Descent into Hell
February 22nd, 2010
I have written before about how much I love the strange, dream-like, mystical novels of Charles Williams, but they are hard to come by now. They can be purchased new, of course, though they are never in stock and are often “unavailable to order a this time,” and I do not often buy books new in any case. My local library is even less helpful, as it usually is, so I am reduced to looking in used bookstores and thrift shops, which has so far met with only very limited success.
Last semester, however, I found one of Williams’ novel’s in the EBC library discard sale, so I thought I might check to see if there were any more of his books in the school’s collection. I had low expectations. The EBC library, serving a Bible College as it does, is adequate in areas like theology and biblical studies, but its English Literature section is literally a few shelves in the furthest corner of the stacks. I did not even bother to check the computer catalogue. I just went to the section and scanned the shelves, and there, against all my expectations, were every one of Williams’ novels and a book of his theology besides.
In retrospect, I should have expected that a Bible College library would be likely to include the fiction of a writer who was also a Christian theologian and a who was, perhaps more importantly, a close friend of C. S. Lewis, for several decades now the closest thing that Protestants have to a patron saint. None of analysis after the fact was able to spoil my mood, however, and I have just finished the first of these books, entitled Descent into Hell.
The novel is superficially about a group of actors who are putting on a play at the residence of its famous playwright, Peter Stanhope. More deeply, it is concerned with the way that some of these actors relate to themselves as selves. For example, the heroine, Pauline Anstruther, sometimes sees a copy of herself approaching along the street, and another of the actors, Laurence Wentworth, creates for himself a succubus that is never really distinct from his own substance, and he falls into a kind of demonic narcissism. Others of the characters are also self-obsessed in the more usual ways, and much of the book’s philosophizing has to do with this question of self.
In this context, Williams has Stanhope muse to Pauline about the shift that occurs from the Greek philosophical tradition’s “know thyself” to the Christian tradition’s “love thy neighbour”. The shift, he implies, is not just from knowing to loving, but also, perhaps primarily, from the self to the neighbour. Though Stanhope does not articulate this distinction at any great length, some of his other comments make it unlikely that he is opposing knowing the self and loving the neighbour absolutely. Rather, he seems to be arguing that it is only possible to know the self through loving the neighbour, that loving the neighbour is precisely what produces true knowledge of the self, and the conclusion of the plot goes so far as to suggest that knowing the self apart from loving the neighbour is productive only of a kind of hell on earth, where the human imagination creates succubi for itself and the dead cannot rest in their graves.
Of course, Stanhope’s observation makes most of Christian history an irony, since Christianity, especially in its Protestant guises, has been intimately bound up with all the various individualisms of personal salvation, democratic politics, capitalist economics, individual rights, and private property. The self trumps the neighbour here, again and again, resoundingly, even if this self remains largely unknown. What is more, this triumph of the self produces, at least according to the logic of the novel, a descent into hell on earth, and it implies that the Christian tradition, far from bringing about the heaven of the neighbour, has been far more concerned with bringing about the hell of the self.
I am not certain whether Williams would actually have levelled this criticism against Christianity, but I think that his logic is worth following. If Christianity, or any other faith for that matter, has anything worth saying in this age where the hell of the self has become our greatest ambition, surely it is that we can only come to know ourselves by loving our neighbours. This is surely the only thing that it has ever had to say, the thing that it has always been saying, without end, though it is all too seldom heard, so I will quote:
“This is the first and greatest commandment: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
Singing Along
February 19th, 2010
My friend Sandy Clipsham had a few of his guy friends over last night, to sing, of course, which is what guys most often do when they get together, or so I hear. I had never met any of the others, but they were an eclectic and interesting group, and we spent as much time talking about new media and alternative publishing and movies as we did singing. There were also homemade brownies, which is never a bad thing. The singing was good too, by which I mean that it was good to sing rather than that the singing was of any great quality, and it made me reflect on the diminishing opportunities to sing with one another in our culture and on the loss that I think this.
