Vallejo, "Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca"

A work ("Black stone atop a white stone") by this Peruvian poet with whom I happen to share a birthday.  You can read the original here. 

In Paris I shall die and it shall rain,
Its memory I hold, a downpour's thrall.
In Paris I shall die and shall not strain,
Perhaps on one fine Thursday in the fall.

A Thursday, like today is Thursday, yet
My humeri betray me as I write;
I see myself alone, my path unmet
Through every angle of my spinning sight.

Vallejo died, they beat him dead, he's dead,
Although to them he, César, did no wrong.
They hit him hard, with sticks as hard as lead,

With rope they hurt him more, yet some looked on:
My Thursday days, these humeri my bones,
My solitude, my rain, my path alone.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Some of us have the unfortunate habit of ignoring those works or manifestos which do not concur with our own.  Only too natural, we might say, because life is short and consecrating time to theories we know to be patently false (for whatever reason) is a waste of our dwindling days.  So bereft of imagination or credibility are many of these decrees that more demanding readers, readers whose main aims are beauty, truth, enjoyment and a moral framework for all aspects of life, are infuriated.  If that sounds like a lot to ask for, you might question why you read at all.  Personally, I read to seek out that one moral law that has always existed within me and is reflected by the starry night above me.  I do not find it often; sometimes it only exists in snippets or flashes amidst a garish carnival of platitudes.  In some rather infrequent cases there obtains a concatenation of detail evoking the shadow of that law, however ignored by the text itself, and the result is what the Greeks called irony.  Rarer still are images of purported truth cast in colors and shapes that could not possibly mean anything more than earthbound pleasures – until you look very closely and see that a few of these pleasures (especially affection, physical attraction, laughter, and friendship) are indeed reflections of something much, much greater.  Thus we are bound to examine all information we come across.  In fact, we can and should assume that within the maze of misperception, bias, and fear there lurks a crazed beast whose roar can bring us something of this law.  Modern psychology, a field with which I am very unfortunately well-acquainted from readings, has taken it upon itself to explain all our dreams, nightmares, waking moments and desires through a children’s set of boxes and crayons.  It has tried (and failed gloriously) to make us think we are all puerile players in a nonstop run of a tasteless musical on the Great White Way, singing the same chants and dancing to the same bongo drums.

Now there is nothing wrong with childhood, but there is something terribly wrong with its ignorant revolt against authority.  Curiosity, optimism, the sense of immortality that many children’s circumstances permit them to enjoy – all of this we should never forget; the love of family, of one’s homeland, of the moments and other souls that make us into responsible adults, all of this we should cherish.  When people long for their childhood, it is either because their childhood was very happy or their current life does not contain this sense of immortality, of unending meadows cascading among unending hillocks.  The assumption of another persona to the psychologist indicates a deep-seated urge to escape one’s existence, although every writer of fiction, like every actor, assumes a myriad of guises over a career and can still be (and often is) very content with his “real” self.  To what other vocation does such an apparent paradox belong?  To those persons of deep faith, those who appreciate their earthbound existence but also look forward to redemption in some higher state; loving one does not mean hating the other.  A lengthy but necessary introduction to one of the finest short stories of the English language.

The basic facts are known even to people who have never opened Stevenson’s text: Dr. Henry Jekyll, a scientist of genius and loner by nature, has acquired a nasty and violent friend by the name of Edward Hyde.  That Hyde might be sponsored by Jekyll is the direct suggestion of the narrator, who culls his details from Mr. Utterson, a London lawyer who hears of an awful crime involving a young girl and a payoff to her relatives from very respectable circles (a strange foreshadowing of these legendary crimes).  Since Utterson is in every way an upstanding Victorian citizen as well as a scholar of the law, this crime of moral turpitude cannot go unpunished.  The trail boomerangs back to Jekyll, who happens to be one of Utterson’s clients as well as an old friend, reminding us of the aphorisms about how well we think we know our dearest comrades. One wonders what the first-time reader might have made of the strange comings and goings of Hyde from a building adjacent to that of Jekyll, and from the physical deformity and abhorrent cruelty that distinguish Hyde from his maker:

The lawyer stood awhile when Mr. Hyde had left him, the picture of disquietude.  Then he began slowly to mount the street, pausing every step or two and putting his hand to his brow like a man in mental perplexity.  The problem he was thus debating as he walked was one of a class that is rarely solved.  Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice; all these were points against him, but not all of these together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing and fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded him.  ‘There must be something else,’ said the perplexed gentleman.  ‘There is something more, if I could find a name for it.  God bless me, the man seems hardly human!  Something troglodytic, shall we say?  Or can it be the old story of Dr. Fell?  Or is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent?  The last, I think; for, O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend!’

The story proceeds in magnificent suspense until a pair of fatal decisions are made, and Utterson is left with a letter from Jekyll detailing his descent into hell.  The letter, which I should like to quote in toto, is such a literary delight that we are struck anew by the ability of its author, and of the temptations of evil in the face of knowledge and progress.  It is here that Jekyll becomes Hyde and Hyde turns into Jekyll, that the two persons once thought distinct appear as anagrams of their own weaknesses.  It is also here that Jekyll reveals why he might have wanted such an escape, and his explanation – for a moment, in any case – appears to be as lucid an ancient codex on combating evil as anything else we might have heard, in this case by grasping, literally and figuratively, at its tenebrous strength.

