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Sunday, March 14
JOAN-GIRL
by
Lloydville
on Sun 14 Mar 2010 11:10 AM PDT
VISIONS OF THE JOAN-GIRL
by Paul Zahl
On January 9th, 1951 Jack Kerouac had a vision in St. Patrick's
Cathedral on Fifth Avenue in New York City. He wrote the vision down that night and sent it to Neal Cassady. It was published in 1995 in the Selected Letters 1940 - 1956, edited by
Ann Charters, and is found on pages 281-293.
The letter hit me with a wallop, because it contradicts the reputation
Kerouac has earned for misogyny. The letter is a religious vision concerning women, and also men, which
embodies a catharsis of feeling and rue, on the part of the visionary, for the feelings of contempt that
governed most of Kerouac's treatments of women in his work.
It is made even more worthy of attention by the fact that four months
later, in a letter dated May 22nd,
Kerouac told Cassady to "pay no attention" to what he had written about
women in January. He "regressed", in other words. And he never quite came back to this universal chord.
In New Testament scholarship -- to make an abrupt cross-reference -- such textual "taking back" of an earlier testimony suggests the
authenticity of the original statement. In other words, if St. James
in the New Testament writes that he has concerns about some of the
teachings he finds in the letters of St. Paul, this tells the modern
scholar that the "odd" assertions from St. Paul concerning grace and
law really did issue from the man himself. St. James wouldn't
criticize St. Paul, that is, unless there had really been something
there for him to criticize. Similarly, if Jesus enunciates something
very radical, such as "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?"
within the context of a work that wants to make him All-Glowing and
Tom-Terrific, then the fact that this saying of Jesus has not been
deleted means that it was so strong in the memory of witnesses that
later interpreters could not have cut it if they tried.
Similarly, Kerouac on January 9th, 1951 experienced something very
real, for him. The fact that he becomes uncomfortable with it in on
May 22nd strengthens its veracity as a real dream, a real "touching of
the foundations of his soul" (his words).
This letter, which is quite sublime in its writing in my opinion, is
worth quoting at length. I will do so with some interstitial personal commentary. A short summing-up, of this loaded,
surprising material from the "Beat" pioneer, will follow. There are two further things to mention, before you read Kerouac's
letter.
It is a vision, his letter. It bursts over and upon him, and he is not
expecting it. It is completely accidental, in fact, since he ducked
into St. Patrick's only to find a place to take shelter from the
busy-ness of Midtown. He did not know he would get caught up in a
religious service, or novena. The letter recounts his vision, linked to
a statue he sees and studies and thinks about. It is a vision which
observes; and in observing one particular woman, seated in a pew in
front of him, he begins to think about his wife, and then about his
view of women in general, and finally, about men, in general.
Secondly, Kerouac's letter is emotional. Everything begins to happen
when he starts to cry. He is not able to explain his tears. Yet he
moves thereby beyond the "aesthetic" (his word) to the sub-rational.
That's when the "work" of the vision takes place. This is to say that
the "aesthetic" carries him to the "emotional", and it is an awesome
thing.
Now, dear Reader, if you are willing and ready, Behold:
TO NEAL CASSADY
Jan. 9, 1951
(Richmond Hill, N.Y.)
Dear Neal,
To continue. A new experience has touched the foundation of my soul since I wrote you the last words last night . . .
Kerouac sets the scene:
I came into the Cathedral not only to get out of the bitter cold, but because, moments before, I had stood in Grand Central Station looking around with a futile sorrow for a place to sit and think. All there was -- marble floor, rushing crowds, dime lockers, bleak seatless spaces and bright vast corners. What a thing men have let themselves in for, in this New York!
I hurried out in the cold and cut up 5th Avenue, past the (yes) Yale Club and past Harcourt Brace (yes) and swore and cursed; and cut right by the Doubleday Book store without deigning to go in and see if they had my book [i.e., his first published novel, The Town and the City] on
display . . .
As you know, St. Patrick's is a Gothic cathedral, copied after Rheims or Chartres or whichever, with a rectory in the back, and a big department store across the street on 50th street. I . . . ducked . . . into the side entrance of the church.
Now our hero must begin to "let go" of his "renegade Catholic" baggage,
and also his heavy personal baggage:
At first I sneered as all the commonplace "renegade Catholic" thoughts came to me in regimental order but soon I was lost in real sweet contemplation of what was going on . . .
I put away all my worries of where to get a job, how to get to California next month, what to do about my poor wife whom I had been torturing in my subtle way lately, and just merely sat thinking in church . . .
Kerouac suddenly invokes Dietrich Buxtehude!
. . . so that you see . . . my first thoughts were superficial, or let's
just say "aesthetic."
Then something happens:
Frankly, Neal, I don't know when it happened; when it was I began crying . . .
It is as if the writer's ears now become opened, together with his eyes. He begins to take in what is actually going on around him.
A tall athletic young priest was cutting up to make a sermon; simultaneously I noted how much the crowd had thickened; and before I knew it I was in the middle of a fullblown church service. Since I was in the church utterly given over to pure meditation I obediently kneeled, or stood, or sat at the young priest's behest and followed everyone else in so doing. He made several cryptic remarks evidently having to do with the novena everyone was on, and then began a sermon.
Note that Kerouac has the reaction that many visitors to a church
service have when the parish "announcements" are being made. He describes them as "cryptic". And so they are! (I have always tried
to teach young ministers to make as few announcements as possible in
church. Announcements disenfranchise visitors and give the impression of the
church membership being a kind of club, with "cryptic" sharings. In
most parishes, however, announcements grow, and Grow, and GROW. For my
money, they are a sign of fading vision.)
The priest now begins to speak. At first Kerouac misunderstands what
is being said.
He began talking about how "every ambitious woman wants to see her child become successful in industry, in a profession, in some constructive field." I slapped the side of my head in despair; for by this time my meditations had carried me far from this modern competitive world into thought of a simple and medieval character. I almost sneered. Then I noticed he was starting out this way for greater punch, because then he said, "What were the thoughts of the Virgin Mother on that first Christmas night with regard to her little son? For she knew, only poverty, humiliation and suffering could save him and she knew he was come for strange reasons into the world."
And from there on this fine young priest made a beautiful sermon about the advantages of humility and piety in the invisible world that will surmount the pride and decadence of the visible. I agreed with him. I almost applauded . . .
At this point Kerouac starts to think about the Virgin Mary. His
attention is caught by a newly dedicated and consecrated statue in the
Cathedral, of the Virgin Mary with her dead son -- the pieta, in other words.
And now I must tell you of the Virgin Mary . . . I was just staring at
what I think was a brand new statue of the Virgin Mary holding her Son in her arms after the
crucifixion . . .
I was amazed to see so many young girls, shopgirls, kneeling around it at the white rail. I couldn't believe my eyes when saw first one, then another, then all of them reach out, touch the statue, touch the red flowers, and bow their heads . . .
Kerouac now associates to his wife. He begins to think concretely
about his most personal relationship, and his role in it. This is where, in my opinion, the letter gets really interesting.
Suddenly I remembered what was wrong between my wife and myself in the past days; she'd said she felt like a "frog" sometimes in the midst of sexual intercourse. I remember it had irritated me . . . Also she never considered herself worth touching when she had a period. Most of all I thought of her -- on the impetus of seeing a girl exactly like her [my emphasis] in the pew in front of me -- with head bowed, kneeling,
a shawl over her . . . humble head, and I almost cried to think of it.
I saw how all of earthly life, with its gutty sufferings, really passes
like a river through the body of a woman while the man, unknowing of these things and "clean", just cuts along arrogant. I saw how it is the woman who gives birth, and suffers, and has afterbirths dragged out of her, and navel cords snipped and knotted, and bleeds -- while the man boasts of his bloody prowesses . . .
I had even been annoyed at the poor girl lately because she conducted long secret meditations of her own in the bedroom while I "wrote". "What are you thinking about?" I'd ask slyly. What's going on in her great soul now? I'd ask myself sarcastically. Bah, bah, bah, and all that; as if, and certainly BECAUSE I was a "writer", she, a mere girl, could not possibly have a soul like mine worthy of hours and of deep contemplation.
Kerouac is recognizing the validity of someone other than himself.
If I had been a little boy of Galilee, and seen the humble women in shawls kneeling at the temple, what would I have thought of Miss Rheingold [i.e., a sexy woman on a billboard advertising beer] . . .? No,
I saw that the girl has a soul . . . For if the burden on earth... could be lifted from one woman, then it may be lifted for another, or to be more precise, the burden is already lifted because the Virgin Mary was [this is a
reference to the Assumption of Our Lady]; just as our sins are expiated by the sacrifice of the great Lord Jesus, without any of us having to be crucified on a cross.
Kerouac now sums up what he has seen, in the form of the "Joan-girl" in
front of him. Joan is the first name of his wife.
No, the tall, humble Joan-girl in front of me, kneeling with bowed head, was a woman who dearly and sincerely prayed for the deliverance of her soul.
Finally, or almost finally, Kerouac considers "men", and the vain-glory of the male. He writes through the eyes of child, "a little boy of Galilee":
I further noticed that there were no young men in the church, only old ones; and I knew they were all out making money or being hoodlums with all their might. If I had been a little boy of Galilee . . . what would I have thought of the go-getter in his Brooks Brothers suit hurling himself through a revolving door with that arrogant scowl? I would have thought he was a scribe, or a pharisee, or a thief. If I had been a little boy of Galilee, and seen the old men praying at the Star, what would I have thought of the be-spatted executive hurrying from a conference. I would have thought he was Caesar. This is our world.
A touching word comes out on prayer:
I wished that the church was not only a sanctuary but a refuge for the poor, the humiliated, and the suffering; and I would gladly join in prayer . . . everybody kneeled: I gladly joined in; no other power on this earth could make me gladly kneel, or even stand up. Did I ever tell you about the time I was in the Navy madhouse and the Admiral of the Fleet came in? -- I was the only one who didn't stand up, all the other nuts did . . .
