More aesthetic mysteries

The idea that one should hide art with art wasn’t just Rameau’s; it was widely discussed in the 18th century; C.P.E. Bach also wrote about it. The director of The Vertical Ray of the Sun may not have heard of it; or if he has, has chosen not expended enough art on the act of hiding.

There is certainly plenty of art here: all shots have been meticulously planned and painstakingly set up; colors and lights are fabulous; many camera angles are delightfully novel. Yet, the richness of all this art is a little overwhelming: oh no, one begins to think to himself halfway through the movie, here comes another incredible shot. There is a feeling of an exhausting succession of relentless Caravaggios; of insisting on making virtuoso love well past the moment of surfeit.

I don’t know why this should be irritating. It is certainly not due to the amount of visual richness: the film Sequins stands proof that relentless visual beauty need not tire the eye. (As does and the interior of Gesù, the embodied refutation of all the neoclassical preachery in favor of simplicity).

Perhaps it is irritating because the plot is dull and the acting wooden – which creates the aesthetic impression of setting a kidney stone in a gold and diamond ring. Yet wooden acting and dull stories do not kill other films – consider The Guardian of Buffalos, another Vietnamese art film, as an example of both, yet not visually irritating; or Bresson’s Lancelot, a satisfying example of the former; or Sequins again – a satisfying example of the latter. Perfectly good, visually gorgeous films can be made around the slimmest of plots. Nor are the film’s plots actually dull: each could have been made into a perfectly good drama.

Or perhaps it is irritating because the film glorifies its social setting – the fashionable and artistic classes of modern Hanoi – whose real life can not possibly be anywhere as pretty. Such aesthetic fantasies are easier to accept about mythically distant places – e.g. Lucknow in 1856 (The Chess Players) or New York ca. 1900 (Age of Innocence) than about familiar modernity. This film’s modern setting means that the carefully (and very beautifully) designed interiors feel like shots from a glossy modern interior design magazine: there is a whiff of commercial prettiness (‘look how pretty things are in Hanoi’), deadly however unjust. How this impression could have been avoided I do not know: would a preamble saying ‘this film takes place in Ubu, that is to say, nowhere’ have avoided the impression?

Neither explanation seems very good.

Certainly the plot is not told well. The stories seem boring, though they needn’t be – there is plenty of missed dramatic potential here.

I am not sure how the plot could be improved, but certainly some elements of the story-telling technique have misfired, like the ham-handed attempt at foreshadowing: early in the film someone explains a scene he is playing in a movie, which is a lover’s parting; the scene is then partly enacted; and then – used twice, verbatim later in the film to show the parting of two different sets of protagonists-lovers. Foreshadowing – something that worked so well in Kaos – here is so heavily, so obviously done that it raises not delight but – heckles. A good art film, like good advice, must leave plenty to the viewers’ intelligence. Good visual metaphor is like advice: it must be small to succeed.

But while it is relatively easy to make such little observations about the story-telling devices, it is nearly impossible about a film’s visuals because our understanding of the mechanisms of visual aesthetics remains less than rudimentary: it is non-existent. Visual artists have no good style books to consult. They have to work entirely on instinct because all aesthetic theories which we have till now evolved have proved to lead straight into the wilderness. Vital elements of the structure of visual material, like the thought processes of a lion, remain outside our brain’s ability to grasp.

The paradoxical economics of aesthetics 101

There is a paradox at the heart of the economic theory of aesthetics:

Looking about at dawn I noticed in the middle distance another house-frame just rising above the tree-tops. Five years ago there were no houses here, only orchards, but now the whole northern slope of the mountain is turning from orchards into a dense suburb. Inevitably, in the process it will be uglified: birds shall be replaced with loud-speakers, orchards – with densely built-up tiny plots which shall be hygienically mowed to Marine crew-cuts. Concrete will replace the greenery. Temperatures will rise and the wind, obstructed by buildings, cease. The land, today still wide open to the foot to wonder whichever way it please, will be cut up and fenced in and made impenetrable and hostile to walkers. Our winding dirt roads will be paved so that a traffic jam of oversized SUVs can comfortably lie in an inefficient snarl. Air quality will decline, silence will be replaced by constant ambient hum punctuated by the boom-chuck of subwoofers and brave karaoke singing at night.

