Borges, "Prólogo al Elogio de la Sombra"

The beginning ("Prologue to In Praise of Darkness") of a fantastic collection by this Argentine.  You can find the collection here.

Without initial consideration, I have devoted my now-long life to literature, to teaching, to idleness, to the tranquil adventures of conversation, to philology, of which I know little, to the mysterious habit of Buenos Aires, and to the perplexities that, with no small arrogance, are called metaphysics.  Nor has my life lacked the friendship of a certain few, which is the only kind that matters.  I do not think I have a single enemy, and if I have had any, they have never made themselves known to me.  The truth is that the only people who can hurt us are those we love.  Now, at my three-score and ten (in Whitman's phrasing), I put to press my fifth volume of poems.    

Carlos Frías has suggested that I use this prologue to announce my code of aesthetics.  Both my poverty and willfulness are opposed to such advice; I am not the possessor of a code of aesthetics.  Time has taught me a few tricks: avoid synonyms, which have the disadvantage of suggesting imaginary differences; avoid Hispanisms and Argentine coloring, archaisms and neologisms; favor ordinary words over the more surprising; imbed in each story circumstantial features as demanded by the reader of today; simulate minor uncertainties, for if reality is precise memory is most definitely not; narrate the facts (this I learned in Kipling and the Icelandic sagas) as if I did not quite understand them; remember that previous norms are not obligations and that Time will be tasked with abolishing them.  Such devices or traits certainly do not comprise a code of aesthetics.  What is more, I do not believe in any codes of aesthetics; in general they are nothing more than useless abstractions.  They vary according to author and text and have little value apart from being an occasional stimulant or instrument.

This, as mentioned, is my fifth book of verse.  It is reasonable to presume that it will be no better or worse than its forerunners.  With the mirrors, labyrinths and swords expected by my resigned reader come new thematics: old age and ethics.  The latter, as everyone knows, never ceased to preoccupy a certain very dear friend whom literature bestowed upon me, Robert Louis Stevenson.  One of the reasons I prefer the Protestant countries to those of Catholic tradition is their attention to ethics.  Milton wished to educate the children in his academy in the knowledge of physics, mathematics, astronomy, and natural sciences; whereas Johnson observed in the middle of the eighteenth century: "Prudence and justice are virtues and excellencies of all times and all places; we are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance."

In these pages I see the forms of prose and verse coexisting without discord.  I could invoke illustrious antecedents, such as The Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius, the Tales of Chaucer, or the Book of a Thousand and One Nights.  Yet I would prefer that these divergences seem accidental and would want this book to be read like a book of verse.  A volume in itself is not an aesthetic act – it is a physical object among other objects; an aesthetic act can only occur when it is written or read.  It is common to aver that free verse is nothing other than a typographical pretense, yet I think in this affirmation lies an error.  Beyond its rhythm, a versicle's typographical form serves to announce to the reader that what awaits him is poetic emotion, not information or reasoning.  There was a time when I inhaled the vast respiration of the psalms* or of Walt Whitman, and after so many years I realize, not without melancholy, that I have limited myself to alternating among certain classical meters: the alexandrine, the hendecasyllable, the heptameter. 

In one milonga I have tried to imitate, respectfully, the flowery courage of Ascasubi and the street songs of the barrios.

Poetry is no less mysterious than other elements of our orb.  This or that felicitous verse cannot make us vain because it is the gift of Chance or the Spirit; only the errors are ours.  I hope that the reader will discover in my pages something deserving recollection; in this world beauty is common to all.

--------------

*And here I deliberately write psalmos.  The members of the Royal Spanish Academy wish to impose upon this continent their phonetic incapacities; they advise us to use rustic forms such as neuma, sicología and síquico.  Recently it has occurred to them to write vikingo instead of viking; I suspect that soon enough we will hear of the works of Kiplingo.

Vallejo, "Amor"

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

You, Love, no longer come to my dead eyes;
For you my heart weeps, its ideals unshunned. 
Still open are the chalices to run
Autumnal hosts near your auroral wines.

Divine cross, Love, my deserts need your dew,
Your astral blood that yields both dreams and cries.
You, Love, no longer come to my dead eyes,
Which fear and seek your teary dawn anew!

