To Be and to Have (Être et avoir)

There are numerous miniature delights in this film, yet perhaps the most magnificent scene comes during a springtime thunderstorm. A sixtyish teacher (Georges Lopez) accompanies two students with two umbrellas from the door of his schoolhouse to a waiting van, a much more complicated task than one would imagine. The two children are not nearly as different in age as some of his other pupils, yet one of them follows his instructions precisely, covers his head with his satchel, and understands the principle of the fragile device keeping him dry; the other, however, seems to get none of this, even though a small child instinctively knows what to do when it rains. A microcosm for Lopez's remarkable world, at once tiny and enormously large.

The smallness comes from the location of our documentary, rural France (we begin and end our visit with cows and green fields as interminable as Sahara dunes). Without a spot of research you would not guess that the population of Saint-Étienne-sur-Usson numbers no more than a few hundred, in no small part to the warmth Lopez imparts to both his immaculate classroom and his pupils, ages four to ten. At the beginning, we have a lesson in orthography using a word that every French child will have mastered before he sets foot in school; later, Lopez will teach his youngest prodigies the male and female versions of "friend." That the children of different ages have to interact and yet retain more than a little discipline and decorum in that interaction does not bother them, and it certainly doesn't bother Lopez. He is courteous, caring, immeasurably patient, and perhaps most importantly, perfectly calm. His voice only goes up in mock emotion or to emphasize a part of a sentence not quite understood. At one point we are told that he shares teaching duties with a certain Tatiana, but no evidence of such partition ever manifests itself. When the younger ones are playing (Lopez understands they will learn nothing if they are browbeaten all day), the older ones are assigned projects that harness some of their strengths as well as delve into their weaknesses. We get little of the home life of the students apart from a quick glance into the farmhouse of the class heavyweight, Julien. Julien helps his mom sweep the stalls of their farm then struggles with her through his math homework with an alarming lack of confidence – perhaps because every wrong answer is met with the back of her hand (another relative suggests the equation, "What's six smacks a day for two days?"). Julien has a tense relationship with his only coeval, Olivier, who is more sensitive and therefore more the victim than the bully. When we find out Olivier's secret towards the film's end, we nod in recognition. Such are the simple concerns of children, rarely mysterious, cynical, or evil. Their pain is reflected in their attitude, and a great teacher like Lopez knows the truth before they sob it to him quietly.

About two-thirds through, our documentary halts its depiction of daily events to interview the schoolmaster. A man of infinite serenity, Lopez surveys the plight of his father, a farmhand from Andalusia and, as he puts it, "what we call an immigrant." His father, like all good parents, especially those of humble means, only wanted his son to have a better life than he did. And Lopez always knew what he wanted to do. He never boasts that he was especially talented as a schoolchild, although if the aim of education is to prepare one for adult life, then few could have been as successful. "I used to love being in school so much as a child," he says, "that I would spend my free time playing the teacher for other kids, even some my age." The pleasure that crosses his lips as he relates this oddity is not one of self-satisfaction, but of contentment with the world. How can the world be wicked if it allowed him to identify his vocation as a child and pursue it with such zeal? And aren't children the future of this world? His father died twenty years ago, right before he arrived in Saint-Étienne-sur-Usson, but Lopez has been teaching for thirty-five years and is only eighteen months away from retirement. Upon hearing him confess his plans, his children resort to a stereotypically French fail-safe strategy and threaten to strike.

