Pushkin, "Окно"

A very popular poem ("Window") by this writer of genius.  You can read the original here.

One darkened time not long ago,        
Beneath an empty moon's sad reign,
In foggy haze of endless flow,
A girl sat by a window pane.  
Alone I saw her brood in thought,   
Her breast a-heave in secret thrills;
As her keen gaze the circuits caught
Of one dark path beneath the hills.

"I'm here!" came forth a whisper's snatch,       
And shaking, she moved quick her hands, 
Through fear and angst to window's latch,
The moon as lightless as the lands. 
"Luck's child," I said with certain woe,
"For you but joy awaits your heart! 
"And when shall I some evening know,
"A window open as fate's chart?"

The Mission

It is unfortunate that the very titles of some works of art discourage a certain segment of the population from viewing them, and another, equally regrettable segment from understanding what on earth or beyond they could be about.  Mention the words "organized religion" to these modern know-it-all skeptics – they know who they are because they know absolutely everything – and you will not fail to notice a sarcastic snicker looming on their thin lips.  They will use terms such as voodoo, witchcraft, superstition, myth, and, most recently, opiate (hilariously rendered as "opium" by some of the more brilliant among them); they will claim that the Church and other conduits of spiritualism have killed so many for nothing, or for nothing more than to enslave and intimidate the survivors; they will claim that all this is a monumental sham for the sake of power; and if that argument doesn't hold water, they will assert that religion is the refuge of the poor, the cold, the downtrodden, to give them hope when life mocks them cruelly.  While all these notions are logical to someone of no imagination, principles or foresight, they are quaintly and wholly illogical in another, more important way.  That we may not be immortal is an acceptable premise, never mind the intuition in so many of us that instructs us otherwise; but what is not acceptable is the fallacy that should we all be nothing but evolved amoebae, we would then have to adhere to manmade law.  True, there are consequences for such infringements.  Yet there is no logical justification for refraining from committing a crime apart from conscience, and if our consciences are biochemical figments of our imagination, then I should do well to rob and kill anyone whose loss is my gain.  That is, by the way, the law of the jungle whence we emerged.  And the jungle of this film will not soon be forgotten.

Our story is simple: we are in the 1750s amidst what certain academics believe to be some of the greatest missionary activity in the history of Catholic Church. The story, which makes perfect sense from first to last, lacks only the coherence of fiction – which is, in fact, its strongest quality.  In the beginning a man is pushed down a stream on a cross, completely at the whims of nature, of God himself who will do with him what He will.  As his body, still alive, wends its way through the rapids, we know that he will cascade over an endless cliff of water and from this perch we shall see the establishment of something much greater and higher.  The man turns out to be a Jesuit priest, and the waterfall comes under the aegis of these people in the jungles of Paraguay.  Despite this ominous introduction, we sense no evil, and shortly thereafter a replacement Jesuit is found in Gabriel (Jeremy Irons) who has on his side a consort of brothers and irrefragable faith.  Gabriel climbs – slowly and with the lushest of backgrounds – the mountain from which his Jesuit colleague just tumbled, and he clambers up with one end in mind: the reduction must be reestablished for the good of the Guaraní people, whom he comes to adore, and, ultimately for the good of the brothers as well.  Barefoot and exhausted, he gains the summit, rests upon a rock, and there takes out a long thin package.  He does not unravel food or a weapon, man's two crutches, but a flute.  His music attracts the natives, who initially act as we might expect them to act, and then assume a quiet dignity and gentleness of movement that do not distinguish them from their European brethren.  Soon Father Gabriel has a new home, and the Jesuit reduction is on track to convert more souls to the way of the Lamb.