I have no data to support this supposition, but I would say that people in our culture listen to music more than those of any previous culture, but that they actually sing and play music with each other less and less. They have an insatiable appetite for professional music, for popular music, for music that accompanies and defines certain mediatized and commercialized lifestyles, but they are increasingly uncomfortable with making music together informally, as amateurs, as communities. They no longer sing along with one another. This phenomenon, I think, is partially to do with the diminishment of a certain kind of church culture, and also with the diminishment of things like summer camps and school choirs, all places where people once sung together regularly, but I it also has something to do with a culture that understands music as something to be produced and consumed like any other product rather than as something to be shared within a community. Although people who call themselves musicians, either by profession or by vocation, are often willing to do music with one another informally, the greater part of our culture is content to consume music, and so it never learns what it is to make music as a community, as amateurs, simply as an expression of community.
Yet, the cost of this inability to sing with each other is considerable. Anyone who has sung around a campfire, or in a church service, or even in a car with some friends and the radio, knows that there is something immensely cathartic about this kind of singing. It does not require us to be musicians. It does not require us to be vocalists. It does not require is to be songwriters. It requires us only to sing along with each other, and this singing produces an intimacy between us. There is a social risk in this kind of singing, certainly, because it is a breach of normal social decorum and because it creates a space in which different rules apply, but it is this very risk, shared between us, that opens us to each other.
So, last night, the five of us took this risk. We sang along with one another, informally, unprofessionally, without the benefit of practice, without really knowing each other, and we risked looking foolish, or at least sounding foolish, and we got through a few tunes that were none of our favourites but that were recognizable and easy to sing, and it was good. We sang “Cotton Fields“,” I’ll Fly Away“, “Five Hundred Miles“, “He Aint Heavy, He’s My Brother“, “If I Had a Hammer“, and “Down by the Riverside“, and I went home thinking that I need to sing along with people in this way more often.
Docs at Home
February 18th, 2010
My friend Dawn Matheson has just sent me a link to the newly launched HotDocs Doc Library, which contains hundreds of documentaries by Canadian filmmakers that users can stream free of charge. Along with many films that I have not seen, the site has several of my favourites, including How to Eat a Cat by Michael Connolly, The Take by Avi Lewis, and Thai Girls by John Haslett Cuff. There are many films here worth seeing, and when they are combined with those that are available through The National Film Board of Canada, all free and legal, you are now officially without excuse to do away with cable forever.
Making a Seed Table
February 17th, 2010
There are three principal reasons that I have not been writing over the last few days.
Two of these reasons are of the sort that I am a little ashamed to confess: first, I have been playing Zelda: Twilight Princess with my eldest son, since he is old enough to be interested in the game but is still too young to work his way through it by himself; second, my wife and I have been watching the final season of Battlestar Galactica in the evenings. I do not often indulge in these kinds of things, and I have been getting much less done because of them, but I remain entirely unrepentant.
The third reason is at least a productive one: I have been making a seed table to start my seedlings for the garden this spring. Last year’s experiment with putting the seed trays in the window sills was mostly a disaster. There was too little heat and too little light in the front windoew, and there are really no better places in the house. A seed table was necessary, and so a seed table has been made. The photos are perhaps not entirely clear, but the table has two levels, each of which is divided into six sections that are the same dimensions as a standard seed try, so I will be able to start twelve trays of seeds at a time, which should meet all of my foreseeable needs. I still have to add the plastic cover and buy the grow bulbs, but it is otherwise ready to go. Best of all, the thing cost me only the price of the light fixtures. The frame was constructed from some wood that I salvaged from my brother-in-law’s futon, and the cover will be cut from some poly that was left over from insulating the attic of our previous home.
I hope to have seeds in dirt by saturday.
A Few Films, February 2010
February 12th, 2010
I have been watching far too many films lately, and I have far too much that I want to write about them, so I have not been able to write anything at all, and my list only gets longer. This post is a an attempt to catch myself up, though at the expense of doing some of these films justice. I have written similar posts before about my reading, and I may just make a habit of posting something like this every few months, just to keep myself on top of things.
Avatar by James Cameron (2009) – The best thing that I can say about this script is that it remains mostly inconspicuous. If I was to say more, I would be forced to call the plot cliche and the story racially stereotypical and the character development both shallow and predictable. The acting is generally of a similar caliber: good enough not to distract but otherwise uninspired and uninspiring, even from some of the more established names from whom something more might have been expected.
