not held its own against four thousand years.  Here was the flotsam and jetsam washed up by the great ocean of time from that far-off empire.  From stately Thebes, from lordly Luxor, from the great temples of Heliopolis, from a hundred rifled tombs, these relics had been brought.  The student glanced around at the long-silent figures who flickered vaguely up through the gloom, at the busy toilers who were now so restful, and he fell into a reverent and thoughtful mood.  An unwonted sense of his own youth and insignificance came over him. 

So great is the power of Egypt that it can render even an insufferable egomaniac like Smith helpless and unripe before its magnificent legacy, but I think that was evident from the very beginning.  Four thousand years ago never felt so palpable, so immediately accessible, as when they leapt from the papyrus to the naked, barely trained eye.  Even to an evolutionary Renaissance man like Smith.