Kerouac's letter to Neal Cassady dated January 9th, 1951 concludes with a sort of "coda", which I find personally touching, and
satisfying. He changed his behavior toward his wife! It didn't last -- as our
moments of loving inspiration seldom do -- but the vision "became flesh". For a day, at least, it became flesh. Here is how it went:
In the subway everybody was going home to rest, instead of gathering in the Final Church of Eternal Joy, and I felt bad to see it . . . But when I came home I loved my wife, and kissed her tenderly, as she kissed me . . .
Goodnight, sweet prince.
Jack
From an historical point of view, a "lit-crit" point of view, this
letter is significant because it documents a temporary change of attitude on
the part of this American legend toward women.
Kerouac's attitude toward women is sometimes summed up in his
tossed-off remark, "Pretty girls make graves". As a poet immersed later in Buddhism, he was desirous, like
Siddhartha, of avoiding re-birth. "Pretty girls", therefore, he regarded as the pathway to birth, the
birth of babies who were metaphysically understood to be reluctant reincarnations of earlier, failed lives. Kerouac's view of birth, therefore of sex, and therefore of women, was not different in principle from George Harrison's in his mid-career
lyric, "Keep me free from birth".
But the result in Kerouac's case was an artist's attraction-repulsion
to women that has damaged his critical reception. He is judged harshly for his
suspicion of one half of . . . earthkind.
Here, however, in this discursive 1951 meditation in church, his thoughts are drawn in a different direction. His observations,
through the eye and through the ear, draw him into an association with
the "Joan-girl" -- his own specific wife -- and then a judgment on men,
as "scribes, pharisees, and thieves", which exist in a different zone. I hope that your reading of the letter has offered a kinder, gentler
Kerouac.
There is something else, though.
Kerouac's vision that day came to him in connection with tears. Something "got through", but it was in connection with tears. I wonder sometimes why people cry in church. Happens all the time. People who are "normally" well- and tightly- put together, "lose it"
during the singing of a hymn, or an illustration in a sermon, or
something they see out of the corner of their eye. It's as if you go "out of your mind" for a minute, or "come to your senses", or are "touched" in a deep uncovered emotional part of you. As I say, this seems to happen all the time.
It happened to me the other night. Just like it happened to Kerouac -- but it was me and not him.
I stumbled across something I only dimly remembered. It was on
YouTube, and I stumbled over something I only dimly remembered. It was the last two minutes or so of an 'X-Files' episode entitled "The
Post-Modern Prometheus". I remembered it as a kind of visual 'send-up' of the James Whale
Universal horror movies I loved so much as a child. In "The Post-Modern Prometheus", a "Frankenstein's-Monster" is located,
by Mulder and Scully, and saved by them. The ending, however, I had not remembered.
It takes place in a crowded nightclub, and Cher takes the stage -- at
least a look-alike -- and belts out the song "Walking in Memphis". Not only does the 'Monster', who is seated at a table in the front row,
together with Scully and Mulder, jump right up and dance ecstatically
to the song -- that EXCELLENT song. But then Mulder beckons to Scully to join him on the
floor. Our frosty and usually confused "couple" get the message, of the song
and of the place. They dance together, romantically and intimately, and touchingly.
"Frankly, Neal, I began to cry."
I began to cry. Really cry. All choked up. Tears of joy, tears of feeling -- feelings actually about my own wife,
my own "Joan-Girl".
Then I decided to write this piece.
Ideas seem to come this way. You don't control them, or muster
them up, or command them to appear.
They come up through the emotions.
But it's often the eye that gets the ball rolling.
Friday, March 12
INTO THE MYSTIC
by
Lloydville
on Fri 12 Mar 2010 12:01 AM PST
A few days ago I was driving with my friends Mary and Paul Zahl from Kayenta, Arizona, to Moab, Utah. We were going up to Moab to track down the locations where John Ford shot parts of Wagon Master (and other films.)
On the way, Paul suggested we make a detour to see the fabled Valley Of the Gods, a large basin surrounded by mesas and dotted with odd rock towers. My instinct was to proceed directly to Moab, but Paul's instinct was stronger so we set off on a dirt road into the valley.
It was a good road, of red clay -- or would have been a good road if it hadn't been raining recently. The rain had turned it into glass. My big Navigator, in four-wheel-drive, kept losing traction on it, threatening to slide over the embankments on sharp turns. It was a little scary, but the car handled it all very well.
Then, at the end of the road, we found ourselves driving straight towards the nearly sheer face of a tall mesa. There was, improbably, a road leading up the side of the mesa in a series of hair-raising switchbacks. The maps we had said the road was paved, and it was, but only in parts. The other parts were wet dirt -- something we discovered too late.
I started up the road, which is called the Moki Dugway -- seen above in better weather conditions than we faced -- and we all soon realized that we had made a big mistake. But I also realized that trying to turn the car around on such a road would probably be more dangerous than proceeding up it.
So we proceeded up it, at a snail's pace, with our hearts in our throats. I hugged the side of the mesa on the sharp curves, honking and hoping we wouldn't meet any oncoming traffic. There were no shoulders to speak of for most of the way, only terrifying drop-offs. If the Navigator's tires ever lost traction on the slippery dirt sections, it would have meant a certain flaming fiery death for all of us.
Below is a picture Mary took with her iPhone during the ascent. She took it upside down, as it happened -- the condition of our stomachs at the time.
For a while it seemed as though the road would never end, but it finally did, on top of the mesa, where we were presented with . . . a winter wonderland. An endless plateau covered in snow, dotted with cedars, new snow falling gently on it all.
It was like a vision of peace and grace, granted to us after our ordeal.
I couldn't get this extraordinary experience out of my mind. The next morning I had what felt like a revelation -- I felt we had been led supernaturally to the Moki Dugway, where we reenacted, in a sense, the climactic scenes of Wagon Master, when the Mormons take their wagons up the side of a precipitous cliff, where wagons were not meant to go, in order to reach their promised land.
I became convinced that John Ford himself had been riding with us on our climb up the mesa, having decided that we would not just have a leisurely meander up to Moab to gawk at his sublime locations for Wagon Master, but drive right into the heart of the movie. Mystical as it may sound, I think that's exactly what we did.
Monday, March 1
THE PREACHER FROM THE BLACK LAGOON
by
Lloydville
on Mon 01 Mar 2010 06:09 PM PST
It occurs to me that many people who have been following Paul Zahl's posts for this site (collected in The Zahl File) may not know that he is a world-famous preacher, or have had a chance to hear one of his sermons.
Well, here's your chance:
What Is Love?
This sermon was preached at All Saints Episcopal Church in Chevy Chase, Maryland on a Sunday in 2009. I doubt if you've ever heard a sermon quite like it before. More than a few mainstream Christians have reacted to sermons of Paul's like this the way the human figures are reacting to the Creature in the poster above. They just seem to miss the point.
 1 Attachments
Tuesday, February 16
WALKING IN MEMPHIS
by
Lloydville
on Tue 16 Feb 2010 12:03 AM PST
Some thoughts by Paul Zahl (of The Zahl File) on Jack Kerouac and his connection to Michael Curtiz's costume epic The Egyptian. Huh? Read on:
The 1954 Hollywood movie The Egyptian, a big picture, with Jean Simmons
and Michael Wilding, among many others, is hard to find -- all but impossible
to find, in fact, until the days of Internet magic. (It's available on a Korean DVD.) It was produced by
Darryl F. Zanuck and directed by Michael Curtiz. Curtiz had directed
several big pictures, including Casablanca and Mildred Pierce, not to
mention The Walking Dead and Mystery of the Wax Museum.
The Egyptian tells the story of a young doctor in Ancient Egypt --
meaning Thebes, Memphis, and Luxor -- who is ensnared pitifully by a
temptress known as the "Woman of Babylon", completely loses his
self-respect, together with everything he owns as well as his post as
Physician to Pharaoh, and finally recreates himself as a
healer wandering throughout the Ancient World. He prospers, only to return home
to lose his true and loyal love, played by Jean Simmons, and to become
caught up in the failed but sublime One God movement of the Pharaoh
Akhenaten. In a touching scene that works dramatically and
cinematically, Sinuhe, the doctor, is converted to monotheism. After
all his sad experience of life, Sinuhe seeks monastic solitude in the
desert, a sadder man but much wiser.
The Egyptian is pretty good. The sets are gorgeous, the camera is
fluid and assured, the acting (with the exception of Gene Tierney, who
is miscast as Pharaoh's sister) confident if a little wooden, and the
matte paintings and miniatures convincing. Personally, I like the
religion of the film, with Akhenaten's confession of his universal faith
going down well, with pathos, at the end. Some might say that The
Egyptian is suffused with '50s-style religion in this country, but that
would be unfair. The film is so anchored in the pessimistic views --
i.e., life as an exercise in dreamy futility, with loss -- of the
author of the original best-selling book, that Akhenaten's "witness" in
the last scene but one, comes off as credible, and for me even
hopeful. The novel on which The Egyptian is based, incidentally, was
written in the Finnish language by Mika Waltari. In the days of our
fathers and mothers, Waltari's novel was an international sensation.
Waltari's father, incidentally, was a Finnish Lutheran pastor. It was the Finnish Lutherans, of course, who brought us The Flying Saucer Of Love.
Here's the thing:
Jack Kerouac saw The Egyptian in a movie theater when it first came out.
He hated it!