I love you not, O Love, when you are far,
And raffled off in beards of merry bards,
Or short and fragile women's healthy glow.

Come fleshless Love as stunning ichor flows;
That I, in Godlike ways formed from this dust,
Might love and might create devoid of lust!

Capote

A famous critic once said that any work described as being based on a true story usually denotes misery and tragedy, a statement from which a cynic might conclude that most people would prefer to see suffering and empathize than witness happiness that cannot be theirs.  Despite the prevalence of Schadenfreude, this is not quite the reason.  What is contained in our soul is a sense of tragedy because conventional wisdom tells us we cannot live forever.  And even before conventional wisdom became louder and uglier, every person of faith would occasionally walk the path of doubt and despair, and every person still wonders what is the worth of an existence in which we are destined to wither and fade.  Those who are artistically inclined are beset by some of the most acute fears because their works will often not gain full recognition before their death.  Instead, they must trust in the taste and acknowledgement of souls and minds that conventional wisdom informs them they can never know, which is a little like building a palace in the middle of a desert then forsaking that remote land forever.  Artists will hesitate as to how much living and how much creating they should do – the line is entirely at the discretion of the individual who may put down a book to go out to a restaurant with company or simply decide yet again that his library is company enough.  Some would even go so far as to aver that friends, people, other lives, can be mined and plagarized as brutally as any text.  Which brings us to this film about other people's tragedies.

The story is well-known: on November 15, 1959, the Clutters, an affluent farming couple and their teenage son and daughter are found murdered in their Kansas home, all apparently shot at very close range.  The news garners a modest backpage notice in the New York Times, but one that captures the attention and imagination of a thirty-five-year-old novelist by the name of Truman Capote (a spellbinding Philip Seymour Hoffman).  A polished, squeaky ball of overdone gestures, ambition, and almost ruthless intelligence, Capote had written prolifically in the last decade, capped off by the 1958 publication of this novel which gained him a certain amount of fame and economic ease.  Yet he had never been so inspired until he read the 300-word blurb on "a tragedy in Holcomb."  He enlists his childhood friend and fellow author Harper Lee (Catherine Keener) to trek out to Kansas, a place clearly antithetical to his big city mores and desires to learn how such an event has affected the local population.  Since the victims and the criminal investigation do not interest him as much as the emotions wafting through Holcomb, Capote does not make the best of first impressions on the policeman in charge, Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper).  Not that, of course, he cares what someone who has no literary taste thinks of him.  When he visits the Clutter residence at sunset, it resembles a grim pagan temple, the coffins laid out like a shrine; then he decides to open one of the coffins and finds something so hideous it remains covered by a sheet.  Such gore does not bother him as much as justify the eventfulness of what just occurred ("To see something so horrifying, it comforts me.  Normal life falls away.  But then again, I was never much for normal life").  Yet in time his culture and innate ability to sense what other people want to hear – regardless of his sincerity – grant him access to a host of details about what happened that dark day in November.  And about half an hour into our film two suspects, Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.) and Richard Hickock (Mark Pellegrino), are marched in silence into the local police station.

The primary downside of every true story, I suppose, is that its dénouement has little in the way of suspense.  After the utilitarian prologue to the arrests, the film liberates itself from the austere plotting of a police procedural to focus on the mind that will transform the intended robbery and last-minute butchery of the Clutters into one of the more famous crimes in twentieth-century America.  We are duly aware – from the openly homosexual Capote's gay-bashing and racist anecdote at a socialite gathering at the beginning of the film – that he will stop at nothing to become either the center of attention or the most famous writer in America.  Ideally, of course, he would become both.   A southerner by birth, Capote is nothing if a New York socialite by disposition: predatory, superficial, quick-witted, and more than occasionally nasty ("Nancy was your best friend?" Harper and Capote ask Laura Kinney, the teenager who found the bodies, as if interviewing her for her qualifications to report on the tragedy).  Capote sets every scene with name-dropping, and the name he drops most frequently is his own.  In an effort to prove his proximity to mere mortals, he relates that his mother died during the filming of Breakfast at Tiffany's, although the event is secondary to his long description of a bar where this actor and this director would go boozing every night.  Like many a novelist he relishes the feelings of others, which he then challenges himself to describe.  When Dewey shows pain at the death of his friend, Capote becomes alive with wondering what lies behind that pain, imagining the whole relationship from start to bloody end.  Were Capote just even remotely sincere about his pleas for humaneness, we would be more likely to believe that he cared about something outside of his own diminutive frame.  But he is never sincere.  Even when he is about to read from his new book to an adoring New York audience, he states his name and then snickers as if he were a clever joke only understood by himself, his intellect realizing that while a talented man with almost total recall and a suppleness to his prose, as a human being he is an insufferable fraud.  And he is most egregiously fraudulent with the half-Cherokee prisoner called Perry Smith.