What one shouldn’t conclude, however, is that the titular bicephalous beast somehow metaphorizes an affliction.  Nor should we suppose that the whole project can be reduced to the modern plight of a small percentage of our population with a misunderstanding of their proper persona, in some cases leading them to conduct their business as totally separate people.  Stevenson, like Utterson, was a lawyer not a doctor, and his interest is in the motives of men not some cerebral malfunction.  That evil and goodness should operate within the same immortal soul is our oldest and still our most critical moral quandary; nevertheless, that a man of superior intellect would generate, in his own nightmare, such a lowlife scum as an alias speaks more of his own inner darkness than any shame he might have had in inducing the transformation.  Despite his claims, Dr. Jekyll is not a good man gone wrong: he is a bad man who finds an outlet in his creative work, in time making himself into his own Frankenstein's monster.  For that reason perhaps is man “commingled out of good and evil,” whereas Edward Hyde, “alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.”

The Constant Gardener

There is an old adage about not asking a question when you are not prepared for the answer; we might add that certain questions are asked in such a way as to avoid all detriment.  How does the other half (or, better said, the other eighty-five percent) live is one such question that we dare not answer because our privileged existence does not welcome guilt and shame.  We have everything at our disposal, but how we reached that point is brushed aside in favor of results.  The results, I must say, are quite good.  We can stroll into any pharmacy or supermarket and acquire whatever gel, ointment, or pill needed to alleviate our aches and groans.  Doctors are reachable by phone and expensive, so they have no problem checking out our smallest complaints.  Although often tedious and understaffed, hospitals are accessible at all hours and, for the insured, with every amenity.  Bewailing the American health care system is one of our hobby-horses, and rightfully so, but there are alternatives that we dare not ask about.  Which brings us to the subject of this magnificent film.

Our hero is Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes) a young and idealistic British diplomat who inherited a love of Africa from some branch of his family and perhaps, like many adventurous souls, from books.  He is what every diplomat ought to be: forthright, modest, understanding, tolerant and hopelessly optimistic.  We first see him hemming and hawing in front of a group of rabid journalists who interpret his last-minute standing in for a senior official as an admission of a mistake.  One journalist, Tessa (Oscar winner Rachel Weisz) criticizes him so brutally (and is rebuked with no kind force) that we quickly perceive what will happen between these two attractive people and what ties will bind them for the duration of their earthly existence.  To be fair, the film employs a shuffled chronology of events to instill suspense, and to be unfair, there is little mystery in what occurs.  The only question is why.  Why, we hear Justin stuttering, can he not think about anything except Tessa and why did he let himself seduce her, or whatever exactly occurred?  Why did he bring her along to Kenya, a nice place by all accounts, but an unstable land perhaps better suited for single persons without strong family ties?  Why is Tessa constantly in the company of Arnold Bluhm (Hubert Koundé), a young, dynamic and attractive Belgian physician, even late at night?  And why is Tessa racing around helping as many people as she can while eight months pregnant?  Yet the most horrific why involves what happens to Tessa and Arnold one afternoon on the way from Nairobi northbound through the desert to report on widespread pharmaceutical corruption and malpractice, a poorly chosen trip through a minefield of mercenaries; thankfully, our only description of those events is verbal.

The film is based on a book by this renowned spy novelist, himself a former diplomat, and isn't the stuff we would usually associate with his name.  How much truth lies therein depends on the news that you follow and what credence you lend to conspiracies in general, a tendency that in some cultures (usually the less privileged) is rather prevalent.  More important than that for our purposes, however, is Justin's hobby, which begets the name and motif of the work.  His gardens are always delightful spectacles, as he is himself amidst them, and the only place he feels totally secure.  We are duly aware of the meticulousness with which he maintains his flora as being the perfect metaphor for his own myopia, the order that needn’t be in place of the order that he cannot bring himself to support.  Fiennes has a sort of moribund and tepid flair that collates perfectly with Justin’s passive personality: the young diplomat is not a pushover, but he is rarely assertive; he may show flashes of anger or indignation, but that simply suggests a lack of imagination or maturity.  In other words, he believes in his world, in the good of man, in the future of Africa because not believing in all those things means childhood’s end and a new frontier of responsibilities that scare him half to Hades.  But he is a good man, a man committed to his wife, his country and his ideals.  He knows that a litany of small favors do make in the end as much of a difference as a big check (consider his change of heart on giving rides to some of the natives who have walked up to twenty miles to obtain vaccinations or medicine or attend a funeral; then think of Quayle the coward who hides as his wife does all the talking and acting for him).  How appropriate then that Justin, who loves the verdure and lushness of a British flowerbed, should wake up in the film’s final scene in a desert with nothing about except rock and sun.  And sky as well, because flowers need fresh air just as much as we do.  The only difference being that they breathe out what we breathe in.