The vehemence of Kerouac's response to this relatively standard
Hollywood production is surprising. I read his armchair review, which occurs in Some of the Dharma (page
124), three years ago and was impressed by his very negative reaction. Here is what he wrote:
WITH 'THE EGYPTIAN' Darryl Zanuck has purveyed a teaching of
viciousness and cruelty. They present him with a gold cup at banquets for this. The
author, Mika Waltari, is also guilty of the same teaching of viciousness and
cruelty. You see a scene of a man choking a woman under water. Both these men
are rich as a consequence of the world's infatuation with the forbidden murder,
--- its daydreams of maniacal revenge by means of killing and Lust. Men kill
and women lust for men. Men die and women lust for men. Men, think in solitude;
learn how to live off your sowings of seed in the ground. Or work 2 weeks a
year and live in the hermitage the rest of the year, procuring your basic foods
at markets, and as your your garden grows work less, till you've learned to live
off your garden alone.
QUIETNESS AND REST THE ONLY ESCAPE.
The secret is in the desert.
Now, Ain't that Peculiar! The Egyptian tells the story of a man
disillusioned by romantic love -- in the first half he loses his whole
self, his deepest self, to the wily and nefarious siren of Babylon.
The Egyptian envisions his then turning aside from the world, and
becoming a kind of medical "gentleman of the road", a Sal Paradise of
the ancient Mediterranean. With Kerouacian pessimism, Sinuhe observes
the fruitlessness of human endeavor, and does so over and over again.
Finally, back home in Thebes -- I love writing those words -- he
becomes enlightened by Akhenaten, the Sun (One) worshiper, who reveals
to him that God is the whole of Reality, and that Forgiveness, of all
things, is at the core of that Reality. There is something like
pantheism here, together with absolving Christianity, and the the name
"Jesus Christ" is invoked on the end-title. How could Kerouac not have
responded positively to this, given his Christo-Buddhism, or
Buddhist-Christianity, or however you want to call his personal
synthesis?
But he didn't like the film. He focused completely on the Woman of
Babylon sequence, with its subtle, slightly-off-frame drowning of the
Siren -- she survives -- and the "lust of the eye" and lust of the body
which drives the story at that point. Biographers of Jack Kerouac
would probably observe in these comments his suspicion of entrapping
women and entrapped men, his frequent equation of greed and lust, and
his persistent failed efforts to choose celibacy on Buddhist grounds
--- "Men . . . learn how to live off your sowings of seed in the ground [my emphasis]."
I want to guess that Kerouac got stuck on the performance by Bella
Darvi as Nefer, the Woman of Babylon, and did not consider the enduring
Treue of Jean Simmons' character, nor the emphatic world-renunciation
by Sinuhe, which begins and ends The Egyptian.
What his impassioned observations do tell us, and they read as sober
and non-Benzedrined, is that Kerouac was touchy about violence. This
is the man who would brawl in bars, mad-drunk, and then write
remorseful exhortations to the whole world to Be Kind. He was also a
man who loved women, but suspected them, and their "designs", through
and through, with the exception of Gabrielle, his mother.
Take a look at The Egyptian. It's a good movie. Sure, it's too long.
And to be sure, there's not one word of humor. But the liturgical
scenes, with their ethereal religious chants praising "Beauty" (I
thought I could hear Lionel Ritchie's "You are so Beautiful") -- which
work! -- and especially the obeisances, including Jean Simmons's, on the
steps of the temple of the One (Sun) God, are sincerely reverent, and
affecting.
You could compare the scene of Pharaoh's archers breaking into the
Temple of Aten with the Roman breach of the Temple in Nicholas Ray's
The King of Kings. The latter is bloody and sensationalistic (like the "Civil War" cards little boys loved in the '60s, by the same people who
did the "Mars Attacks" cards) -- the former, sympathetic and pitiful.
My irony for today is this:
Jack Kerouac should have liked The Egyptian. The title character, take
away the toga, is the man himself.
Maybe he walked out before the end. The editor of this blog taught me never to
do that.
Monday, February 8
SOME OF THE MOONRISE
by
Lloydville
on Mon 08 Feb 2010 12:27 AM PST
Drunk late at night in 1955, Jack Kerouac watched Frank Borzage's Moonrise on TV, and wrote this poem about it, in his notebook of religious meditations eventually published as Some Of the Dharma:
DUMB POEM CALLED "MOONRISE"
A snake in a pond Slithers out of harm Seeking the frond Of the heavenly farm.
Jeb was your Paw Forevermore And this is the law Of love and gore.
The blood of the bear Is soaking in the swamp, Such heavenly air
Overhangs his pomp.
Give yourself up To the sheriffs of truth, Fear no hound pup No karma of tooth
For your sweet smile And meditations desperate
Are wine to the senile And love to degenerate
Face the shroudy kitchen Of the sea of the night And make a pretty kitten Of all this abounding blight
(Written after watching, drunk, Dane Clark on TV in movie MOONRISE) --- Some cloth has that sin rip This doesnt
My friend Paul Zahl (of The Zahl File) drew my attention to this. He writes:
This is Kerouac's little riff on a surprising movie, with its
Prophet of Grace Sheriff and its Recluse of Wisdom Rex Ingram, its
insight about dogs, and its unsensational, unforgettable scene on a
very small ferris wheel.
I think I could preach three sermons arising from stanza four, and another two about the movie's not having "that sin rip". I'm not sure they'd be received all that well -- but maybe on a park bench some day, as in Moonrise.
Kerouac, watching a late night movie on television and
drunk, manages to capture the theme of the film. Does "blood"-destiny have to determine the outcome of a life? Or can other
things, like love (the shaky and vulnerable heroine), a wise man for
father-figure (the Rex Ingram character "Mose", who knows what's really
up before anyone else does, and who gives his hounds the dignity of
being called "Mr. Dog" and means it) . . .
. . . and a philosopher-sheriff, the
likes of whom I have never seen depicted in a movie -- sort of a
small-town "zen-detective" (the phrase is Thornton Wilder's) -- who is
able to convey a concrete quality of grace in unsentimental terms. Can
the "sin rip" (Kerouac's phrase, not the movie's) be mended? Mended in
believable terms, in a way that could actually happen?
Kerouac takes karma, and a dog's bite and faithfulness,
and the cabin kitchen at the end; and the swamp of the beginning and
middle; and comes up with a . . . kitten. All while drunk!
Sunday, November 29
ONE STEP BEYOND — DON'T GO THERE
by
Lloydville
on Sun 29 Nov 2009 12:01 AM PST
Paul Zahl (of The Zahl File) offers another meditation on an extraordinary bit of American culture from days gone by, the T. V. series One Step Beyond. If you don't remember it, or never saw it, Paul suggests that you might do well to keep it that way, just for your own peace of mind:
EXCRUCIATING -- BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE . . .
by Paul F. M. Zahl
Way Out, Roald Dahl's television show, was the ugly one, the ghoulish
one, the cruel one.
Twilight Zone was the high end of these early television gems of the fantastic -- moralistic and righteous, at times redemptive and even hopeful.
Christ got at least two positive mentions in the Rod Serling scripts,
and the team effort showed in the artful results.
But in between, in between the cruelty of Roald Dahl and the justice of
Rod Serling, came the observing eye of . . . John Newland.
Newland is barely remembered today, but in the late 1950s and early
1960s (and even into the 1970s) he produced, directed, and acted in
scores and scores of television shows, mostly in the supernatural or
thriller line. Speaking of Thriller, Newland directed "Pigeons from
Hell" for that great series, scaring us all where it counts -- early
childhood -- and leaving us with that tender scar forever.
Newland's big achievement was hosting three seasons of a series concerning the
paranormal. The series was entitled One Step Beyond. It was created by Merwin Gerard and consisted of
thirty-minute 'docu-dramas' of supposed instances of possession,
ghostly presence, telepathy, and predictions of dreadful futures.
I have been watching One Step Beyond since the day it was birthed, in
1959. Almost all of the shows have been on video since the beginning,
as they were somehow in the public domain. And now -- there is a God
-- Paramount has released the first season of One Step Beyond in
splendid condition. Oh, and the music, especially the theme called
"Fear", written by Harry Lubin, is the ultimate science-fiction/horror
theme. Anyone who is reading this would recognize it instantly. (I
listen to it right before bedtime every night. Mary loves it, too.)
But what has come to me in recent viewings, with an almost stunning
power, is a sort of personal truth about the inner spring of these
tight dramas. It is a truth about the supernatural in general, and it
springs from its source. These stories, with few exceptions that I can
see, are about love lost or love gone wrong. Someone has lost someone,
and is desperate with grief. He or she is completely naked to the
possibility of contact. Or someone has done somebody wrong, and the
guilt is killing them. Or, even, somebody hates somebody else, and the
hate gets objectified, in some kind of paranormal occurrence.
Below are some examples of what I am talking about. ("The Dead Part Of
the House" is available on the official Paramount DVD release (above), the
rest are available for download or viewing through YouTube or related
sites.)
Season One, Episode Nine: "The Dead Part of the House"
A widower hates his nine-year-old daughter because she survived an
accident that killed her mother.
He resents his little girl. And she knows it, and the child is
perishing for love, in front of his eyes.
She develops three ghostly friends, and in a benign move, these
supernatural friends are able to bring her father to his senses.
Phillip Abbott plays the father and conveys an irrational paternal
hatred, based on a love for his wife gone awry, that is painful to
watch, in the extreme. The little girl is entirely sympathetic, and so
completely shaken. Moreover, the child's kind aunt is powerless over
her brother.
It is Tennessee Williams, as far as I am concerned, on a claustrophobic
'50s television set, yet completely unself-conscious.
Season Two, Episode Seven: "The Open Window"
A painter of fashion models -- his current model is played by Louise Fletcher --
observes a woman in an apartment across the way preparing to commit
suicide. She has been rejected romantically and her little
black-and-white four-walled world is killing her. Her disconcerting
monologue and preparations, overheard and observed, have several
antecedents in theater and movies. But the television camera closes in
on her, with dissection. It is impossible to watch. And it's only
1960!