Even so, despite all of these criticisms, I would not hesitate to list Avatar among the most impressive film experiences of my life. Too much has been written already about the 3D and the special effects and the visual scope of the film, so I will not go over these things again, but the greatest testament to the power of these elements is probably the fact that they are able to make a mediocre script and barely passable acting into the highest grossing film of all time.
Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa (1954) – This was my second Kurosawa film, but it may as well have been my first, since I saw Yojimbo so long ago that it is only a very hazy memory for me now. I will not make the vain attempt to describe the film or the director for those who are unfamiliar with them, but I do want to discuss two scenes that I liked particularly. They both centre around a peasant girl and the youngest of the seven samurai who have have been hired by her village to protect it from bandits. The two fall in love, as might be expected, but they are separated both by class and by the ambiguous relationship that the peasants have with the samurai, both relying on their strength to maintain the social order and also fearing that their strength might be used to undermined that social order, to take the peasants’ food and daughters by force.
In one scene, the two lovers are sitting in a meadow of flowers, a place that has already been visually associated with the young samurai. The peasant girl basically offers herself to the samurai, but he hesitates, and she becomes angry, questioning his manhood and his status as a samurai. During this scene, there is a shot of the two lovers sitting, turned toward each other, face to face, and the camera pans behind the samurai, so that the girl’s face is increasingly occluded and eventually eclipsed by his head. It is as if the girl’s beauty is being obscured by the many questions that the samurai has to consider or as if the girl herself is being eclipsed by her lover.
In a later scene, the two face each other once again, but now across a huge bonfire in the village square. The girl is at the door of a hut, and her invitation is clear to the samurai, but he hesitates again, and the camera alternates between their two gazes as they look at each other across the fire, the symbol both of their passion but also of the considerations that separate them. The scene culminates with the samurai crossing to the other side of the fire to consummate their perhaps ill considered love.
These two sequences are fabulous. They are so tightly blocked and filmed, so symbolically suggestive on various levels, that they almost stand as stories unto themselves.
The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans by Werner Herzog (2009) – If I was forced to describe this film in a single sentence, I would say that it is a colossal practical joke being played by the director and the principal actor on the audience and the rest of the cast. It is as though Herzog took the script of a completely conventional cop film and told most of the cast to take it ever so seriously. Then, letting only Nicholas Cage and maybe Val Kilmer in on his intentions, he set about shooting the film as a systematic mockery of both the Hollywood cop flick and the culture that produces it. There are three highlights for me.
First, there is the scene where Nicholas Cage, high on cocaine, enters the apartment where his team is staking out a suspect. He sees two lizards on the table and asks why they are there. Of course, nobody else sees the lizards, so Cage turns and looks out the window for what seems like two minutes, all the while, in the foreground, the two lizards are climbing over each other. The scene closes with Cage, at long last, turning back to glance at the lizards once again.
Second, there is the scene where a car has crashed after hitting an alligator. The shot that closes the scene is filmed from the perspective of another alligator and looks very much like handicam footage. The shot lasts for perhaps a minute, and there are some indications that the alligator is being prodded with a stick so that it will move.
Third, there is the scene where one set of gangsters is gunned down by another. Cage, high once again, tells a gunman to shoot one of the corpses again. “Why?” the gunman asks. “Because his soul’s still dancing,” Cage replies, and the camera shows the corpse’s doppelganger breakdancing in the middle of the floor until the body is indeed shot again and the soul drops awkwardly to the floor.
This film is a must see, I think, but only if you are prepared to watch it from the same ironic perspective that it was directed.
Watchmen by Zack Snyder (2009) – I did not love this film. I did not even like it as much as the graphic novel, which I liked less than many others told me I would. The narrative of the pirates, which is my favourite part of the book, is cut entirely from the film, though there are for obvious filmic reasons for this. The music, which seems appropriate where it is mentioned in the book, seems often jarring and awkward when it is actually played in the film. The narrative, which is pleasantly complex in the book, appears only hurried and shallow in the film. I am thankful, in short, that I paid nothing to see it.