You may smile at the political convenience of having Smith be half-Indian although, we recall, this is no conceit of fiction but a true story.  Smith is young, lean, and well-read; he is also deranged in ways that only become evident towards the end of the film.  Capote investigates Smith, his missing parents, his orphanage, the suicides of his siblings, his tendency to use big words, his jealousy of Hickock's non-existent relationship with the effeminate writer, his journals, his self-portrait in charcoal, his mother who when alive was a Cherokee alcoholic.  In Capote's case, his mother was a slut and in this troubled killer he sees himself, as well as an excuse for the irreverence and spite of his own life.  "If I don't understand you," he tells Smith, "the world will see you as a monster and I don't want that."  He finds Smith attractive and has him and Hickock pose for a top fashion photographer, sometimes with himself on the side as if he were a scientist with his two prize specimens.  He pontificates by claiming that this book was the one he was always meant to write, supporting his grandeur with truisms such as "there are two worlds: the quiet, conservative life and the world of those two men."  Yet we see through his guise and so does everyone else, so why does he become a star?  The real Capote's desire was to be the best, which is the desire perhaps of every writer worth his salt; it is how this desire manifests itself that will reflect the author's character.  Some authors see themselves as victims or outsiders, and Capote was in every possible facet of his true self an outsider, and his alleged revolution, the "nonfiction novel," was intended to restart time with him as the almighty creator.  But the nonfiction novel is essentially how we deal with everyone: we take the basic facts and extrapolate their hidden meanings.  We guess at gestures, words, and sensations and try to picture what motivates human decisions.  So when Capote tells Dewey his book about the Kansas killers will be titled In Cold Blood, Dewey responds: "Does that refer to the crime or the fact you're still talking to them?"  And for once Capote seems as if he has not considered that particular reading.

5 x 2

The title of this film may make you think of photographs, which in the end is all that the characters, who once loved each other, have left.  And its end is in its beginning: director François Ozon, he of the particularly unshy approach to modern sexuality, shuffles the pictures in reverse chronological order so that we begin with the divorce of Marion (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) and Gilles (Stéphane Freiss).  Why they have come to this point after eight years of slow failure and a son that will keep them together until they die will be revealed in the other four vignettes to follow.  The monuments to their years – their divorce and parting shots, a dinner party where rather disturbing secrets are revealed, the birth of their child, their wedding night, and the gorgeous late afternoon beach on which they first meet – show us aspects of their personality that are unforgiving and mysterious, and never quite logical; which is, I may say, precisely the point of the exercise.  It is the point because we are not dealing with cardboard cutouts.  These are real people who not only do remarkably stupid and hurtful things but also come up with stupid excuses to justify themselves.  Marion and Gilles have known each other for about ten years, years they cannot have back and of which they will remember less and less owing to their separation.  If they had to file away times, forks in the path, when they chose wisely or (as is usually the case) unwisely, they might well select what we see of them.

And what do we see?  Marion has a face that suitors might deem classically beautiful, although it is neither one of those epithets.  But throughout it is morose, because early on in the relationship (late in the film) it is clear that Marion is not and perhaps cannot be content with her life.  The only time she is radiant and glowing sincerely is that first time as the film winds down, on a beach in a sunset that every person secretly wants as the backdrop to the story to end all stories, with a man who is handsome and apparently as interested in her as she is in that sunset.  The idealism of Marion, and her sobering encounter with the difficulties of making a relationship survive, reflect the downward spiral that seems inevitable because we know the end.  And because we know Gilles. 