Is this imperialism?  Most certainly.  But it is imperialism performed in such an innocuous manner that we wonder who is converting whom.  Peace between peoples of astonishingly divergent origin who can coexist and even thrive together should always be lauded.  So it is hardly surprising when Gabriel is summoned to tend to Rodrigo Mendoza (Robert de Niro), an incarcerated slave trader and mercenary who exemplifies what schoolchildren learn about Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors and their scions.  His world is the opposite of that of the monks: he enjoys wine, women, luxury and servants; he rides on steeds that would terrify anything on two legs; and he wears a countenance that suggests he usually gets what he wants.  There is one exception to that rule, a young woman called Carlotta, who ends up madly in love with Mendoza's brother Felipe (an emaciated Aidan Quinn).  One evil eve after being verbally jilted by Carlotta, Mendoza finds the two in bed and Felipe falls into the despicable trap of duelling a man who has neither qualms nor rules for meting out vengeance.  The brothers clash, the inevitable occurs, and the next time we see the normally slick-haired and stylish Mendoza is as a ragamuffin prisoner sitting on some hay.  "He has not seen anyone in six months," Gabriel is warned by another priest, "I think he wants to die."  But Gabriel has seen many repulsive sinners in his life, and he asks unhesitatingly whether this penance is remorse, to which Mendoza replies that "there is no penance hard enough for me."  They talk further, decide on a plan for the expiation of his horrible crime (contained in part within a magnificent scene by that same waterfall), and Mendoza sheds his previous titles and becomes, after reading chapter thirteen of this epistle, a brother in the Jesuit order.

The rest of the film is devoted to a debate that has many faces.  On one side, we see the hypocritical exploitation and manoeuvring of both the Spanish and Portuguese representatives, men long since blinded by glitz and greed; on the other side, the Jesuits and their hardscrabble but happy existence far from the hum of men.  But there is a third side, a great arbiter and Church dignitary called Altamirano, whose name could connote looking above or high or, in his case, not looking at all.  Ultimately it is he who will decide the fate of the Guaraní; whether their sanctioned murder of each couple's third child is truly to facilitate parents' flight from European oppressors; whether their sweetest tones are merely winds channeled through a beast; and whether missions and missionaries are as important as the central and often compromising tenets of Church authority.  An unorganized and beautiful film that initially promises to be fast-paced, slows down in the middle to the tempo of a stage play, then picks up at the end in a most menacing fashion, The Mission deservingly boasts one of the most legendary soundtracks in recent cinematic history.  And it is the bedlam of the conflict's resolution and the unclear yet enthralling path it takes to that bedlam that have been alternatively praised and chided.  But what is war if not chaos?  And what is love if not submission?  Questions asked, answered with few words, and best explained by the very final shot which could represent so many of us just looking in the mirror.  Some of us, however, may gaze forever at a web of mirrors and see nothing at all.

The Horror of the Heights

A visitor might descend upon this planet a thousand times and never see a tiger.  Yet tigers exist; and if he chanced to come down into a jungle he might be devoured.

                                                                                                   From the "Joyce-Armstrong Fragment"

More than once on these pages I have claimed that the best works of this author are his best-known.  Now this statement has stood through generations of scrutiny, detractors and admirers, and cannot seriously be denied.  Nevertheless, Conan Doyle's remaining oeuvres are valuable not only as satellites around the brilliant sun that he placed among our stars but also as exemplary prose of its own.  Conan Doyle's greatest asset as an artist was his unwillingness to listen to anyone except himself – thereby incurring both the good and bad of splendid creative isolation.  The bad, of course, may be found in some of his weirder works, for the most part historically inspired (and here I admit my difficulties in finishing these works, so lengthy and unpromising have they proven to be); but the good has yielded some texts of astounding creativity, even miniatures like this famous story.

We begin as in so many tales of Holmes and Watson with a first-person narrator, but unlike Watson, who often knows much less than the characters he describes, our editor and host appears to be omniscient – well, omniscient apart from one important detail.  The tone is also markedly different because from all indications our subject seems to lurk outside the realm of empirical science:

The idea that the extraordinary narrative which has been called the Joyce-Armstrong Fragment is an elaborate practical joke evolved by some unknown person, cursed by a perverted and sinister sense of humour, has now been abandoned by all who have examined the matter.  The most macabre and imaginative of plotters would hesitate before linking his morbid fancies with the unquestioned and tragic facts which reinforce the statement.  Though the assertions contained in it are amazing and even monstrous, it is none the less forcing itself upon the general intelligence that they are true, and that we must readjust our ideas to the new situation.  This world of ours appears to be separated by a slight and precarious margin of safety from a most singular and unexpected danger.  I will endeavour in this narrative, which reproduces the original document in its necessarily somewhat fragmentary form, to lay before the reader the whole of the facts up to date.