Sanjuro by Akira Kurosawa (1962) – This film is a sequel of sorts to Yojimbo, and it might be summarized by the phrase, repeated several times in the course of the story, that the best sword remains sheathed. The hero, a grizzled samurai, is told this first by the noblewoman whom he rescues near the beginning of the film, and he repeats the phrase to himself in the final scene, but much of the film reinforces this idea less obviously, showing how most violence is unnecessary, and how it is the stupidity of some that makes violence necessary for others.
The final scene recapitulates this theme succinctly. Sanjuro is confronted by a samurai whom he has tricked and defeated throughout the course of the film. Sanjuru has removed his hands from his sleaves and has tucked them against his body under his kimono, and though I am not certain whether there are the cultural connotations for this stance, it is certainly a passive one, with his hands far from his sword and encumbered by his clothing. He remains in this position even once confronted, telling his opponent that he does not want to fight, that enough blood has been spilled already. He is, visually and symbolically, sheathed, but his opponent is persistent, as movie villains so often are, and he is forced to unsheathe himself and slay his enemy. He is, as he says himself a moment later, a sword that cannot remain sheathed.
This blend of symbolism and reflection with what remains essentially an action film, all very beautifully shot, is what makes Kurosawa’s films so appealing.
49th Parallel by Michael Powell (1941) – As a Canadian, I find 49th Parallel often amusing, since it portrays Canada as a nation of trappers and natives and Hutterites and dillettant democrats, which most Canadians would have recognized only as a stereotype even at the time the film was made. The propgandist elements of the film are also enetrtaining at a remove of some seventy years, sounding mostly forced and mostly unnatural. The story, however, still remains compelling, and the pacing is superb, creating a thriller that builds in intensity without having to resort to cliche plot techniques. The score, by Ralph Vaughan Williams, is also very good. I would recommned it very highly for a February evening with a glass of scotch.
The Subterranean Room: A Dream
February 10th, 2010
I am in a vast building, a shopping mall, but built from medieval stone, massive, oppressive. The shops are all closed, barred by steel grates, but I would not know which to choose in any case, because they have no signs. They are just an endless series of metal bars set into the gaping, darkened archways of the shops, like prison cells for the beasts of some prehistoric past or some still unimagined future.
There are people here, a few, but they are timid and slinking, keeping to the edges of things, appearing and disappearing from the recesses of the shop doors, where they cling to the bars in the shadows at the bottom of the doors, looking at something I cannot quite make out, even when I go to the bars also and peer into the unlit stores, jostling now and again with the others who are coming and looking too, coming and looking and sighing and going again, to the next grate in the next door down the broad and echoing concourse.
I fear, suddenly, though I do not know what I fear, and I see a smaller grate against the floor, and it is hanging open. It leads me to a tunnel, and I follow it, though I have to crouch, and then there is a ladder downward, and then more tunnels, some tall enough to walk and some small enough that I must wriggle on my belly, and more ladders, always downward, and even the tunnels sometimes angle downward, so that I find myself at the roots and the foundations of the world, and there is a door.
The door is ajar, and there is light, warm and flickering, from behind it. When I open it, the room is smaller, much smaller than I had imagined it would be. There is only a fireplace on one side, burning strongly, and a small bed on the other. There is also a table between them, pushed against the wall. It has a single chair. On the table is a bottle of red wine, a pitcher of what I know already will be clear water, a large loaf of dark bread, a small wheel of some hard cheese, and a dozen or so books standing against the wall.
First Sky of August
February 7th, 2010
This poem is for my wife, because I do not write her nearly enough poetry, and because she deserves poetry if anyone does.
First Sky of August
I have always thought you loveliest
When I catch you unaware, and you stand,
Half-turned and still, your eyes on something else,
Something quite apart from me, some bright thing,
Like the book on the thrift store shelf that day
When you, for me, were first transfigured;
Like the apples, red and gold in the light
Of a morning dimmed market, halo lit;
And like the sun, redder and golder still,
And sinking through our first sky of August.
Dinner and a Doc, February 13th, 2010
February 6th, 2010
For Dinner and a Doc next Saturday, which is February 13th, we will be screening Lost in La Mancha by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, a film that follows Terry Gilliam during his first attempt to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. It provides interesting insight into Gilliam as a director, and it also draws some nice parallels between the story of Don Quxote and the film making process.