It is perhaps sad that the film engendered a lengthy legal dispute which can easily be researched online, a dispute motivated, it should be said, not by finances but by what is perceived as a breach of privacy. What is more interesting is the film's title, a pair of helping verbs, to wit, the two ways to conjugate compound verbs in French. You could also say that some things are and some things have things that are; perhaps there are people who are themselves owing to personality and people whose personality is based on their possessions. We are never told whether Lopez has a family or whether, like a nun or priest, he has simply adopted a community as his own. Nothing interrupts our enjoyment of the quiet moments shared by trees and snow, the plain road, the simple beauty of winter. Lopez seems in harmony with all these pacific elements, as if his wisdom were as natural as the rapport that the children develop because they understand that squabbling and pouting will never take them far in this life or any other. They cook together, breaking eggs and pouring flour; they correct each other in the mildest way; they rarely tease or push – and such instances are met with swift intervention by Lopez. And what of the turtle seen crawling through the schoolhouse at the film's beginning, or the vivarium of chelonians seen later on? A mawkish image for the torpor of modern education? As it were, it most likely indicates that for some a vocation is not thrust upon them but grows within. And if the beauty of the world is within you, you will remark little difference between a tiny little town in France and the sunset beaches of Tahiti. Not that everyone has any interest in Tahiti.   

Baudelaire, "Les chats"

A work ("Cats") by this French poet.  You can read the original here.

The fervent rake, the austere sage,                    
Both grow enamored, as years pass,                          
With cats' soft force in proud home's cage,                      
Like they, oft cold in sloth's morass.                       

With knowledge carnal and of book,                        
They seek the silent shadow's gloom,  
Where Erebus their thralldom took             
For messengers of coming doom.    

And when asleep, their noblesse beams          
As Sphinxes stretched in lonesome night,       
Who seem to rest in endless dreams;   

And magic sparks caress their spine,              
And mystic pupils are gilded bright                                
With obscure hints of pelage fine.

The Closet

One of the most puzzling things about adolescence is the division between the in-crowd and the rabble. Puzzling, I should add, only when you are a confirmed member of the latter grouping; the popular and the admired comport themselves as if their unquestionable status were captioned by this famous motto. The more attentive among the uncool, however, quickly notice that the difference lies in not what is said and done but in the actor himself. The silliest pun can become a shibboleth, the stupidest gesture a signal, the cruelest prank an indication of superiority. What is particularly remarkable about adolescence and its conspiracies is how uncompromisingly bland the stratagems behind them seem once we reach adulthood. Not one joke, not a single sadistic moment will be worth a farthing to a mature and confident twentysomething who sees through cliques and clucks as any of us now should. How odd then that so many of adolescence's wicked games continue undeterred well into our greying years, and how many poor saps remain the subject of their colleagues' scorn. Which brings us to this charming film.

Our hero is François Pignon (the perfectly cast Daniel Auteuil), even if his heroism should be immediately questioned and harpooned. Though a cognate with "pinion," there is a certain contempt with which his surname is pronounced that English does not quite contain, but which suggests a cross between an irritating clink and an onion. Pignon is divorced from a loathsome shrew (Alexandra Vandernoot), whose one good deed in her entire existence may very well have been the birth of their son, Franck. The problem is that Franck, like the rest of humanity apparently, is convinced his father is an incorrigible loser. For his part Pignon definitely provides him with ample evidence. His job at a rubber factory in the accounting department has been for twenty years his only steady beam in a life of avalanches and cave-ins, if one considers his daily parking and coffee debacles to constitute a success. Nevertheless, it is not hard to detect that Pignon is a kind man, as are most pariahs if only because they cannot afford or do not know how to effectuate any other type of behavior. Pignon grins and bears his cruel fate because he has never really managed to succeed at anything. Were he in some isolated, underdeveloped village in an impoverished or war-ravaged nation with little hope of escape, we would hardly begrudge him his despair; but with a fine income, a modest but nice apartment, and a healthy existence in one of the richest countries in the world, the problem lies to a great extent with him. 

Why does Pignon come to the office every day and succumb to his co-workers' sneers and taunts as if he deserved them? Why do all the men at his job think him unmanly and all the women think him boring? Perhaps because when one is insecure but wishes to conceal such misgivings and fears – and most of us huddle under that large circus tent – nothing makes one more liverish than a fool who accepts his insecurities and does nothing to combat or hide them. In other words, we hate this person because he comes off as the worst and most cowardly manifestation of ourselves. Pignon draws the ire most readily of the neckless thug Félix Santini (Gérard Dépardieu). Santini mysteriously holds the position of head of personnel, something akin to a human resources director, even though his hobbies are rugby and the belittlement of lesser beings. Since sports and cruelty are the time-honored pursuits of all high school jock bullies, Santini fulfils a stereotype that allows us to despise him and gravitate towards Pignon. While Santini smashes in his co-workers' teeth in another bone-crushing practice session, Pignon finds and adopts an adorable kitten who turns up one day on his balcony – just as, I might add, he was considering an unforgivable sin. And why such self-loathing? Because Pignon just discovered that, after twenty servile years, his neck is slated for the guillotine. 