Gilles is not what he appears to be.  Rather, he is not what Marion claims he is to herself, in her heart of hearts, and in that beach she holds dear in her memory.  Gilles has no particular interests other than business and pleasure, usually in that order, and could never be a shining knight or brave family man despite his efforts at both roles.  When he has his gay brother over for dinner in the second vignette, he speaks freely of a night of lovemaking that did not involve his wife.  Marion’s face in this scene is one of the film’s strongest images, one of mounting disgust as if she were vomiting with every feature of that classically beautiful face but her mouth.  That his brother is being used by a much younger man who has learned the bimbo trick of making older, less secure men trade the indulgence of your every whim for occasional affection reflects the cruelty of the world around the couple who has made it this far.  And because it is Gilles who is raping Marion in the first vignette, boasting of an orgy in the second then mysteriously absenting himself from the birth of their baby in the third, we can only conclude that Gilles is at fault and Marion is a victim.  But this legerdemain is just part and parcel of the structure, since the fourth vignette shows something about Marion that we might have suspected all along.

As mentioned elsewhere on these pages, the arguments against films with such gimmicks, to use an unkind term, is that were they to be straightened out like some stuffed viper they wouldn’t be particularly interesting.  They also, I should add, wouldn’t be those films.  5 x 2 thrives from your knowledge of what happened next but not why.  The situation, sufficiently banal, is given real pathos because we all know it will end badly and even suspect, aware of Ozon’s love of the macabre, that something truly horrific may have rendered the couple asunder.  Well, however revolting you find their behavior will depend on your tolerance for emotional cruelty.  I will say that female viewers may take a particular dislike to what Gilles does and doesn’t do, and what he chooses to say at some magnificently inopportune times.  This may reflect his inability to communicate with women or, perhaps, Ozon’s own fundamental lack of interest in elucidating those fragments and details that separate the prejudices that women have to endure daily from the coddling that men typically receive.  Without slipping into the symbolism of these basic beacons of man and woman, love and sex, and forgiveness and atonement, it is no surprise that some reviewers have likened Marion's sin to Eve's.  And that is the woefully sad part of this tragedy, this crude symbol for our own decay and nostalgia: Gilles is never given a chance to explain why he acted the way he did, and he is damned for it.  What if we had begun with the end and seen Marion happy and then very quickly disenchanted, would we think differently of Gilles?  Ah, but that would be a different film.

Science as the Enemy of Truth

Readers of the pages will understand that I have few qualms about the development of modern technology: there are so many wonderful aspects to our existence, devices that ease our every movement and task that I would be rather grim to rail against the riches that science has brought to man's thatched hut.  Yet what science is and is not remains a pervasive misconception.  Among many of my fellow earthlings the misconception can be summarized very pithily in the axiom: what science promises, faith removes.  Faith, as the persons who promote such an axiom will tell you, is nothing more than a panoply of superstitions to while away our ignorance, children's tales to explain to unripe minds what will become readily evident at a later age.  From this reasoning, anyone who subscribes to the tenets of faith believes in fairy tales because his mind cannot or will not accept the logical precision and explanation of the world in which he exists.   It might have been profitable at one time, indeed almost necessary, to flood the masses' consciousness with dreams of an afterlife and a grandfatherly caretaker who will reward the good and consign the bad to some fiery demise, and this charade was sufficient to lend hope to the farmer's russet brow and keep them in thralldom to the moneyed.  But since the middle of the nineteenth century we have lifted the veil of our foolishness and begun the steady march towards total and complete knowledge.  Gone are the mysteries of the Trinity, the whimsical writings we call the Scriptures, the agonistic effort to do good amidst the scoriae of a fallen world.  Every last corollary of Christian teaching, every last rose window within every last nave in every last chapel in the universe is a two millennia-old lie.  We have all been duped by our own fears, and should now break free and celebrate the liberty that science has bestowed upon us in the form of atheism, selfishness, greed, and living for the here and now at the expense of the there and then.  If all this sounds a bit too easy and congratulatory, that's because it is.  And what science is, is not, should and should not be are all addressed in this essay from this superb collection.