For those who are interested in a little more information, there is the official trailer, an interview with the directors by Rebecca Murray, and a review of the film by Stephanie Zacharek at Salon.com.
The soup that night will be Butternut Squash Soup with Brown Butter, which is a Thomas Keller creation with a few modifications.
As usual, the event will be at my place, 130 Dublin Street, Guelph, and all are welcome, though please email or leave a comment to let me know that you will be coming. We will eat at about 5:30 and begin the film at about 6:00.
Also, here are some of the upcoming films we will be showing:
March 13th - Scared Straight by Arnold Shapiro
April 10th – Man with a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov
May 8th – The Thin Blue Line by Errol Morris
Animals as Leaders
February 5th, 2010
Despite what the title of this post might seem to imply, it is neither a defense of animal rights nor a commentary on our political leadership. Rather, it is something perhaps still more surprising, at least from me: a second post on music in less than a week. It may never happen again, so enjoy it while you can.
My brother Andrew was driving me somewhere the other day, though I cannot now remember where. He was playing a CD, as he always is, and I was enjoying it very much, which is not always the case for me with Andrew’s music. Though I do mostly like the instrumentation in Andrew’s tunes, I disagree with him substantially about the musical value of screaming and growling, which probably relates to my dislike of most vocals generally, though it does seem to contradict my appreciation for vocals that are less lyrics than mere vocalizations. In any case, this particular disc was entirely instrumental, so the question of vocals was moot, and I was really enjoying the sound, so I made Andrew give me the disc when we got home.
The project is called Animals as Leaders, and it is comprised of guitarist Tosin Abasi, who records all of the guitar and bass tracks, and Misha Mansoor, who does the programmed drums and the synthesized effects. The sound would best be described as progressive metal or post-metal, though these labels may be a little misleading to those unfamiliar with them. Though the music does include sections that are clearly metal, it is not limited to this sound, ranging through a wide variety of dynamics, and Tosin’s fabulous guitar work is displayed throughout. Those who are interested in having a listen for themselves can start with “On Impulse” and “Song of Solomon“, and there is also a nice clip of Tosin playing his custom eight-string guitar.
Writing New Media
February 3rd, 2010
Dave Humphrey posted on the subject of grammar the other day, arguing against the now cliche assumption that new textual media like texting, instant messaging, twitter, facebook, and blogs are creating a generation of students who are poor writers. Now, as a teacher of English Literature, I have been confronted by some horrible writing over the years, and very little of the writing that I see is of the quality that I would like it to be, but this does not imply an easy correlation between new media and poor writing.
In my opinion, the shift in writing has not been from good writing to bad writing at all, but from technically correct writing to technically incorrect writing, which are related but not identical questions. Though good writers generally do have a certain facility with the technical aspects of writing, it is certainly possible, as the schoolwork of previous generations would testify, to write correctly, by dint of rote and repetition, but still to write poorly, without style, without rhetorical force, without intellectual or emotional insight, without sensitivity to the subtleties of sound and connotation and allusion. It is entirely possible, therefore, even likely, that previous generations of students were no better writers than the students of our own day, even if they were better able to write correctly according to a certain definition that may or not be very useful in any case. I am certainly not suggesting that today’s students are better writers than their predecessors, because they may in fact be worse on the whole. I am only suggesting that it is not possible to measure writing ability solely by the degree of adherence to certain technical standards.
With this distinction in mind, I would argue that new textual media do in fact have a relationship with the ability of students to write in ways that are technically correct. It is not that these media have produced an increase in incorrectness, in colloquialism and informality, but that they have made our already colloquial and informal communication a textual and public activity rather than an oral and more or less private one. We now write to one another the things that we previously only said to one another, and this has produced a new kind of writing that tries to represent textually the kinds of colloquial talk that has never before found a significant place in formal writing. This new colloquial writing is not merely a corruption of more traditional formal modes of writing. It is a mode of writing unto itself, with its own grammars and technicalities. It is not necessarily good, of course, but that is not exactly the point. After all, the colloquial talk that is now being made textual through new media writing was not often of tremendous value either.