As for the denouement, you'll have to see it yourself. But it's not
really about the genre, it's about human attachment severed and love
torn to shreds. How did Newland, who produced and directed, get this
out at an early hour Friday night? I don't think anybody at the
network or the sponsor must have seen it as serious, because it was
about, uh, ESP. But it was very serious.
Season Two, Episode 20: "Who Are You?"
A little girl wakes up in her bed and doesn't recognize her parents.
Her parents are loving, devoted, and dear. She runs away and finds the people she believes to be her parents. They, for their part, are living in a total darkness of grief, having
lost their own little girl recently.
The little girl we are watching is possessed of the spirit of the
other, dead little girl. And she is horrified by the attentions of her natural parents. And her grief-stricken 'real' parents are horrified by her.
This child is totally lost, but alive and real, a whole self of
yearning.
When "Who Are You?" is over and the implications of the first 20
minutes -- these shows are all 29 minutes long -- begin to sink in, the
situation becomes excruciating.
In short, don't watch this.
Just two more examples, but they can be multiplied by a score of others:
Season Two, Episode 32: "Delia"
Here is a humdinger, which begins so quietly and prosaically that the
middle section takes you completely by surprise.
A vacationing American man is trying to recover from a second lousy
marriage, and is drinking in a bar on a quiet island off Mexico. Another American, a sexy divorcée, at a table nearby, invites him
over. She is beautiful and the kind of woman most men would love to
meet under such circumstances. But he turns her down. He is
impossible.
He takes a self-pitying walk down to the beach, and half way down,
meets an extremely beautiful, refined, and quite un-sexy woman sitting
alone by a tree. She knows all about him, connects with him instantly
-- as he with her -- and they are completely and in a single minute one
in love forever. She is the lost and final love eternal, with eternal
eyes and never-ending smile.
He exits for a moment, comes back -- and she is gone.
He spends the rest of his life searching for her, and ends up back on
the island, where he awaits her return, and drinks himself to death.
I won't give away the ending.
This little parable is the ultimate dream of romance between a man and
a woman. Drink to me only with thine eyes. I will spend my life
awaiting your return. And die in the process.
After you see "Delia" once, it becomes impossible to watch it again.
Get thee behind me. (Get thee to a nunnery)
He should have stayed with the giving brunette. Hélas, he didn't.
Season Two, Episode 33: "The Visitor"
This one is a celebrated episode. It starred Joan Fontaine, with Warren
Beatty, in either his first or second appearance ever.
It concerns a woman in older middle-age who has left her husband,
against his will, for the bottle; and has pulled herself completely
within herself at their cozy mountain get-away. A nice fire is burning
on a snowy night, there's plenty of money, and there's a bar full of
whisky. But a young man knocks at the door, his car having broken down
in the snow, and he is trying to get to the hospital where his young
wife is having a baby. He cannot get there.
Who he is and why he is there and what he has come to do? All is
revealed, neatly and affectingly.
Again, this is about love gone wrong, about malice as the consequence of hurt,
about grief causing people to go mad -- and all on a minuscule set, with one
camera, two actors, and dread, with heart.
Don't see this one either.
I watch these episodes of One Step Beyond and have to tell myself not
to watch any more. They are saturated with grief. They are fistfuls of loss and love that
is separated, by the curtain of death, from fulfillment, even promise.
Yes, there is compassion -- and none whatever of the ghoulish joy in
karma that Way Out featured every time. I would call these instances
of Baby-Boomer television masterpieces of wrecked emotion, and love's
attachment snapped forever.
How come these are so powerful -- if "excruciating" means powerful? I would like to finish this article by trying to say why.
In the first place these are completely uncompromised one-act plays.
The camera prowls around -- I honestly think of Rossellini and the
inquiring camera, maybe even the camera as protagonist, though I fear
that sounds pretentious. (I invoked Tolstoy once in a conversation
with Joe Dante, and he suddenly started to look at me coolly. I sure
wanted to withdraw that particular comment.) Yet it is true that John
Newland's camera moves around a lot, in interior spaces about the size
of a closet most of the time. In addition, his close-ups, which are
numerous, completely fill the screen. These are intimate dramas --
they are about one or two, or at the most three, characters. The
people's faces are tortured. They are anguished. The unflinching
close-ups mostly record grief and separation. What are ghosts
in these stories other than objectified presences of love become
unattainable? Thus the excruciating atmosphere of One Step Beyond.
There is one other thing:
When I was eight and nine years old and saw shows like this, I
definitely connected with the fear and dread. But
I didn't really get the truth. The psychology was completely at the
edges, or rather, out of the question.
I just knew, to my bones and my nerve ends, that something serious was
going on.
Too serious.
Twilight Zone, which saved the day, was more distanced somehow. It
didn't raise the resistance that was raised by One Step Beyond.
Neither could I have appreciated The Glass Menagerie. (Still can't
watch the last act.)
My advice to you, dear reader, is Skip This One. Sit It Out.
It's too close to home. Take away the supernatural part of it, and
there is only human loss.
Oder -- and I truly wish I had done this when I was president of a
theological seminary -- show "Delia'"and "The Dead Part of the House"
to a class for future ministers on . . . pastoral care. In the church,
and in the frayed and hungry world around us, you're going to encounter
quite a few Delias and a whole directory full of The Dead Parts of
Houses.
Monday, October 19
THE THEATER OF GARDENS
by
Lloydville
on Mon 19 Oct 2009 12:04 AM PDT
Here's another piece by Mary Zahl about gardens -- getting into the nuts and bolts of the way a garden works and how that contributes to what it means:
LOOKING AT THE HOUSE AND GARDEN RELATIONSHIP
by Mary Zahl
Reflecting on what is happening visually in what I consider good
residential garden design, whether my own or someone else’s, I have to
start with the relationship of the house to the garden. For good or
ill, the house is the most important structure in the landscape. That
makes creating an effective relationship between the two all the more
difficult if the house is a) not particularly attractive, and b) not
designed to open up to the outside visually.
The first point is staring me in the face as I look at much of the
residential architecture around me: In Central Florida, most new
housing is the big-box-with-a-roof look in stucco, the older houses are
one-story cinderblocks, and the terrain is pretty flat for both. Only
where there are established large trees (live oaks!), is there much
hope for a satisfying complimentary landscape design. The photo above shows a typical single-story Central Florida home graced with majestic live oaks.
The second point came home to me vividly in the last house we lived in,
a church-owned rectory situated next to a parking lot. This was an
attractive two-story colonial stone house from the outside. But from
the inside, the only views out from the living areas were of the
parking lot. Even the screen porch had this vantage! We might as well
have been living in a house with no windows, apart from some of the
filtered light. I found it depressing.
When designing a garden, one of the primary tasks is to go into the
house and look out from the key windows and doors. I ask the clients
where they like to sit, and it is almost always in a room with a view
of the garden. Most gardens end up being a stage set, which means they
should look as attractive as possible as much of the year as possible
from the inside. Above is a garden in Birmingham, Alabama, as seen from a favorite indoor spot of the clients.
Anyone who has a swimming pool understands that it
should be beautiful to look at, because it may seldom be used for what
it was intended.
Then, working on paper, I draw center lines out from each of those
important vistas, and try to make the garden’s axes work from them.
Not only is this the classic design principle we inherited from the
Ancients, but an adaptation of this axial approach is what makes the
greatest gardens of the world -- many in England -- work so well:
I am often reminded of a friend’s explaining to me that Balanchine was
such a great choreographer because he never abandoned the classical
principles, but found creative ways to interpret them. This same idea
is at work in the best English gardens, such as Sissinghurst or
Barnsley House. That's Sissinghurst Garden in the photo above, in Kent, England, designed by Harold Nicholson and
Vita Sackville-West, among the first to combine strong geometric lines
with profuse planting, a marriage of two elements and two personalities
that matched them.
The challenge for me as a garden designer is to stick
to classical principles of axes and proportion with a huge variety of
residential architectural styles. Above, the "axis" of a garden in Birmingham.
This is where the plants and the quality of hard materials come in.
Planting needs to soften and "warm up" the geometry. Materials should
age as quickly as possible to do the same, which is why natural stone
or brick or pots are always preferable. Geometry alone makes for a
cold garden. A profusion of plants with no geometry or relationship to
the house’s architecture is too chaotic for my tastes, and makes for a
less integrated whole, and actually a less peaceful atmosphere
year-round. Getting that balance right for the client’s taste is the
biggest challenge I have. Well, that, and creating something that
doesn’t die!
Below, an example of strong geometry and natural materials softened by planting in a Birmingham garden:
Finally, to go a step further, I want the views to be so appealing that
they actually draw the owner out into the garden. This is my unstated
goal: to create a gardener -- or at least someone who is drawn into
nature and away from the computer or television -- to a place that might
feed their soul.
Below, an inviting space for sitting in a small courtyard garden in Birmingham:
I'm struck by Mary's comparison of the garden to a stage set, something that must work first as seen through the "proscenium arches" of a house's apertures -- windows, doors, porch frames. The same is true for a theatrical set, once the curtain rises, or for the shots in a movie. All these "sets" must be pleasing in themselves but also invite us to enter them -- literally in the case of gardens, imaginatively in the case of stage or screen. A stage set or a shot in a film, like a garden, can't just offer us a pretty picture -- it must have a spatial quality which lures us into it, makes us want to inhabit it. Only then, as with a garden, can it work its real magic.
[Photos by Mary Zahl, who also designed all the Birmingham gardens pictured above.]
Tuesday, October 13
HELLO, MR. CHIPS
by
Lloydville
on Tue 13 Oct 2009 12:11 AM PDT
Paul Zahl, the Preacher From the Black Lagoon (see The Zahl File), revisits a commercial disaster from days gone by -- the 1969 version of Goodbye, Mr. Chips:
A MOVIE WITH SOUL
by Paul Zahl
I am beginning to know James Hilton's books and the movies made of
them, such as Lost Horizon, in two wonderful versions; Random Harvest,
which is an almost perfect elegy to selfless love; and Goodbye, Mr.