The Joyce-Armstrong fragment turns out not to be the logbook of some collaborative scientific expedition, but the notes of one wealthy Romantic with particularly rabid opinions on what should be valued in life.  He was "a retiring man with dark moods," a "poet and dreamer," and a "mechanic and inventor," all of which point to the felicitous and rare coincidence in one soul of ambition and imagination.  Despite these credentials, "there were times when his eccentricity threatened to develop into something more serious," a comment which had it been made by a more cynical writer might have been interpreted as something less extraordinary than deranged, the madness of the blue flower.  But Joyce-Armstrong has more sober ends in mind.  He is convinced that something above the clouds (what he labels an "air-jungle") has been snapping up pilots and disposing of them elsewhere.  Precisely that "elsewhere" is what interests him, and he is definitely in the minority:

Nevertheless, when I dined at Rheims with Coselli and Gustav Raymond I found that neither of them was aware of any particular danger in the higher layers of the atmosphere .... But then they are two empty, vainglorious fellows with no thought beyond seeing their silly names in the newspaper.  It is interesting to note that neither of them had ever been much beyond the twenty-thousand-foot level.  Of course, men have been higher than this both in balloons and in the ascent of mountains.  It must be well above that point that the aeroplane enters the danger zone – always presuming that my premonitions are correct.

Thus begins the actual manuscript in medias res, its first two and its last page having been lost.  Yet that first "nevertheless" indicates that Joyce-Armstrong has been struggling to convince anyone who would listen and might understand a smidgen about flying of his unearthly "premonitions."  And one fine day, dressed "for the summit of the Himalayas" and full of mettle and grit, he sets out with the goal of scaling forty thousand feet of air.

What he finds, if it can be described with any available vocabulary, will not be revealed here.  The premise of the story is one of sheer terror that cannot appeal to the average person because the average person would not possibly be able to take a monoplane seven miles above the ground, nor grasp what insanity might beset an oxygen-starved brain at those heights.  And given the awesome dramatic tension that Conan Doyle develops, the cantle of jungle above these clouds might not be what horror buffs would expect.  But horror assumes many forms, one of the most effective being the subtle dread of something evil that should not exist.  There is also the matter of the self-fulfilling epitaph that Joyce-Armstrong leaves and which is often cited by students of the ghost story as well as erudite connoisseurs of Conan Doyle's oeuvre.  But what, pray tell, would we do without "accidents and mysteries"?

Goethe, "The Humors of Lovers"

An excerpt from the literary memoirs ("Fiction and truth") of this German writer.  You can find the original in the seventh section of this book.

In the company of a host of very worthy people, I had worked through the tedious period into which my youth had fallen.  Sufficient evidence of this can be found in the numerous quarto manuscripts which I left my father; not to mention that the plethora of writing attempts, drafts, and half-completed essays went up in smoke more owing to ill humor than to any of my convictions!  Now I was learning through persuasion, through lessons, through disputed opinions, but most of all through my commensal, the privy counselor Pfeil, I learned to value more greatly what was important, the concision of action, without, however, clarifying where I was to find or achieve this or that.  For owing to the substantial limitations of my status, the indifference of my contemporaries, the reticence of my teachers, the eccentricities of conceited residents, and the wholly insignificant natural surroundings, I was obliged to look for all these things within myself.  Whenever I sought a basis, a sensation, a reflection for my poetry, it was inwards to my own bosom that I had to turn.  I required for poetic representation an unimpeded view of the object or circumstance, and thus could not step out of the circle which grazed me, which was suitable to the formation of my interest.  In this sense I first composed smaller poems either as ditties or in free verse; they sprang from reflections, dealt with events of the past, and mostly assumed epigrammatic turns of phrase.

And so began that course which for the duration of my existence I would be unable to avoid, namely, transforming whatever gladdened or tortured me into a picture or poem and secluding myself so as both to amend my ideas in the face of external stimuli and appease my innermost concerns.  And no one needed talent for such actions more than I, who by his very nature careered from one extreme to another.  Everything I had known hitherto were merely fragments of a great confession, which this little book is an audacious attempt to complete.