The kitten will be traced to a new neighbor, Jean-Pierre Belone (Michel Aumont), who just so happens to be a retired labor psychologist. For some people, work and its associated routines are coterminous, in which case retirement results in complete severance from the tasks of yesteryear; for others, of course, they will always practice what they have practiced until their last, wheezing breaths. Belone is someone who likes listening to people's problems because he truly believes there is no quandary he cannot solve. He understands Pignon's predicament all too well, having likely sat through months of such twaddle in humoring whiny patients, but this time something about the misery of his neighbor summons the altruist from within him and he offers Pignon a very odd piece of advice: spread the rumor that he is gay. The reasoning, in our politically correct days, might be obvious enough; but a rubber factory by definition boasts a clientele that, well, likes its rubbers: firing a man who has just outed himself would then be nothing less than a public relations nightmare. Belone goes one giant step further when he recommends that Pignon anonymously send touched-up photos to his workplace (Belone already has a template in mind). The gambit is taken, the pawn sacrificed (Pignon also has some affinity with the French word for this least powerful of chess-pieces), and Pignon goes into work not having changed a hair on his pointy head yet having assumed a shift of mythic proportions. The women at work, especially the dishy Ms. Bertrand (Michèle Laroque), are irrationally drawn to the clandestine Pignon as if he were an island to be discovered. Santini's transformation is even more radical and provides the film with some of its most impeccable humor, as does a certain parade that Franck happens to catch on television, imbuing him with newly-found respect for his father – and further complications need not be mentioned.     

The Closet exploits one of the great premises of fiction: that the person so easily pigeonholed might be playing a master role. In past times, the secret involved subterfuge and espionage, but we have moved on from such undeservedly romantic notions of what lies in the heart of men. Now the secret may be sexuality; it may even be, as a metaphor for the wickedness of the twentieth century, that the person in question is actually of another religion, whose revelation would transform his public image irreversibly. A literary critic might underscore the need for any ambitious work to sustain at least two wholly plausible readings to be memorable and worthwhile, yet to the skeptical mind another question surely arises. Is not every human form a mixture of multiple themes, multiple vices, regret and joy, or are we all just simple beasts consigned to simple boxes for future filing? How about the erstwhile cool cats that all too often seem to have peaked during those same dominating years? Filed away in a factory closet that, presumably, no one would ever find.

Rimbaud, "Les corbeaux"

A work ("The ravens") by this French poet.  You can read the original here. 

When prairies, Lord, breathe but cold words,
And ravaged hamlets sleep in peace,            
And angelus bells hang unheard,   
Upon unflowered, waning leas, 
Let fall from your grey monstrous skies                 
That dear and tasty raven flesh.

Strange army of malicious cries,             
The frigid winds attack your nests!
Along the yellowed rivers' roll  
Upon the Calvary's broad bend,
Above the gullies and the holes,          
Disperse and rally, foe or friend!

Upon the fields of France they feed,
Where sleep the dead of yesteryear, 
And thousands swirl in wintry greed                        
So that each passer-by may fear!    
Be now the herald of our yoke,              
Our black funereal bird of harm!

O holy saints atop the oak,     
Lost masts amidst the evening charm,
Leave warblers of the month of May                          
To those led on by woods' retreat, 
Bestride the grass they aim to stay         
A sad and futureless defeat.

Bergson, "False problems"

An essay ("Les faux problèmes") by this French philosopher. You can read the original as part of this collection.