Chips, also in two wonderful versions.
The second version of Chips, which bombed in 1969 (with the exception
of Pauline Kael's memorable praise), is an interesting case of a film
that more or less disappeared after its initial showing, became almost
notorious for its over-dubbed and stream-of-consciousness songs, and
co-starred the now less-remembered English pop star Petula Clark.
A personal interest in James Hilton, together with an interest in the
English playwright Terence Rattigan, led me to this movie recently,
which was released on DVD last January. And yes, it is an odd
collection of things -- a familiar drama (or so it seems at first) of
life in an English boarding school; a use of idyllic outdoor long shots
and zoom effects that are like ads for Tab, or even Coke, back in the
'60s; spectacular and also heavily edited musical numbers within a
story concerning a Latin master of the 1920's; and in the heart of it,
right at the core of it, a love story that rings completely true.
In short, this is a movie with soul, which is also greater than the sum
of its parts.
After watching two versions of Terence Rattigan's The Browning Version,
both of which were filmed on the same location (i.e., Sherborne School
in southern England) as the 1969 Chips, I felt saturated with this
elite context. (The first version of The Browning Version, with Michael Redgrave, is illustrated above.) Is there much left to say, after these two persuasive
works, about the introversion and disappointments of prep school
teachers of Latin and Greek? Well, Rattigan must have believed there
was, because he took a familiar story, Hilton's novella of Brookfield
School, and batted it straight into the stratosphere.
His script, which now focusses almost completely on the love story of
Mr. Chipping, played by Peter O'Toole, and the unlikely love of his
life, played by Petula Clark, is literary and beautiful, full of
Classical allusions yet uncontrived. When Rattigan puts the Ancient
Greek maxim "Know thyself", together with the God Apollo, at the
turning point of the story, it is fully apt and touching and true.
He also writes a scene between the two meant-for-each-other lovers,
filmed by the Victorian greenhouse at Syon House on the Thames, which
is as affecting a proposal of marriage -- it is basically she who
proposes to him, yet with no tenor of forwardness -- as anything of its
kind on film. Incidentally, I write as someone who has performed
hundreds of marriages and who gladly embraces Lloydville's title, Preacher From the Black Lagoon.
How does a movie acquire soul? We have an impressive script by a
master, Terence Rattigan. We have a great theme from James Hilton: the
transformation in real time and life that is effected by a devoted
woman in relation to a shy misunderstood schoolmaster, and the
consequent effect of the couple's marriage on an entire community,
Brookfield School, petty, political, and witchy. Yet these two
elements don't fully account for the movie's soul, which means you
start crying by the middle of act two and can't stop until way after
the end.
I think there are two other things that make Chips something like a
great movie, although probably not a great movie in the way of
cinematic art. The first is its visual style, which, as I said, is
full of long shots of the heroine and hero, with flowers in the
foreground; constantly changing colors to mirror the emotions of the
leads; many zooms from high up (God's eye!); and basically the most
accomplished style of the kind of thing Dan Curtis was doing in his
made-for-television horror movies of the same era: a little arty,
consciously 'visual', and plain pretty. It works here and you probably
wouldn't alter a thing. Thus the sequence at Pompeii and Paestum works
because the honey-colored marble of the sublime ruins matches the early
love of the surprizing surprized couple.
The second added thing in this wondrous movie is the music. The songs
are by Leslie Bricusse, who wrote "Stop the World, I Want To Get Off";
and the instrumentation is by John Williams. The songs were considered
forgettable when Goodbye, Mr. Chips first opened, without much for
tunes. Yet they are mostly sung by Petula Clark and Peter O'Toole as
narrations rather than lip-synch performance. They are internal
monologues. They are therefore true to life. Petula Clark's song
"Apollo", for example is subtle and everything that the word "nuanced"
is now supposed to mean. And I will guarantee something to the readers
of this blog: If you see Chips and do not go straight to YouTube or
iTunes and listen to "Fill the World With Love", over and over again,
you had better check to see if you still have a heart. To be honest
with you, now that I know what that Bricusse-composed school hymn means
in light of the powerful story in which it figures so prominently, I
don't ever want to sing anything else again. (Maybe "Be True To Your
School" by the Beach Boys, but nothing more, ever again.)
So, here is a movie with soul. Goodbye, Mr. Chips from that hinge year
1969 is hard to explain. It's got Hilton in the first stratum,
Rattigan in the second, sublime if ever so slightly cheesy visuals, and
introspective songs that work, partly because they do not overwhelm the
other elements.
There is a fifth element, however, one more thing, to add. There is
Peter O'Toole and Petula Clark. These actors were made for each
other. Clark embodies a kind of heroine that you rarely see any more.
(I married one 36 years ago.) She loves her husband, supports him
with everything she has and thus brings out qualities in him that he
never knew he had, and she's humble while having a kind of luminosity
-- a word like "nuanced" which suffers from over-use -- or inner
spiritual strength that is contagious in this self-absorbed world.
Katherine Brisket, which is the name of Clark's character, is the
strongest entity in the entire movie. Yet her life's work is love.
That is why the bull's eye center of Goodbye, Mr. Chips is the scene
when Mrs. Chipping takes the entire student body and faculty to a new
and noble level as she leads them, not by design, in the school hymn
"Fill the World With Love". This is not dumb! It completely works.
No wonder O'Toole's character falls in love with her, defends her, and
establishes an unforgettable rock of a life with her.
Goodbye, Mr. Chips is now available on a beautiful DVD, its soundtrack
also available on a connoisseur's three-disc CD from Film Score
Monthly.
Oh, and I just took a look at Joanna, made one year earlier in England
with Donald Sutherland and Genevieve Waite (and Rod McKuen -- listen to
the warm) in order to get some perspective on the period. Odd isn't
it: I loved Joanna back then, and thought Chips was dumb. Now I love
Chips and think Joanna is the queen of dumb.
Thursday, October 8
TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD
by
Lloydville
on Thu 08 Oct 2009 11:55 PM PDT
A report by Paul Zahl about a strange, haunted museum in St. Petersburg, Russia:
This past August, I slipped away for an afternoon from the tour group I
was helping to lead in Russia and the Baltics. I slipped away in order
to see a weird museum in St. Petersburg.
I had heard heard of it before, and its original form under the
Soviets, the notorious Museum of Atheism. Until a few years ago,
Russian young people used to be taken to the former St. Isaac's
Cathedral in Leningrad/Petrograd/St. Petersburg to witness a
State-operated exhibition displaying the folly, ignorance, and
wickedness of Christianity, with side-exhibits on Buddhism, Animism,
Judaism, Islam, and the Greek and Roman Gods.
After perestroika, the Museum was dismantled and St. Isaac's became a
Russian Orthodox cathedral again. The exhibits persist, however, in
a big old gray crate of a building about three blocks away. To visit
the 'Museum of Religion' today, is to have a fascinating window on the
Soviet assault on religion, in general, and Christianity, in
particular. And there is a lot to say about this, in that a whole new
generation of Western atheists would love this place, with its
overwhelming assumption that religion is a matter of competing
belief-systems with no judgments possible concerning the possible
truth-superiority of one system over against any another.
I could go on about the sociological, cultural, and even the
theological implications of St. Petersburg's Museum of Religion in the
Year of Our Lord 2009. But that's not what really drew me to the
Museum.
What drew me to the Museum of Religion, located three blocks away from
its original Russian Orthodox/Stalinist home, were the visuals, the
absurd visuals, which I hoped, and guessed, would be there.
And they were there!
You pay your entrance fee and immediately notice that there are five
times more guards in this museum than there are visitors. Once, Soviet
'confirmation' classes would have crowded the place, together with
masses of foreign tourists bussed over. Today there is no one there at
all. Today's Museum of Religion is not deemed as interesting as
yesterday's Museum of Atheism. But it's the same material.
You go up a tiny staircase -- have to be pointed in the right direction
by one of the half-dozen guards who are looking at you like fresh meat
-- and then enter a series of small rooms that display the Origin of
Christianity and move directly into a series of four or five rooms on
Russian Orthodoxy. None of the guards spoke English, but one of them
spoke German so I got the lay of the land from her. The room on Jesus
emphasized his teachings, with a small dose of messianism. In each
small room concerning Orthodoxy, paintings of episodes in Russian
Orthodox history were set up, together with liturgical vessels and
altar crosses and vestments. There was a mannequin of an Orthodox
priest -- really ragged and dusty and gross. There was an amazing
painting of an Orthodox monk wandering in the snow looking like a
character from one of the "Blind Dead" movies as abducted by aliens, a
green Village of the Damned gleam streaming from both of his eyes.
This is the Tolstoyan religious hermit depicted as insane man.
There was another shocking painting nearby, from around the time of the
1905 Revolution (i.e., the time of The Battleship Potemkin), depicting Nicholas and
Alexandra protected by a holy beam of light coming down from Christ and
the Father and Mary in heaven. The Tsar and Tsarina are surrounded by
priests and martyrs, who are being shot at by squads of Reds, who are
in turn being given money by Jews. The image is shocking and violent,
and also apocalyptic.
Interestingly to me as a Christian, one item in the rooms dedicated to
Russian Orthodoxy stood out with a moving and unquestionable
intensity. It is a marble statue, about four feet high, of Jesus naked
and bound, being led to his crucifixion. He is muscular and intrepid,
but helplessly under restraint. It is a beautiful image. It leaped out
of its "wax museum" surroundings.