My earlier attraction to Gretchen I had now transferred to a certain Anna, whom words cannot describe with justice.  Let us only recall that she was so young, pretty, cheerful, loving and pleasant that she truly deserved to linger a while in the shrine of my heart as a minor saint, to have bestowed upon her every honor which often arouses more contentment to give than to receive.  I saw her every day without fail; she would help in preparing the food that I would relish, and at worst she would bring me the wine I would drink.  Our exclusive companionship around the noonday feast was a guarantee that the small house, rarely visited apart from guests from Mass, merited its good reputation.  There was ample desire and opportunity for conversation.  Yet because she was still not allowed to get too far away from the house, our time together was leaner.  We sang the canticle of Zechariah, played Krüger's Herzog Michel in which a crumpled handkerchief took the place of the nightingale, and whittled away the time in such a fashion.  Since the more innocent relationships are, the less omnifarious they become over time, every bad compulsion befell me.  This led me to make a discussion of the torments that lovers endure and dominate one girl's devotion with my adventitious and tyrannical whims.  On her I permitted myself to vent the foul mood caused by my failed attempts at composing poems, my apparent inability to overcome these failures, and everything which now and then would irritate me.  I did this because she loved me with all her heart and did me every favor she could, and through vulgar and unfounded jealousies I ruined for both of us our finest days together.  For a while she endured this with incredible patience which I was cruel enough to push to the limits.  Finally I realized to my despair and shame that her spirit had drifted away from me; and the fact that I had allowed this to happen without cause or need had to be imputed to madness.  We also had horrific fights by which I gained nothing.  Only now did I feel I really loved her and could not do without her.  My passion grew and assumed all the forms that such circumstances dictated, and in the end it was I who filled the role that she had played until now.  I tried everything in my power to be obliging to her, even to provide her with other joys, because I could not desist in my hope of winning her back.  But it was too late!  I had really lost her.  And the madness with which I took vengeance on myself by bludgeoning my corporality so as to hurt my moral conscience contributed greatly to the bodily ills that cost me one of the best years of my life.  In fact, I might just as easily have wasted away had my poetic gifts and their healing forces not been as helpful.  

Before this happened, I had already become duly aware at various intervals of my bad habits.  The poor child truly inspired pity in me when I saw her hurt without the slightest need.  So often and so intricately did I put myself in her position, my own position, and then that of another, happy couple from our circle of friends that in the end I could not but treat this situation dramatically as torturous and edifying penance.  Hence I derived the oldest of my remaining dramatic works, the short play The humors of lovers, and in this ingenuous piece one became aware of a bubbling passion.  Previously, a meaningful, provocative world had spoken to me and me alone; and in my story with Gretchen and its consequences I had already stared down the same crooked path which so undermined bourgeois society.  Religion, custom, law, status, relationships, habit – all this engaged only the surface of city existence.  The streets girded by magnificent houses were kept clean and everyone behaved himself sufficiently well; but on the inside things looked much emptier, and a smooth outside gilded like a faint daub much brittle and decaying masonry which would crumble overnight and arouse an even more terrible effect as if breaking the peace.  How many families because of bankruptcy, divorce, inveigled daughters, murder, burglary, poisoning had I seen either fall apart or approach the edge of such disasters, and despite my youth I had often lent a helping hand.   My openness seemed to beget trust, my discretion was long since guaranteed, and my actions did not overlook any victims while seeking out the most risk-laden cases.  And often enough I found the opportunity to mediate, to cover up, to dissipate the thunder, and do anything else that could be done.  In so doing, I inevitably experienced a large number of humiliating and hurtful episodes, both for myself and for others.  To give myself a bit of breathing room, I drafted plays and for most of them, also expositions.  But since the complications always had to be frightful and almost all the plays threatened to end in tragedy, I disposed of them one after another.  The only one that I finished, The Accomplices, whose buoyant and burlesque essence seemed fearsome for vague family reasons, caused a certain amount of apprehension when it was performed and gloated in its details.  The explicitly illegal events offended both aesthetic and moral sensibilities, and for that reason the play could not make it onto German stages, even though imitations of it which strayed from the precipice were received with applause.