Now let us close this overly long parenthesis, which we had to open to show to what degree conceptual thought has to be reformed and sometimes even discarded to be able to arrive at a more intuitive philosophical approach. We said that this philosophy will most often turn away from the social vision of the object already created; instead, it will ask us to participate mentally in the act of creation. It will place us, therefore, on this particular spot, in the direction of the divine. As it were, it is quite human that the labor of individual thought would accept its insertion into social thought and use preexisting ideas like any other tool furnished by the community. Yet there is already something quasi-divine in the effort, however humble, of a mind who reinserts itself into the life force which generates societies that generate ideas.

This effort will exorcize certain ghosts of problems which have plagued the metaphysicist, that is to say, each one of us. I am talking about those alarming and insoluble problems which have more to do with that which is not than with that which is. Such is the problem of the origin of being: "How can it be that something – material, mind, God – exists? There must have been a cause, and a cause of a cause, and so on indefinitely." And so we continue from cause to cause; and if we stop it is not because our reason does not look beyond, but rather because our imagination closes its eyes, as if above an abyss, to escape the vertigo. And so persists the problem of order in general: "Why should there be an ordered reality in which our thought is recovered as if in a mirror? Why isn't the world incoherent?" I say that these problems refer to that which is not more than with that which is. We would never be surprised, as it were, that something exists – material, mind, God – if we did not implicitly admit that it would be possible for nothing to exist. We figure – or better, we think we figure – that being came to fill a void and that nothingness logically preceded being: primordial reality – what we call material, mind, or God – would then add itself to this, a scenario which remains incomprehensible. Similarly, we would never ask why order exists if we did not think we had conceived of a disorder which would submit to reality and which, consequently, would precede it, at least ideally. Thus order would need to be explained, whereas disorder rightly would not require explanation. 

This is the point of view that we risk taking as long as we only seek to understand. But let us try additionally to create (apparently, we can only do that through thought). When we dilate our will which we tend to reabsorb into our thoughts and sympathize more with the creative effort, these incredible problems retreat, diminish, and disappear. And that is because we sense that divinely creative willpower or thought is too rich and full, in its immensity of reality, for the idea of an absence of order or an absence of being to be able only to graze it. Representing the possibility of absolute disorder, and even more so of nothingness, would mean saying that it could not be the being of everything, and that would be a weakness incompatible with its nature, which is force. The more we consider the matter, the more abnormal and morbid seem the doubts which torment a normal and sane man. Let us recall the doubter that closes his window then returns to verify the closing, then verifies the verification, and so forth. If we were to ask him his reasons, he would reply that he could have reopened the window each time he tried as best he could to close it. And if he is a philosopher, he would intellectually transpose the hesitation in his behavior into this formulation of the problem: "How can one be sure, definitely sure, that one has done what one wanted to do?" But the truth is that his power to act is wronged, and here is where he suffers: he only had a semi-desire to carry out the act and that is why the act leaves him with nothing more than semi-certainty. Now can we solve the problem this man has given himself? Apparently not, but we will not give him such a problem: herein lies our superiority. At first glance, I would be able to believe that there is more in him than in me because both of us close the window, yet it is only he who raises a philosophical question. But the question with which he tasks himself is in reality nothing more than a negative; it is not more, but less; it is a deficit of willpower. This is precisely the effect that certain "big problems" have upon us when we place ourselves in the context of creative thought. They tend towards zero as we approach this context, being nothing more than the distance between the context and ourselves. And so we discover the illusion of the person who thinks he is doing more by tasking himself with such questions than by not tasking himself. It is very much like imagining that there is more in a half-consumed bottle than in a full bottle because the latter only contains wine, whereas the former contains both wine and emptiness.