Incidentally, I kept thinking of Professor Lampini's "Chamber of
Horrors" in House of Frankenstein, and also of Will Rogers' hay-seed
wax museum of American heroes in Steamboat 'round the Bend. The people
who assembled the Russian exhibit on religion probably didn't know
much about what they were exhibiting, except that it all needed to be
as ugly as possible. To see it in the Summer of 2009, now tatty in the
extreme, and filthy, is extremely cool.
But wait, I'm not finished. The Museum has a section on
Protestantism. Behold, another manikin!: this time, of a "Reformed
Pastor". But it's mistaken. The cassock is right, and the preaching
tabs, but the figure is wearing a large pectoral cross. Reformed
ministers, at least until very recently, have not worn crosses around
their necks. Heaven forfend! And there's a Hogarth engraving of an
18th Century church that has the complete wrong title. On the other
hand, the "attitude" of the exhibit is nowhere near as vehement in
relation to Protestantism as it is in relation to the Russian National
Church. Protestantism comes across as being a rare and relatively
enlightened bird.
Speaking of birds, the room on Animism is great. There is a statue of
a big black bird, I think a Polynesian deity, with yellow and red
feathers. They are coming unglued, so you start to sneeze as soon as
you enter the room. But there are no other visitors to hear you or
notice. Since I had brought no Kleenex, I was glad to be sneezing
alone. One of the feathers that had come off and was lying on the
floor was too small to be of any aid.
One final item, and then a postscript. The attempt at constructing a
Buddhist meditation area or temple -- no words can do this justice --
was delightful. There were a couple of small statues of the Buddha, on
a wooden platform about six inches off the ground in the center of the
room. Overhead were a couple of scarves or pashminas, intended to be
drapes, but they were blowing in the wind because the Museum's fans
were on. That was it. I was just wishing for a little background
music by Enigma.
All in all, the Museum of Religion in St. Petersburg is a relic of
fascinating persistence in the aftermath of an historical earthquake in
Russia, and in the world even. Is it anti-religious? Well, yes, as
the attitude is that of competing, fantastic, and anthropomorphic
attempts to represent the Unrepresentable. It reflects what religious
studies departments in American universities used to call "phenomenology", which is the idea that religion has got to be studied
purely in relation to its surface manifestations, rather than in
relation to the possibility of actual or possible transcendence. So
yes, the Museum of Religion is anti-religious.
But it is also a Museum which has been demoted. It is definitely not
the Museum of Atheism. The cue cards to each room, which my
unrehearsed and unexpected guide explained to me in German, try to
sound objective. But they are just reporting on what fools these
mortals be. (Oh, and only in the room devoted to the French Revolution
does the visual material really go over the top, and this in its
satirizations of Roman Catholicism. In this room, we are really in the
spirit of Robespierre and 1793.)
What appealed to me primarily in this messy nut-house of an exhibit
hall was its absurdity -- the misconceived manequin of a Presbyterian
clergyman, the feathers-and-all large Polynesian bird (looking like the
monster in The Giant Claw), the hagiographic and extreme-polemical
painting of the martyred Nicholas and Alexandra, and the sudden
overwhelming appearance of the real thing: Jesus in white marble,
bound, humble, decided, suffering, pitying and to be pitied yet
wordlessly strong. The "camp" value of the place, which is out of
Billy Wilder's One Two Three (remember "We Have No Bananas" in
Russian?), is high. The sadness of its exhibits with many more warders
than visitors is also pathetic in the real sense. And yet the flashes
of insight, both negative to organized religion and positive to bound
martyrs -- and hermits of the forest -- are really there.
I left, a little bewildered, a little amused,
a little moved, as I said "Auf wiedersehen!" to my new Russian
guard/guide, who may have picked up her German during the Siege of
Leningrad. I thought to myself: this is the kind of thing that the SS envisioned when they
gave orders that the Jewish Ghetto in Prague be turned into an open-air
museum after its inhabitants had been liquidated -- a "time-capsule" of
a vanished people and a vanished way of life, which people of the
future could inspect and wonder at. Today, however, the Ghetto in
Prague is the symbol of an entirely different kind of confidence, and
the tables are turned utterly. I thought these things as I heard the
bells of St. Isaac's, just three blocks away, and observed the hundreds
and hundreds of people crowding to get in -- and not just tourists from
overseas, but Russian citizens. As Jack Kerouac said, "The world is
big enough to right itself."
Postscript
If you enjoyed this piece, go over to YouTube and connect with Sergei
Eisenstein's silent film of 1927 entitled October. It is also called
Ten Days That Shook the World. In the fourth segment of the YouTube
version, when General Kornilov's army is approaching St. Petersburg,
Eisenstein creates a montage on the theme of God. When the soldiers
are being enjoined, by reactionaries, to fight "For God and for the
State", the director edits together a series of images of God.
He starts with Jesus; then goes to the mosque in St. Petersburg, which
still looks like it did when Eisenstein's photographer Edward Tisse
shot it in the silent era; then shows the Buddha, incense billowing
around him this time, not a pashmina; then our Polynesian Giant Claw (I
really think it's the same statue.); then some tribal African statues;
then some spooky dangling hands from one of those statues; then a few
really horrible and very Pagan religious images. There it is! In
Eisenstein's film exists the direct origin of the now staggeringly
retro Museum of Religion. That's what it was really all about: a
frontal and absolute ideological rejection of religion as being
anything other than competing disasters of projection and morbidity,
carrying the planetary virus of idolatry -- religion as systematic
put-down of the humanity of the human race.
I want to tell Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris about this movie, not to
mention this museum.
Thursday, October 1
THE MYSTERY OF GARDENS
by
Lloydville
on Thu 01 Oct 2009 01:03 AM PDT
[Photo by Mary Zahl]
Mary Zahl, the wife of Paul Zahl (see The Zahl File), is a renowned
designer of gardens -- serious, amazing gardens. She was kind enough
to send along this report of a recent trip she made to Charleston, S.
C., revisiting the place where her career and vocation as a garden
designer got kicked into higher gear by a terrible natural disaster:
Last week I was in Charleston, S. C., speaking on garden design to the
Charleston Horticultural Society. It was my first 'official' return to
the garden scene there after leaving in 1992. In my talk, I was
reflecting on twenty years of designing gardens, mostly residential.
What was particularly apt about this timing was that it was in
Charleston that my work in this field took a giant step forward, both
in scope and volume. There was one reason why: Hurricane Hugo came
through the Low Country on September 21, l989, leaving countless
devastated gardens that, in turn, became the jump-start for my career.
Hurricane Hugo was the only real disaster I have lived through. What
affected me the most and lasted the longest was the sheer ugliness of
it all: giant trees uprooted or snapped off, huge piles of debris for
weeks on end, dried up places which had been shady and green, general
chaos everywhere. Even the birds and butterflies disappeared. It was
depressing, and hard to summon the energy that was needed to put life
back on track.
But, as my work meant bringing a little beauty and order into lives
surrounded by ugliness and disorder, my eyes were opened to the
importance of what I was doing. 'Garden design' became more than an
end in itself; with a cleared and freshly planted garden, I saw hope
return and anxiety decrease in those I was helping.
Before this experience, I had struggled with whether or not I was doing
something 'important' with my work. I loved flowers, and loved being
out in the garden, and even helping bring to life something that my
clients could not do for themselves. But it felt like the icing on
life's more serious cake. Through this experience, I had a little
window into the power of art/beauty to feed the soul.
[Photo by Mary Zahl]
It still feeds mine, after all these years. Just strolling through
this garden of Frances and Milton Parker in Beaufort, S. C., last week
(seen in the photos above) took my breath away with its serenity and creative energy, two apparent
opposites. I wanted to sit -- for hours if I could -- and take it in.
It lives in my mind's eye, just as the paintings we saw this summer at
The Hermitage in St. Petersburg do.
Paul and I were recently watching Warren Beatty's movie Reds. The
struggle of the main character, John Reed, was between his art as a
writer (Ten Days that Shook the World) and his passion to get
involved in the political situation in Russia. His wife begged him to
stay at home and help the revolution by being the writer/artist he was,
but he went abroad to be a part of the action. He died there at a
premature age. I personally wish he had valued his art more.
Wednesday, September 23
THE FLYING SAUCER OF LOVE
by
Lloydville
on Wed 23 Sep 2009 12:01 AM PDT
Here's a second report from Dr. Paul (of The Zahl File) on a strange place he went and a strange thing he saw on his travels this summer:
FINNISH MODERN . . . EVEN THOUGH THERE ARE MARTIANS
by Paul ("Famous Monsters") Zahl
Last month, my wife Mary and I led a group of friends into Helsinki's Rock Church, as it is now called in English. It is the Temppeliaukio in the Finnish language.
This
is a Lutheran parish church not far from downtown that is now
celebrated as being one of the most innovative worship spaces in
Europe. It was excavated and constructed in 1969 within a hill of rock
and is now surrounded by a beautiful square of townhouses. The Rock
Church was designed by two brothers, Timo and Tuomo Suomalainen. It
was dubbed initially and locally as the "Anti-Devil Defense Bunker" but
is now treasured and loved. It is a working church and the location for
many concerts, especially on its prized organ. When we walked in,
Sibelius's Violin Concerto was being played.
But I was interested in seeing the church for a somewhat different reason:
It looks just like a flying saucer. As a matter of fact, it could be a flying saucer.
When
you look down on the Rock Church from the square above, it appears to
be a saucer of light bursting from the ground, or, conversely,
embedding itself in the ground. It especially resembles the
earth-craft touching down on Altair IV in Forbidden Planet, not to mention the Martian saucer in Invaders from Mars,
and even more to the point, it is a lookalike for the saucers that
hide beneath the sea and within the earth, in the odd Canadian move
from 1977 entitled Starship Invasions.
In other words, this is the coolest church in Christendom. It requires a shout-out!
Can
we stop and think for a sec about what the Rock Church is saying? It
is saying there is something precious buried within a rockpile just
outside the city. Whether the precious thing is coming out, bursting
out; or whether it is burying itself, embedding itself in granite, is
unclear. But it is definitely rooted in the earth. It could not be
more rooted.