Yet, despite all this, land prices will rise instead of falling. A paradox.

Marketing the monster

Car companies know, but do not say, who the owners of SUVs are. It would be impolite to tell the truth that they are fearful lousy angry drivers. The three traits go together: drivers afraid to sit behind the wheel are consequently inclined to see driving as a power contest of “me against them”: they need the size of the car to make up for their lack of self confidence, a feeling of mechanical superiority inspires their worst instincts. The evidence is obvious, just look: they are the ones who can’t negotiate turns or double park and yet also the ones who behave most uncivilly on the road. Teenagers excepted, the SUV drivers are the only people routinely to install the ultra-loud horns. Choipak is one of them. “Thais are very bad drivers”, he keeps saying. Yet in every collision in which he has been to date he was the ramming party. Now you know why SUVs are advertised with images of power and confidence: they advertise precisely that which their owners do not have.

Only the most apt analogy

If I understand him correctly, Alexander Nehamas (Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art, Princeton University Press, 2007) seems to think that once we understand precisely why we find something beautiful (a woman’s figure promises fertility, her beautiful hair health, a man’s log ring finger economic success, flowers in the meadow alkalinity of soil) – the impression of beauty evaporates.

The experience of beauty is inseparable from interpretation, and just as beauty always promises more than it has given so far, so interpretation, the effort to understand what it promises, is forever work in progress. It is completed only when beauty has nothing more to offer: understanding comes into full blossom as attraction withers, as it always does – unless death comes first. (p. 105)

I find this view common (it is the main reason for the spirited opposition to all evolutionary psychological theories of mind) and idealistically naïve. After all, is the pleasure of a swim erased by the knowledge that it is caused by increased heart action and the cooling of the skin? To know that the meadows’ flowers indicate the alkalinity of its soil makes an afternoon spent lying in it with a book (or just looking up at the sky) no less delightful to me. And why should it? The point of beauty is the pleasure it gives. The pleasure can be treated as an end in itself.

I wonder whether Alexander Nehamas knows it. It is not a low-aimed blow at all when I say it, but a matter of the most apt analogy, I think: if the good professor has ever used birth-control, he should.

The sparrow hawk

How I have missed my little bike: dashing down steep inclines, head first into the wind, or climbing up the slopes, body lent deliciously backwards, the engine roaring like a charging lynx, or leaning gently now this way now that on broad, sweeping turns above steep cliffs. The best are those sections of the road which run along the mountain ridge in the evening: left and right rows of mountains fall off into distance, ever fainter blue, like fish disappearing down the depths of the sea, and the low-slung sun sends her dying reddish rays through the hairy haloes of the russet reed. A sparrow-hawk on her evening hunt first cuts swiftly across my path, then circles, then follows me for a while, as if to see what prey I chase. And for a while we travel together, she and I: together in our element: mountains, evening, speed

Of love and courtesy with an end-reflection on virtue

Mon ami André spent a part of his visit explaining the precepts of pick-up art. One of its central tenets, he said, was to put down the women one wanted to sleep with in order to undermine their self-confidence. Jokingly, teasingly, he said, friedly-like, but put down all the same; therein lay much of the art: to put them down without turning them off. (To use art to hide the art, Rameau-style, as it were).

While listening to him, Zobenigo, who had been raised by his grandmother in the good manners regime (such as had formerly obtained in the old world) realized in a flash the reason for his troubling over-success with women: used to pick-up artists of the André sort, women are thrilled to meet a considerate, gentle, polite men; and are positively swept off their feet by men who hold doors open for them, screen them from the traffic while out walking, and do not let them carry their packages. They mistake such attentions for love, not realizing that Zobenigo, faithful to his grandmother’s tenets, treats all women with such courtesy; that his courtesies are, in other words, impersonal and indifferent.