Both of these plays, without my knowing it, were written from a higher point of view.  With careful acquiescence to moral attribution they interpret rather bluntly the Christian adage: let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

In the Land of Time

The fantastic has grown and shrunk over the last several decades, a product of what we have come to believe and what we are taught no longer exists.  The fables and whispers of yore, beasts and gods and impossible feats from impossible dreams – these have been exposed, say the high priests of galactic speculation, as signs of inner tribulation and repressed desire.  Metempsychosis is as ludicrous as miracles, both of whom yield no ocular proof.  Now readers of this site are aware of what I think of such humbug defended to the death by militant minds who have never really used their minds at all.  We are built for calculation and observation, true enough; but our minds are not bound by numbers, theorems or, worst of all, by our own pathetic human limitations.  Should we doubt our flight when all the birds of paradise skate our skies?  Should the fact that our deoxyribonucleic acid is shared in almost precise sequence by so many other animals oblige us to conclude that we must obviously be their descendants?  Evolution has revealed many vital links to our biological situs, but left unanswered the real questions of our cosmogony.  Yet modern science, in their insufferable arrogance and quest for fame – a fame that in their world of charlatans and speculators could not be more fleeting – continues to insist that we know enough to say that there is no anthropomorphic Creator because "the idea of an old man with a long white beard sitting on a throne is preposterous" (quoted from many dull and dead sources).  That idea is one that people of faith have felt in countless variations since they were far too young to be told of such an image; it is an image of our omega that we carry within ourselves because that same image can be purported to represent something less benevolent, Time.  Which brings us to a fine story from this collection.

Although a tale of fantasy In the Land of Time is also admixed with one of horror, and all good horror tales begin with a warning.  Our warning comes in the first paragraph in the form of a testament:

Thus Karnith, King of Alatta, spake to his eldest son: 'I bequeath to thee my city of Zoon, with its golden eaves, whereunder hum the bees.  And I bequeath to thee also the land of Alatta, and all such other lands as thou art worthy to possess, for my three strong armies which I leave thee may well take Zindara and overrun Istahn, and drive back Onin from his frontier, and leaguer the walls of Yan, and beyond that spread conquest over the lesser lands of Hebith, Ebnon, and Karida.  Only lead not thine armies against Zeenar, nor ever cross the Eidis.'

Karnith père thus expires to be relieved by Karnith fils or, more fully, Karnith Zo.  The matter is then not whether the new regent will cross the Eidis but how and when – certainly a policy advocated by the more hawk-like among the Alattans.  And so, as many decision-makers tend to do, Karnith decides to poll his people, not by democratic vote but by sensation.  He walks over the fields of his massive demesne and into the villages of the fiefdoms; he watches the smoke rise from the humble huts, the villagers tending to the bleating sheep (with the beautiful aside: "and the King wondered if men did otherwise in Istahn"), and "pondered much, who had not pondered before."  He had waited years to become king but had not gotten to know the designs of his own labyrinth, the breaks in his own earth.  He is then primordially shocked by the instances in which his folk attribute their wizened apathy to the megrims of Time.  "Time has ruthlessly done it," he is told and stares back at the clouds and sun that "shone upon Alatta and Istahn, causing the flowers to open wide in each."  An attack on his neighbors is postponed for an attack on that force which has spread equal ruin and dread to all nations, and his armies set out for the Land of Time with the blood-parched zeal of true warriors of doom.

What they find after their endless luff into an unsubsiding wind will not be revealed here, but it can be held for an allegory of what Time has to offer us.  Dunsany's prose of fantasy has been rightly praised as some of the finest of the British Isles, and there is much to be said for his archaisms, quickness of imagery and courage in presenting that which can only be presented in absolute terms.  His other writings, primarily featuring this fictional raconteur, are not as successful because his mind did not really operate on the level of the parlor room churl: he was born to write the fantastic in hues hitherto undiscovered.  Included above is an illustration from his most cherished of artists (a modern disciple of this Dutch painter of genius) who appended many pictures to his tomes and even inspired some of his tales.  My antipathy towards what has assumed the title of fantasy (and its twin separated at birth, science fiction) is mostly owing to the mechanical nature of the storytelling.  We may envision at more fanciful moments Mordor or some other realm as a thinly-veiled counterpart to our own; but rarely are moral themes touched upon with any valence because the themes are not as important as the strangeness of the whole endeavor.  And what then of Time, "the servant of Death," the "Enemy of my House," he who "wore a look on his face such as murderers wear"?  Let's just say his representation matches his actions, which are ubiquitous and irreversible.  And let's just hope that his victory is not the last.