Is it preparing to be a "sleeper cell", like the alien machines in the Steven Spielberg version of War of the Worlds? Or is it emerging from centuries of frozen sleep below the Arctic ice cap, as in The Atomic Submarine, from 1959? (Just so you know, ahem, The Criterion Collection has done up the
latter in a box set, together with three other classics related to it, like
Corridors of Blood.)
What is it doing in our midst? We don't know.
But there is something here. Whatever religion is
or could be, it is embedded in the nature of things. It is not so
high, quoting the Bible, that we can't reach up to it, nor is it so
low, that we can't reach down to it. But it is here, to be
discovered within the nature of things. It is in the root of a man,
and of the earth. The Rabbi Jeshua said, "The kingdom of God is within
you." He did not spell out what he meant exactly. Many people have
thought about this, and sought to fill in the blanks. Nobody knows for
sure what he was intending. But whatever it is, it is here. It's an
open secret. "Take A Look Around" (Sergio Mendes and Brazil '66).
If
you see what is really here, what is in front of you and above you and
below you, you're probably looking at it.
We can even get high-brow for a moment. Goethe has a beautiful passage in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship in which he describes the nature of religion as understood within a utopian school for children. The children look up in order to express reverence. They look around in order to observe the natural world, their environment. And they look down in
order "to recognize humility and poverty, mockery and despite, disgrace
and wretchedness, suffering and death, to recognize these things as
divine; nay, even on sin and crime to look not as hindrances, but to
honor and love them as furtherances of what is holy."
[Photo by Mary Zahl]
I think the lesson of the Rock Church, which is a world-class architectural site on account of its perfect resemblance to
an alien flying saucer, is this: the truth is here, embedded in rock,
unerodable through fashion or time, right in the marrow of the earth
and hearts, digging in or breaking out, and filled, just filled, with
light.
Sunday, September 13
TWO PAINTINGS IN DISTANT PLACES
by
Lloydville
on Sun 13 Sep 2009 03:06 AM PDT
I traveled a thousand miles north to Wyoming this summer, but mardecortesbaja contributor Paul Zahl (see The Zahl File) and his wife Mary ranged even further afield, leading a religious-themed tour to Russia. (Mary and Paul are personable folks, and Dr. Zahl is a widely respected scholar of religion, so they're much in demand for such tours.) Paul was kind enough to send some reports of his adventures, of which this is the first:
EL GRECO IN THE TWILIGHT ZONE
by Paul Zahl
In the movie Russian Ark there is a scene in which an
aristocratic French visitor to The Hermitage Museum at St. Petersburg
lectures a young Russian of the early Nineteenth Century concerning a
painting by El Greco (above.) So moved is the Marquis by this painting that he
kneels in adoration before it. He explains to the young Russian that
the picture bears the image of the founders of Christianity, St. Peter
and St. Paul. The scene in Russian Ark is moving and
beautiful.
Last month, my wife and I took a group to see the very
painting in person. It is in a room full of El Grecos, but it stands
out for its warmth and the humility of one of the figures. The picture
also tells a story familiar to many: the tension between humility and
grace, represented by El Greco's depiction of St. Peter; and doctrine
and the authority of the truth, represented by St. Paul.
The picture was painted by El Greco between 1587 and 1592. St.
Peter is on the left, an old and humbled man of soft features and
tenderness. You could approach him and tell him almost anything about
yourself. He is somewhat sad, sympathetic, and modest. The observer
has to look very carefully to notice that Peter is carrying the key to
the kingdom in his left hand. But that is in shadow, almost obscured.
St. Paul, on the other hand, while not arrogant, is a person
possessed of his Idea. With his left hand, his left fore-knuckle
actually, he directs our attention to the Word, the Bible before him.
With his right hand, Paul reasons. His features are ascetic,
convinced, sincere, a little detached from persons, but possessed of
his Idea.
El Greco observes these two great men -- I thought of
Rossellini's television movie entitled The Acts of the Apostles (above),
which treats the same men in somewhat the same way -- as two sides of
one thing, the Christian faith. There is even a kind of yellow barrier
between them in the painting, emphasizing their difference.
My wife immediately noticed the doctrinal character of the St.
Paul, his cerebral, reasoning attitude. It is unmistakable. He is
reasoning with the viewer, on the basis of a written text. St. Peter,
on the other hand, is 'reasoning' with us on the basis of a shattered
wisdom, what Dostoevsky called the 'strongest instrument, the humility
of humbled love'. (I know it is pretentious to quote Dostoevsky, but
his words are apt just the same.)
There are few visitors today to this painting by El Greco who do
not identify with Peter at the expense of Paul.
But wait, There's something else:
A week later, Mary and I were in the National Gallery of
Stockholm, and there it was (good God!) -- the same painting, by the same
artist, in a room also full of El Grecos. But it was different. The
painting had the same subject, composed the same way, with the same
colors, but something was . . . well, wildly different.
Something had happened to St. Paul. He had lost weight, his
features were pinched, and his hair . . . it was a mess. It was uncombed -- what little there was of it was all
over the place.
What came to my mind was the episode of Thriller,
the old Boris Karloff television series, entitled "The Cheaters". At
the end of the episode, a selfish man begins to see himself, through
cursed spectacles, as he really is. The makeup artist, Jack Barron,
first shows the man losing his hair and looking himself but bewildered.
Then we see the man grinning diabolically, with hideous scars on his
face and just a few tufts of hair. Finally, we see the man become a
sort of demon from hell, to which he is soon dragged by the very devil
himself. Fun little episode for schoolboys on a Monday night at nine
way back then.
The comparison seems right, however. What has happened to St.
Paul? His convinced, convicted authority in the Hermitage
version has become transformed into a sort of 'wild man',
'I-just-came-out-of-the-forest-with-Robinson-Crusoe' persona. The
Apostle has entered the Twilight Zone but hasn't come back. Or he is
like the character in a Stephen King story, who is awakened too soon
from a forty-billion-mile journey to a distant planet. Everything's
right but everything's wrong.
I have looked up the Stockholm version of "St. Peter and St.
Paul" and found nothing on this weird difference. I can't believe it
has gone unnoticed. But it is disturbing.
A final thought on El Greco's two St. Pauls. The kind of
doctrinal Christianity embodied by the Hermitage Paul, text-weighted
and cerebral, is superannuated. You see it today and you run. The
painter seems to have understood this instinctively. His later St.
Paul has sort of gone crazy. "Grandfather, we need to get you to the
hospital." This Paul is not Diogenes, an old man of self-contained
de-constructing wisdom. He is a street-crazy -- maybe inspired, like the
homeless man in Ordet, who has faith enough to raise the dead,
but you wouldn't take your child to him for a blessing.
Or, maybe he
is "The Howling Man", of The Twilight Zone (above), who is in fact no longer
benign at all.
I don't know which of these two possibilities is the Stockholm
St. Paul. But if the Stockholm Paul is the confessional Protestant of the two,
St. Peter is looking pretty good by comparison. And wasn't Senator Kennedy a good
advertisement for that side of the enterprise?
[Editor's Note: Paul has elaborated Mary's insight about the portrait of St. Paul into a very provocative meditation. St. Paul wrote some of the greatest and most radical spiritual treatises of
all time, and they were a cry from the heart against law as a spiritual tool -- but what he wrote was still theology, and all theology seems to have a
tendency to decompose into law, to be parsed for "rules" which can be
used to oppress instead of bless. A spooky thought occurred to me while reading Paul Zahl's piece -- maybe the Stockholm portrait of St. Paul was once an exact copy of the
one in the Hermitage and has decomposed over time, like the portrait of
Dorian Gray, reflecting the historical misuse of St. Paul's letters. The
Twilight Zone, indeed!]
Thursday, July 30
THE EVERLASTING HILLS
by
Lloydville
on Thu 30 Jul 2009 01:35 AM PDT
Thou enlightenest wonderfully from the everlasting hills.
-- Psalms 76:4
Another superb dossier for The Zahl File -- Paul Zahl on two extraordinary movie sets from two oddly related films:
Autumn on the Hill
by Paul F. ("Maleva") Zahl
"It is always the end of autumn on the hill, the spirit of a year has passed through. In the fall school begins, you feel very young, the trees teach a lean lesson about paths in life. The atmosphere of the hill is heavy, pungent; leaves are burning somewhere, even though there are Martians."
-- Dennis Saleh, Science Fiction Gold (1979)
The hill referred to is from Invaders from Mars,
a dreamlike film from 1953 that concerns aliens who take over the minds
of a little boy's parents. The intruding saucer is buried beneath a
hill behind the family house. At the top of the hill there is a hidden
opening into which humans are dragged down, like in quicksand, to be
implanted with alien control devices. Invaders from Mars is
famous for many things, the chief of which is the set design, much of
it created to look as if seen from a child's point of view. The autumn
hill is the big prop, with its picket fence, and no one who saw this
movie as a child will ever forget that hill. Invaders from Mars was directed by William Cameron Menzies, who had also directed Things to Come in 1934.
There is another hill designed by Menzies. He was
production designer for the Hollywood version of Thornton Wilder's play Our Town and praised for his beautiful set for that drama of life and
love and death in Grovers Corners, New Hampshire. The keystone of
Menzies' design for the film version of Our Town (1940) is another autumn hill,
with another picket fence. The movie begins with the hill, as the
Stage Manager emerges from it, gently stooping to pick up broken pieces
of its picket fence; and the movie ends with it. The concluding
section takes place almost entirely on the hill, which is the autumn
place of the dead, the site of the town cemetery, where most of the
characters now stand, dead, in quiet distance from their earthly lives.