The result is that Zobenigo often finds himself surprised by declarations of love, sometimes wonderfully welcome, but more often troublingly un-so. For courteous gentlemen it is embarrassing to have to turn down ladies in love. In the former times, when women were used to good manners and consideration in men, they knew not to misinterpret polite behavior and waited for more direct signs of attention before vesting their feelings. Their circumspection in the matters of love was also a form of courtesy.

Politeness may be a virtue and worth cultivating for its own sake, but when it is aimed at people less polite than we it often misfires. Possibly, this is the case with all virtue, meaning that the virtuous man can’t help but become estranged from their society.

That favorite contrast again

(It being the English versus the French).

Two films about multipartner sexual arrangements – one English (Quartet), one French (Changing Times) – illustrate a crucial difference in the way the sexual mores are regarded in the two countries. The English view is moral and consequently the English tale is sordid. The conclusion is: only sordid people do things like that. By contrast, the French, though not entirely happy-go-lucky (they are no strangers to the hard feelings – jealousy, inadequacy, insecurity – upon which the Biblical anathemas feed), yet do not bring out the Biblical artillery to bear upon their loves. The French film thus feels lighter, even funny in parts, and its heroes and heroines happier. They certainly appear more desirable as associates or friends.

The French attitude is traditional French and common to many ancient cultures: one values people (lovers, friends, kings) above principles (with terrible consequences for principles). If you believe French films, neither the traditional morality (the Decalogue) nor the modernist (sexual equality, etc.) appears ever to serve as a term of opprobrium or exhortation among French lovers. They never seem to say to each other: you must (or you fail to) treat me according to the high moral principles which are the following… Instead, they seem to say to each other: love me. A much vaguer term, true, but one which allows greater latitude in negotiating the actual terms of the relationship. (“Yes, I know, but he loves me”).

The English ethical emphasis in love may have another effect. The moral prescription against dalliance, triagularity and bisexuality being so heavy, the only people willing to violate it may be the type more willing to violate any rules. And so it just may be that the residents of English sexually complex relationships are the more sordid type to begin with. And in turn, it just may be that the English novelists who write about them in casting their opprobrium upon their heroes are as much descriptive as they are prescriptive.

Regarding private and public conversations

There are two kinds of conversations: public and private. Private conversations are those between two people with no witnesses present. Everything else is public speech: it involves either more speakers or two speakers and an audience. By audience I mean persons not participating in the conversation yet profoundly influencing it by their mere paying of attention because the speaker(s) being aware of their presence tailor(s) their speech to the needs of the audience as well as that of his immediate interlocutor.

Such public conversations are per force shallower – the larger number of participants (even if be merely passive audience) means that the range of possible subjects of conversation is limited to those of general interest; the depth at which each subject is covered is also limited – by the shortness of the attention span of the weakest link among them; above all, the extent to which the participants of such conversations are willing to commit themselves to it is severely limited: in front of groups – and anything more than two is a group – people are afraid to make mistakes, to appear uninformed, to lose an argument, or to say anything of personal significance.

In private conversations, all these obstacles can be avoided. Conversations held in twos can be honest and intense in a way in which public conversations cannot; one can thus learn more from them: both about the topics (because sustained in-depth discussion is possible) and about the inner workings of our human fellow beings (and therefore ourselves) because with no one else present our interlocutor just may dare tell us something important.

To me such private conversations are very much worth having while the public conversations, whether debate or chatter – not much.

I have made these reflections last year when a well meaning friend took me round to numerous parties in order to introduce me to a large European city. She noticed the plan was not working: I was not mingling. She thought it was a kind of stage fright; but the truth was a little more complex than that: I generally cannot be bothered to participate in general party talk just as I usually cannot be bothered to join in on an online discussion.

Online discussions, including blogs and Facebook entries, suffer from all the constraints of public conversations: possible topics are limited, depth of discussion also, and all performance being public, it is all chiefly a show: posturing outweighs content. It is in that sense – dishonest, a pretense.