Belloc will be the first to admit that the essay's title is in fact a contradiction in terms.  Science, in its former identity, used to mean exactly what any Latinist will tell you it means: knowledge and the glorious and relentless pursuit thereof.  There is no shame in saying that knowledge has overcome many of our quainter understandings of the world; yet it has also reinforced the impression held by those of faith that although we cannot hope to comprehend even a fraction of the awesome realm that we call reality, something inside of us suggests that we may be privy to much more than we suspect.  And so, while the pundits of evolutionary clarity continue stumbling through their caverns and fossilized fictions, we are left with science as a form of petty oneupmanship that really defeats its inherent purpose:

Many men of today would by implication at least show their agreement with that phrase, "Science is the enemy of Truth"; and the number of those who feel this more or less consciously is increasing.  On seeing a passage beginning, "Science has proved ..." or "There is no scientific evidence for ..."  or "Examined in a strictly scientific spirit ...." and so forth, men are becoming more and more predisposed to quarrel with what follows.  They are filled with an "I know all about that!" feeling.  On hearing of some method that it is "scientific" they are at once prepared to find it leading to ridiculous conclusions.  They do not feel instructed; they feel warned.  Habits of eating, clothing and everything else suggested in the name of "Science" they constantly discover to be inhuman, degrading or simply silly.  The term "Scientific" applied to some recommended habit is beginning to have something grotesque about it, as likely to be in opposition to the general conclusions of mankind and our human common sense.  As for the name "Scientist," it has fallen on the worst fate of all.  It is becoming something of an Aunt Sally, and to call a man a Scientist is perilously near making a laughing-stock of him; unless you add the word "distinguished," which turns him into a statue.

No clearer proof of such a morass of competitive minds who seek victory instead of truth can be found than the continuous (and almost daily) "scientific studies" that contradict other scientific studies and, eventually, themselves.  They will tell you that drinking alcohol is both good and bad, depending on the quantity, quality, and whether you eat, sleep and exercise regularly – as if this needed millions of research funds to determine.  They will tell you that love doesn't exist in its Romantic form and is nothing more than a series of chemical reactions, and then later backtrack and espouse love as a psychosomatic healer of physical pain – which again evinces nothing new under all the suns of the universe.  

Yet the main fault with all the science-seekers that continue to do some good work in terms of technological advancement and some very atrocious work in terms of philosophy is the smugness that accompanies these additions.  As much as people may complain of proselytizing on the part of certain church advocates, there is no louder howl to be heard than from the militant atheists who have concluded before ever reading Augustine or Swedenborg, or even more recent thinkers such as Tillich, the younger Niebuhr or Belloc himself, that nothing can happen that they could not know about or understand.  They will attempt to defend themselves by stating that we know very little about the universe – a wholly true statement – and yet they know quite enough to aver that God cannot possibly exist.  Is not the question of God the most important and elusive piece of knowledge that mankind could ever have?  When confronted with this ridiculous contradiction, they swat away any doubters by employing the very same tactics of which they accuse the clergy.  Namely, that only the enlightened can possibly understand the shape and shifts of the universe, and that any suffering they might incur owing to their work (both terms used rather loosely) earns them the moniker of "martyr":

There is ... no more absurd example of "Scientific" mumbo-jumbo than this ... A "martyr to science" should properly mean one who bears witness to scientific truth by submitting to suffering rather than recant his conviction.  In this sense men are indeed martyrs to scientific truth who sufficiently anger the Scientists by pointing out their mistakes .... But our new priesthood does not use the word "martyr" in this sense at all.  They apply it to a man who is blown up in the course of a chemical experiment, or who dies of a disease caught in a medical one.  And as for "the gulf between the clergy and the laity," which was made such a grievance of against real priests, it is nothing to the gulf between the ignorant herd and Scientific Persons.  They show a corporate and almost universal contempt for the man who has not had the leisure to go through all their studies, but who can bring valid criticism to bear on their own laughable conclusions; they do not meet his criticism in its own field, they appeal to Status, to their own necessary and unapproachable superiority.