This cinematic version of Our Town is very good. It is
filmed intimately, with long conversations between leading characters framed in close shots, almost like early television, although the
photographer was Bert Glennon, who also worked with John Ford. The
acting is excellent. The movie is never self-important. It exists to
capture the feel and thought of the Wilder original. Jack Kerouac, by
the way, who praised few of his literary contemporaries, wrote, "Our
Town by Thornton Wilder is vastly enlightened, the dream ended,
Scrooge looking back."
Of all the images of this subdued and beautiful
meditation on film concerning beginnings and endings, the autumn hill
of William Cameron Menzies sticks in my mind. The place it occupies is
not so far from the autumn hill in the little, later movie, the
claustropobic and domestic picture of alien invasion.
The two hills are the same. They exhibit the end
of human identities and human striving. One malevolent, one benign (if
somewhat indifferent), they both represent the negation of human
existence in the presence of something bigger and larger. The people
on Wilder's hill have lost their lives and become indifferent to what
they (thought they) had. ". . . all those terribly important things kind
of grow pale around here. And what's left when memory's gone, and your
identity, Mrs. Smith?"
This is a meditation on death, the caesura to end all human
intentions. While he was composing his play, in 1934, Wilder described
it in a letter as "A theologico-metaphysico-transcription from the Purgatorio with panels of American rural genre-stuff." (He wrote most of Our Town, by the way, far from the 'Grovers
Corners' of America. He wrote it in the Zurich suburb of Ruschlikon,
almost next door to where my own sons attended middle school in the
1990s.)
Menzies' other autumn hill, constructed 13 years
later on a 20th Century Fox set, is parallel. It sure looks the same!
It, too, hides the end of human striving, this time because of hostile
aliens, who make no distinctions between women and men, children and
their parents, nurses and soldiers, as they destroy their identities
and take them over. When I first saw Our Town the movie, I felt instinctively the chill of the hill. It was unsurprising to read, years later, in the correspondence between Sol Lesser, the producer of Our Town,
and Thornton Wilder, the author of the source, that William Cameron
Menzies was being praised for his achievement in the design.
Two hills, one benign, if indifferent, and one
malignant, each exhibiting negation. Positively, I would like to say
that the autumn hill of Our Town represents a funerary and
profound transcendence, the end of engagement with life on its own
repetitious terms, in favor of the very biggest picture, which is
forced on us human beings, whether we like it or not, by the fact of
physical death, and sometimes death-in-life . . . even though . . . there
are Martians.
Editor's Note: I found the above frame grab from Invaders From Mars on the DVD Savant site, which has a long and interesting review of the film, including this observation on the hill set:
The Sand Pit Hill Set
Menzies appears to have put the majority of his resources into one
very large, very special set, the hill leading to the Sand Pit behind
David's house. It is one of the most remarkable sets ever made, for a
number of reasons. A slightly curved path winds up the hill between
some leafless black tree trunks, followed by a broad plank fence. Atop the hill, the blackened fence dips out of sight into the largely
unseen Sand Pit beyond.
The hill is 'deceptively artificial.' On first impression it reminds of
the bridge in the 1919 Cabinet of Caligari, the bridge over which
Cesare the Somnambulist kidnaps his female victim. The Invaders hill
appears to be a similarly flat-perspective, diorama-like design. In
static shots it resembles a painted backdrop. But when an actor walks
up the path, all sense of perspective goes haywire. The hill is like a
2-dimensional painting, but 3-dimensional people defy visual logic and
diminish as they walk 'into' it. It's a 'reverse forced-perspective'
optical illusion. George MacLean seems to get smaller than he should as
he reaches the top of the hill, and it takes a lot of steps to get him
there. But the trees at the rear of the set don't give the right
'perspective clues,' so it almost looks as if George MacLean is
shrinking as he walks. It is a subtle effect that is more easily
perceived on a large screen.
Click here for the full review.
Wednesday, July 15
MOCKINGBIRD
by
Lloydville
on Wed 15 Jul 2009 12:33 AM PDT
Paul Zahl, of this site's The Zahl File, is, as I've mentioned before, a preacher, but his most impressive contribution to the revival of humane religion in our time may have been fathering three sons who are also preachers -- this is where Protestantism has a distinct advantage over Catholicism in keeping the clergy ranks full.
His sons are all contributors to the Mockingbird blog, which you should check out. Mockingbird is a youth-oriented Christian organization based in New York and its blog is both serious and cheerful, with a cheeky attitude towards popular culture that you'll find refreshing, and probably surprising if all you know of Evangelical Christianity is that part of it which attracts the media's attention -- the grim, self-righteous, judgmental and often spectacularly hypocritical part.
I myself have no use for institutionalized religion of any stripe, but I've never forgotten something Camille Paglia once said . . . roughly, "Evangelical Christians are the only group in America who are asking the right questions, it's just that they're coming up with all the wrong answers." That may be true as a general rule, but the right questions are still the right questions.
Incidentally, if you scroll down the main page of the Mockingbird blog, or click here, you'll find a very interesting piece by Paul Zahl about three extra-ecclesiastical religious artists -- the Victorian novelist Mark Rutherford, George Harrison and Jack Kerouac.
Monday, July 13
A THOUSAND GUYS IN LOWELL
by
Lloydville
on Mon 13 Jul 2009 12:08 AM PDT
There are 1000 guys in Lowell who know more about heaven than I do.
-- Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac left an amazing portrait of America in the second half of the 20th century -- paying attention to the everyday warp and woof of things and their mythic role in the unconscious epic of the nation. To find anything comparable in the art of our time you have to look to the photographs of Walker Evans and William Eggleston, especially Eggleston.
Kerouac celebrated and eviscerated American places in long, impressionistic passages in his writing and in brief epithets tossed off in passing. These epithets, taken together, have something of the quality of the Catalog Of the Ships in The Iliad.
Paul Zahl, a regular contributor here, discusses Kerouac's geographical epithets, about America and other places, with some choice examples:
A JACK KEROUAC GEOGRAPHICAL GLOSSARY
by Paul Zahl
Kerouac had a wonderful way with vivid adjectival phrases.
In his letters especially, and wherever he could write free of
stricture or zealous editor, he would use jammed-together phrases to
describe the places he visited, the people he met, and the phenomena he
observed.
I have made a little study of Kerouac's descriptive phrases for the
cities and towns, and even foreign countries, in which he spent time.
For example he described Morocco as the place where one could see "the
true glory of religion once and for all; in these humble, often
mean-to-animals people".
If you have spent time in a Middle-Eastern country, this phrase
instantly connects. How many people I know who have left their
inherited religion in the West and are impressed by exactly the phenomenon
Kerouac observes, right down to the flogging of the camels.
Here is a little 'Beat' geographical glossary, from the man who saw,
and wrote what he saw.
Oh, and some of them may offend you if you actually live in the place
he is describing. When Kerouac refers to "rainytown Pittsburgh", he
captures the essence of that particular city. But Pittsburghers don't
see it this way at all!
So hold on to your hats. And get ready to smile, and maybe wince a
little.
(All these phrases come from the letters of Jack Kerouac composed
between 1957 and 1969, which are collected in the 1999 Viking Press publication edited by Ann Charters.)
Rock n Roll Hooligan England
sick old Buddhaless Europe
California TOO MANY COPS AND TOO MANY LAWS and general killjoy culture
Total Police Control America
Doom Mexico
(Kerouac survived an earthquake in Mexico City, and was
also fascinated by the interest in death which he saw in the culture
there.)
"Orlando Florida"
(Kerouac complained that you could not buy On the
Road at any newsstand in Orlando, where he and his mother lived for two
fairly long periods, so that city for him would always be in quotes.)
nightmare New Orleans
thank God for Spain! All living creatures are Don Quixote
San Francisco, that town of poetry and hate
unholy Frisco
Muckland Central Florida in Febiary (sic)
midtown New York sillies world
this New York world of telephones and appointments
peaceful Florida, winter Florida, Florida peace
Massachusetts boy-dreams of Harvard
the South where everybody is DEAD
And thinking globally . . .
so goes the Dostoyevskyan world
And from Visions of Gerard . . .
That hat, with its strange Dostoyevskyan slant, belongs to the West,
this side of this hairball, earth
the world, the uncooperative and unmannerly divisionists, the bloody
Godless forever
Home again . . .
overcommunicating America
You could probably write an essay on every pungent phrase that Kerouac
comes up with. You may also be offended by his incautious descriptions. Furthermore, they were mostly written down under the influence of
alcohol, by the author's own admission.
Yet they are evocative and at times (to me) inspired. They are also
very funny. After just a few days in London, thirty years before the rise of the
"soccer yob", Kerouac spoke of "Rock n Roll Hooligan England". What prescient voice is this?
If this starter glossary re-connects you with Kerouac's
voice, the voice of a man Allen Ginsberg described as "heaven's recording angel',
and sends you back to his work, try writing down more of these phrases as they catch your eye. As your Catalog grows you'll wonder, "Where did this man receive his wisdom?" and "Did
he not grow up right here in Nazareth, and do we not know his mother
and his brothers and his sisters?"
[Editor's Note: "Overcommunicating America" -- we live there now, all right. And even a man who could write, decades ago, "California TOO MANY COPS AND TOO MANY LAWS and general killjoy culture" might be surprised at the way The Wellness State has calcified into his most extreme vision of the place. Jack apparently never visited my hometown, Las Vegas, but he would have nailed it, too, I imagine, in a way that would make me wince . . . and laugh. Paul Zahl just moved away from a suburb of Washington, D. C., where Kerouac and Gregory Corso once dropped in unannounced on the poet Randall Jarrell and found him "hobnobbing in Chevy Chase", a world center of hobnobbing. Kerouac will find you wherever you are, America -- you can run but you can't hide from heaven's recording angel.]
The map above is from one of Kerouac's diaries. The portraits are by Tom Palumbo. You can find more of Paul's articles in The Zahl File here.
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