But as soon as we intuitively perceive the truth, our reason resurfaces, corrects itself, and intellectually formulates its mistake. It has received the suggestion; it provides the check. Just like the diver on the ocean floor will feel and touch the wreck pointed out to him by the pilot high up the air, so will our reason immersed in the conceptual environment verify from point to point, through contact, analytically, what had been the object of a synthetic and supraintellectual vision. Without any warning from outside, the thought of a possible illusion would not have even grazed it because the illusion made up part of its nature. Shaken from its sleep, it will analyze the ideas of disorder, of nothingness and its congenerics. And it will recognize – if only for a moment, as the illusion will then immediately appear dispelled – that we cannot suppress an arrangement without another arrangement's taking its place, or replace one material without the substitution of another. Therefore "disorder" and "nothingness" really denote a presence – the presence of a thing or an order that does not interest us, which disappoints our effort or our attention. And it is our disappointment that is expressed when we call this presence an absence. In such a case, talking about the absence of all order and of all things – that is to say, of absolute disorder and absolute nothingness – would mean saying words devoid of sense, flatus vocis, since a suppression is simply a substitution envisaged on one of two sides, and the abolition of all order or of all things is a substitution of one side, the idea that has as much existence as that of a round square. So when the philosopher speaks of chaos and nothingness, he is doing nothing more than moving into the order of speculation – taken to the absolute and emptied there of all sense, of all effective content – two ideas made for practice which would then refer to a determined type of material or order, but not to all order and not to all material. From this point of view, what is to become of the two problems of the origin of order and the origin of being? They vanish; they vanish because they are only asked if we imagine being and order as "occurring," and consequently if we imagine nothingness and disorder as possible or at least conceivable. As it were, they are nothing more than words, a mirage of ideas.

May reason be penetrated by this conviction and be delivered from this obsession – only then will human thought breathe. It will no longer task itself with questions which retard its further progress.* It witnesses these difficulties vanish one by one, such as, for example, ancient Skepticism and modern criticism. It may also arrive at the side of Kantian philosophy and the "theories of knowledge" which emanate from Kantianism – and it doesn't stop there. As such, the very aim of The Critique of Pure Reason is to explain how a defined order can add itself to materials that are allegedly incoherent. And we know the price that we would pay for such an explanation: the human mind would impose its form on a "sensitive diversity" emanating from who knows where; the order which we find in things would be that which we ourselves impose. As a result, science would be legitimate but relative to our ability to know, and metaphysics would be impossible because there would be no knowledge beyond that of science. In this way, the human mind would be relegated to a corner like a schoolchild told to stand in the corner in punishment, prohibited from turning his head to see reality in the way it really exists. And there's nothing more natural if we have not noticed that the idea of absolute disorder is contradictory or, better, non-existent, a simple word by which we designate an oscillation of mind between two different orders. From this point of view, it is absurd to suppose that disorder logically or chronologically precedes order. The merit of Kantianism is to have developed this idea in all its consequences and presented it in its most systematic form, that of a natural illusion. But it has conserved it: Kantianism is in fact based upon this concept. Shed this illusion and we immediately bring back the human mind by science and metaphysics, by knowledge and by the absolute. 

Thus we return to our starting point. We said that we needed to take philosophy to a higher level of precision, to place it in a position to resolve more specific problems, to make it an auxiliary and, if needed, a reformer of positive science. No more big system which embraces everything possible and sometimes also the impossible! Let us content ourselves with the real, material and mind. But let us also ask our theory to encompass the real so tightly that nothing, no other interpretation may slip between them. There will therefore be only one philosophy like there is only one science. Both will be created by means of a collective and progressive effort. And it is true that a perfection of the philosophical method will be imposed, symmetric and complementary to that which science once obtained.

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* When we recommend a state of soul in which such problems vanish, let it be understood that we are only doing this to the problems which give us vertigo because they put us in the presence of the void. The quasi-animalistic condition of a being who never asks himself a single question is another matter, as is the semi-divine state of a mind who is not tempted to evoke, by an effect of human infirmity, artificial problems. For this privileged way of thinking the problem is always at the point of arising but is always arrested, whereby what is properly intellectual is stopped by its intellectual equivalent which sparks its intuition. The illusion is neither analyzed nor dissipated because it is not declared; yet it would be if it were declared; and these two antagonistic possibilities which are of an intellectual order are cancelled intellectually for not leaving room for anything apart from an intuition of the real. In the two cases we have cited it is the analysis of the ideas of disorder and nothingness which provide the intellectual equivalent of the intellectualist illusion.