Which explains perhaps my failure in all my attempts to establish private correspondence with bloggers. The reason why bloggers are bloggers is that by nature they are publishers, and therefore public speakers. As such, they have no time for private conversation – why spend a great deal of time on a private letter when one could use the same time to write some sort of urbi and orbi – address himself to millions?

But what’s more, possibly they do not feel any need for it? (After all, if they did, they would write a personal note sometime, too). Just why this should be seems so puzzling: does not everyone need private conversation from time to time?

But perhaps not. It is perhaps possible that some bloggers – the blogger personality, shall we call it – do not feel the need for intense private conversation because their own, private attitude to their own selves is also in a sense public. By this I mean the hypothesis that these friends do not have an intense, searching and intimate relationship with their own selves. Perhaps their private thoughts are all aimed at the burnishing and buttressing of their public persona (how would it look if I?… and what else could I do to influence more people and make more friends?...) Perhaps their private diaries, if they have any at all, are like their blogs: a succession of arabesques calculated to look good, a kind of private public performance, with the self both an actor playing to fool his audience as well as the fooled audience itself. A kind of inwardly directed PR exercise, interrupted by jokes and changes of subject?

(Later: Theo Angelopoulos on RF: Parfoit la communication avec des milliers et milliers des hommes c’est une communicaton plate... rien... facile...)

A note on some prose styles

I must add here that Clive’s prose feels deathly leaden to my ears, pedestrian in the extreme, the very definition not of prose of but of prosaicness. I have these few days been washing these poor ears of mine with Ghalib (in Russell’s translation) wherein I find sentences like this:

“While I dwelt in this same seclusion and distress, a cruel, ruthless man who knew not the fear of God – may he dwell in eternal torment – in the blackness of the night killed with a musket shot William Fraser Sahib Bahadur, the Resident of Delhi and unhappy Ghalib’s benefactor. My heart felt afresh the grief of a father’s death. My soul was shaken within me.”

Etc.

For about a year now I have been trying to emulate the manly style of Joseph de Maistre: short sentences shorn of adjectives and subordinate clauses. Now, for a change, I think I should try to emulate Ghalib’s flowery Persian. I shall make a study of Russell’s book. Is it not odd that I should feel such affinity to a Mughal writer, dead these two hundred years, who wrote in a tongue I do not read and, at the same time, such profound indifference to my own contemporary writing in a language in which I write myself?

The mysterious causes Clive James' illegibility

I told von Kottwitz that I could not read Clive James, that he bored me. He wrote back saying that it was my dislike for things Anglo-Saxon which made it so. Fascinated by the hypothesis, I wrote to von Kottwitz:

I must forgive you if you do not find the topic fascinating and beg your forgiveness in turn if I continue to bore you with it; the matter won’t let me rest; hence I harry you; but whom else can one harry with this sort of drivel but his forgiving and ever-long-suffering friends? Do bear with me; and help me if you can.

It’s the Clive James business. (But even more so, your diagnosis of my trouble with it).

Overall, I have found the book impenetrable: quite literally, a thicket of words in which I got stuck, unable to keep my dazed and wondering eye on the page; half the words which I managed to read, I did not seem to understand the point of! What you said about it – that it had something to do with my disapproval of Anglo-Saxons – struck me powerfully because I was reminded of all the essays in the New Yorker – and on the Valve, and on a friend’s website –which had the same effect on me: the deadly combination of bafflement and boredom, not unlike what some may feel while reading the Introduction to Inorganic Chemistry.

I was also reminded of my advanced degree history teacher at U of M who lambasted my style of writing: one simply does not write like this, he said firmly, causing me to drop the course and flee all the way to Taiwan in panic (what on earth did I hope to learn from him?). I did not understand him then – except that he seemed to object to my tone (which was one of lively polemic, I thought) – but perhaps he meant that I should write more like Clive James? Is there a secret Anglo-Saxon style-book of whose existence I am not aware but which all wishing to be featured in the New Yorker are obliged to use? If so, why do you not write to it? Is your prose somehow un-Anglo-Saxon-like in its pleasing legibility?