Annensky, "Сентябрь"

A marvelous composition ("September") from one of Russia's most abstract poets.  You can read the original here.

In golden gardens wilt deceitful gates
Of purple’s glory and consumption slow,
By sun’s late dust in shortest arcs they flow
To perfumed fruit on which no master waits.  

The yellow silk of rugs leaves proof impure,
Assented lies of our last words and gaze,
The endless ponds of black lend parks their maze
And passion ripe their ready, yearned cure.

Yet only loss brings beauty to our hearts,
Enchanted force alone inspires love’s haste. 
To those already with sweet lotus’s taste
The fawning autumn scent but fear imparts.

The Paradise of Thieves

There is a point of human despair where the northern poor take to drink − and our own poor take to daggers.

You may enjoy the works of this author for their portraiture, their inimitable style, their flawless moral structure, or, one stormy and brisk late afternoon, perhaps for all three.  Indeed, it is this triptych of delights that allow these famous stories − all simple studies with complicated but fair explanations − to render the image of Chesterton and his most prized creation in glory.  It is also in the setting that one finds the precise tone.  When at home in Chesterton’s England, morals are his strongest suit; when in France, the plot and its concomitant characterizations (like all great writers, Chesterton’s characters shape the storyline, not the other way around) are most dazzling; but away from both these isles of civilization, a sensational style overtakes all else that, while present in all the stories and all of Chesterton’s other texts, is magnificent in its freedom of association, as if the unusual venue stirred his deepest longings.  Not many such stories exist, but one gem is undoubtedly this tale set in the land of wine and weal. 

The opening line introduces us to Muscari, the “most original of the Tuscan poets,” a stereotype so true to life that he cannot possibly exist except in literature or a dream.  He is cloaked by both nature and habit in black, and carries himself “as near as his century permitted to walking the world like Don Juan, with rapier and guitar.”  We already perceive the essence of this frivolous hedonist when another flourish is added:

He was neither a charlatan nor a child; but a hot, logical Latin who liked a certain thing and was it.  His poetry was as straightforward as anyone else’s prose.  He desired fame or wine or the beauty of women with a torrid directness inconceivable among the cloudy ideals and cloudy compromises of the north; to vaguer races his intensity smelt of danger or even crime.  Like fire or the sea, he was too simple to be trusted.

Muscari is somehow also an “ardent Catholic,” with the emphasis, we suppose, on “ardent.”  His ardor leads him, as it always does, to his favorite restaurant where he espies Harrogate, an English banker, and of even greater interest, the latter’s “beautiful English daughter.”  As he plans his approach, he catches sight of Ezza, an old friend and failed poet.  He chastises his friend, whom he does not recognize owing to his motley garb, for dressing like an Englishman (or, as the latter defends his wardrobe, “an Italian of the future”), and then proceeds to discuss the visiting foreigners.  Ezza mentions there is also a son in the picture, to which Muscari replies:

Harrogate has millions in his safes, and I have − the hole in my pocket.  But you daren’t say − you can’t say − that he’s cleverer than I, or bolder than I, or even more energetic.  He’s not clever; he’s got eyes like blue buttons; he’s not energetic; he moves from chair to chair like a paralytic.  He’s a conscientious, kindly old blockhead; but he’s got money simply because he collects money, as a boy collects stamps …. To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

They are all to venture through a forbidden region, Ezza and Muscari as guides, the Harrogates as moneyed tourists.  Only a sixth member to this party is added, a priest, “whose name was Brown and who was fortunately a silent individual,” and they set off.

Now we know that when characters are forbidden for a specific reason from entering a region, walking down a lonely alley, or bathing in an even lonelier cove, what has befallen others will surely befall them.  The reason the Harrogates are not encouraged to venture into the Tuscan woods is too good to be real: a king of thieves, extorting fees and fighting off the national troops, resides and reigns among those same wooden columns and uses its animals as lookouts.  His brigands appear in all parts and in all forms, and “his wild authority spread with the swiftness of a silent revolution.”  When the travelers do alight and confront the inevitable brigand and the “dubious-looking men with carbines and dirty slouch hats” who “had been gathering silently in such preponderating numbers,” their ringleader, a man called Montano, has three demands to make of his rich interlopers.  But that little priest, as silent all this time as the revolution or the dubious-looking men, has three objections to this scenario, all of which he explains at length to Muscari.  Rare is it that a poet has so listened to a priest!  The explanation, given in oblique hints as is typical for this particular priest, has just settled into Muscari’s brain when he looks around, befuddled at the turn of events:

Darkness was deepening under the mountain walls, and it was not easy to discern much of the progress of the struggle, save that tall men were pushing their horses’ muzzles through a clinging crowd of brigands, who seemed more inclined to harass and hustle the invaders than to kill them.  It was more like a town crowd preventing the passage of the police than anything the poet had ever pictured as the last stand of the doomed and outlawed men of blood.

In the end, both poet and priest are right about what is important to them.  And Muscari is especially right about those southerners and their daggers and those northerners and their potables.