This textualization of our colloquial talk is significant, however, because it begins to blur the boundary between the colloquial and the formal. If there was once a strong distinction between the ways that people spoke and the ways that they wrote, a strong distinction between colloquial speech and formal writing, this distinction is now increasingly obscured as both the colloquial and the formal become a matter of textuality. After all, people now text gossip to each other and blog their lives to each other and write their school assignments or professional documents all at the same time and on the same device. These activities are just different windows in the virtual space of the same monitor. There is no longer a strong spacial or temporal separation between formal and informal communication, so it should come as no surprise that the two begin to bleed into one another.
Not only do new textual media blur the distinction between formal and informal writing, however, they also blur the distinction between textuality and other forms of media, as text becomes only one of many elements that are combined in the space of the screen in order to communicate, something to be combined with emoticons and embedded audio-visual material and hyperlinks and other such media. Though this is not exactly new, as even the earliest written texts have incorporated illustrations, what is new is that these additional media are no longer intended only to support or to enhance or to explicate the text. Instead, they are now understood as having equivalent or even greater significance than the text, where the primary medium is audio or visual, and the text is included merely as a caption or a label.
It is the blurring of these two distinctions, between the colloquial and the formal and between textuality and other media, that I think is the real source of anxiety for most educators, even if they have not yet recognized it. What they perceive as a degradation in their students’ ability to write properly is in actuality a shift in the very idea of what constitutes proper writing and even a shift in what constitutes the proper role of writing. They advocate a return to rote grammar and spelling in the schools without realizing that writing well in the context of new media may well require very different kinds of propriety altogether, very different approaches to rhetoric and persuasion, very different understandings of style and tone.
Now, let me be as clear as I can. I am very definitely not suggesting that the writing going on through new media is good writing simply because it writes in new and different ways. My experience with most new media writing is that, when it is intended still to be the primary mode of communication, it is as horrible as most writing has always been, and when it is being subordinated to other kinds of media, it is usually a good deal worse. Simple novelty of form and purpose should not at all obscure the fact that this kind of writing is mostly characterized by cliche, incoherence, and general sloppiness, but this is not merely an effect of adopting one standard of technical propriety over another. It is an effect of having few models of good writing within the newly adopted standards of technical propriety, models that teachers and schools are too fixated on grammar to provide.
Let me take emoticons as an example. I have no essential objections to emoticons, neither in themselves nor as an example of visual elements being introduced to a textual medium. My objection to emoticons is that they are usually the visual equivalent of a textual cliche. They say only very little, and they say it in only a very simplistic way, which makes them suitable for only certain kinds of writing, for those kinds of writing that are the equivalents of our colloquial speech, which often do not require anything more than simple and uncomplicated modes of expression. Rather than just objecting to all such visual elements in a text, however, I would suggest that teachers should be providing models that combine visual elements with written text more effectively, models that signal a more formal or thoughtful use of these visual elements without necessarily making recourse to traditional writing conventions.
They could, for example, show how a still primarily textual piece might include audio or video or photographs or hyperlinks to material that explicates its subject more effectively than words could alone. They could show how text might be superimposed as commentary on a video or on a series of photographs or on an electronic text in order to make a close reading of these media. They could show how text might be voiced, or combined with music, or laid over visuals in order to produce a certain stylistic or tonal quality. In short, they could address emoticons, not as a failure to understand formal grammar, but as a failure to understand the visual possibilities of which emoticons are only the most banal example.
This does not devalue the role of formal grammar. Many of our grammatical conventions exist because they help us to communicate more clearly and more easily. They are not essential, to be sure, and they can and should change over time, but that does not alter the fact that they are useful as conventions of communication. What I am suggesting is merely that the value of these conventions needs to be modeled in the context of writing that is relevant to students because it also models the ways in which their media enables them to write. I am suggesting that we need to write new media well, to encourage others to write it well, and to learn from others who are writing it well, and I am suggesting that this requires us to discover and develop and artculate and share new conventions that will enable this kind of writing, even if these new conventions take some of what they need from good old fashioned grammar.
From Word to Word by Jeremy Luke Hill is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.