Now one would not hesitate to trust a chemist rather than a coffeehouse barista as to an evaluation of rat poison or a metallic alloy.  But I would rather have the barista make my cappuccino for the simple reason that he will know more about the chemical processes and foibles involved therewith than any chemist.  And herein lies the problem with materialistic science: there will always be someone who knows better.  The problem is not unlike the quandary of the rich man who wakes up one day and realizes that he will never become the richest man in the world: the only way he can ever be considered rich is to hobnob with those who have less than him and thus, quite logically, he spends a disproportionate amount of his time making sure that everyone knows quite how wealthy he is.  The same pockmark identifies the man of science who will devote all too many hours to highlighting the ignorance of others on, ironically, either petty things that do not matter one way or another (the chemical composition of an obscure plant, for example) or things he hasn't the foggiest notion about (the nature of God, the number of stars in a galaxy invisible to the human eye, what was taking place on earth five billion years ago).  Purely empirical knowledge like money can only be relative, because regardless of what noble intentions may have existed at the onset the quest for purely empirical knowledge will always devolve into a competition.  And apart from a few "elections" in some recent totalitarian states, no one to date has yet to win a competition in which there were no other participants.

Science in itself is a marvel, but science in itself is not the subject of Belloc's title.  What he refers to and states explicitly is the modern scientific spirit of snobbery, oneupmanship, ego maintenance and glory.  Not one of those characteristics should distinguish a true scholar.  And while Belloc exaggerates mildly when he claims that "anyone can, with patience, do scientific work," he is at the same time generally correct: we all do scientific work to form conclusions about what is hot and cold, safe or dangerous, painful or pleasant.  The person who sees a gang of toughs in an evening alleyway does not need to stroll in their direction to understand he is risking his well-being; nor does a child who has only beheld from afar a fireplace's crack and spittle need to immerse his hand in flame to see what might come of it.  Our method of reasoning perception, what science often claims belongs to it and it alone, is how we deal with the majority of our reality's moments, but this is coupled with a large amount of faith.  We believe that certain things will and will not occur that have nothing to do with empirical observation.  We believe that our spouses, who are apparently only attracted to us by chemicals, will not find the chemicals of others more attractive even during long periods of separation from our chemicals.  We believe that our government will do everything in its power to avoid a nuclear war, or war in general, although we have little material evidence that would persuade us of its unswerving commitment to that end.  But with the scientists who have come to outyell all other voices of reason, we encounter a particularly virulent form of egoism that has spelled the downfall of many of their predecessors:

[The] Scientist has acquired a habit of achievement in knowledge: in knowledge not possessed by the mass of other men.  This breeds in him a natural pride, and from that root, I think, spreads that extraordinary presupposition I have noted, unconscious, but very much alive, that the scientist is possessed of universal knowledge .... [and so] a cause of the Modern Scientific Spirit's disease would seem to be the exclusion from consciousness of all that is not measurable by known and divisible units, because the scientific method can only deal with results recorded in known and divisible units.  Thus, the physical scientist tends through habit to a state of mind in which qualities not so measurable seem negligible or imaginary; hence the loss of the sense of beauty -- the loss of all that is qualitative; the loss of distinction and of hierarchy in sensation.

This is where science ends: at the doorstep of a lab of no color, shape or distinction.  Science travels a long path and completes tasks to make our lives easier, safer and healthier, but it must know its limits.  It cannot explain the sensations we feel when we look upon the starry sky, the curdling ambition that restrains us in our speech and manners for fear of offending some greater party, our sympathy for those who will never love or even know us, those whose predicaments we will never personally confront,  those who exist as blurry forms on the periphery of our privileged paths.  There can be no scientific explanation for the feelings that rise in our throats when we see what we have and what they do not, when we contemplate the suffering that has ravaged the world in every century to the detriment of the majority but not of us.  There is no logical explanation for us, nor can science ever hope to develop one.  Except, of course, if what we understand as science is extended back to its original sense to what we might learn from the realms of the unseen and unprovable.  And we see and what we can prove are often two wholly different things.