The other half of the words in the book – the ones which I have managed to read and understand – seemed to me to make points so infinitesimally pithy, so remarkably unremarkable, such plain small grey mice of thoughts, that I just cannot get it through my head that anyone would spend anytime of his life thinking them, let alone three years writing them. (Three years!)

Which brings me to my real worry here: do I lack in education? I remember being bored by Sontag’s Notes on Camp, but their foreignness is understandable, she was writing about a New York fashion in the 60s or 70s (I guess); I didn’t know any of the names she named in that essay and I was not going to set out on a crash course of learning them just to understand what seemed to me a historical phenomenon of passing relevance; but I know this stuff: Mann, Milosz, Mandelstam – these are my people (for better or for worse) in a way in which, say, Normal Mailer or Rothko are not. So why do Clive’s observations about them seem to me – well – so profoundly indifferent? Are you saying that there is a special Anglo-Saxon way of seeing the world, a kind of color lens, having something to do with Normal Mailer and Rothko perhaps, viewed through which my part of the world looks – well – incomprehensibly dull? And is this only something one acquires through advanced degrees (since only those with advanced degrees seem to write this way, the rest resting content with Strunk and White)?

Ray Huang, Evolutionary Psychologist

Ray Huang, 1587, The Year of No Significance, p. 171:

The composition of Ch’i’s infantry squad also reflected social influences. When recruiting, he deliberately turned away volunteers from the cities and accepted only peasants. It was with more than prejudice that he classified the former as crafty and roguish. It would be illogical for a man with steady trade in the city to join the army as a soldier, whose pay was never abundant and possibility for career advancement even less promising. The recruitment, therefore, usually only attracted urban misfits who looked at enlistment as temporary solution to the food and lodging problem until something else turned up. Such undesirables, singled out by Ch’i for rejection, were those, whose “countenance was fair, whose eyes were shiny, and whose movements were light and nimble”. Did his army have no use for nimbleness? His experience had taught him that a man fulfilling this description would, before facing the enemy, “work out a method of self-preservation and, at the critical moment, not only desert but also instigate others to do so in order to provide cover for himself”.

The foregoing analysis is only partly of social influences (that city folks are smarter than country folk by virtue of having grown up in a more varied environment, are used to better opportunities in life and on both accounts less easily manipulated). This analysis is also partly evolutionary psychological – it associates looks with certain behavioral patterns: that nimble, handsome, intelligent-looking fellows are untrustworthy because they know how to look out for themselves. The description sounds poetic: a woman might describe her lover in these words. Yet, she would be describing the features of a man likely to avoid the fetters of settling down with her; she still would love him all the same because she would want his genes – the survival genes – for her sons.

The women one fails to use

Then there are those women – more pleasant to get along with than sexually attractive – with whom I avoid sleeping because I hope that if I do, a friendship may arise and the association thus last longer than the usual few months followed by the unavoidable huff. Sadly, this does not work, either. Either they fail to understand my intentions (if I do not explain them) or fail to believe me (if I do) and in the end are disappointed and hurt all the same. Inevitably, sooner or later, there is a confrontation, things sour or cool, and even if they get better in time, they never return to the former closeness.

I am not sure whether Rochefoucauld says this, but he should: women appear to resent being used only marginally more than they resent not being used at all.

(Il semble de faire les femmes seulement un peu plus d'être exploité que de n'être pas exploité du tout? Er... even if it is right, it doesn't sound Rochefoucauldian enough).

A certain hotelier

Some two weeks into our affair, the hotelier said “I am waiting for you to say something”. I was genuinely puzzled and said so but she refused to elaborate. Only later, after she had put an end to the affair, I realized that what she had expected was a proposal – of cohabitation if not marriage outright. I must be extraordinarily thick: everyone whom I tell this story, everyone else but me, understands the hotelier’s hint in a thrice.

My thickness is puzzling because the hotelier was only following the normal pattern. Girls sneak into my bed with (apparently) no preconditions, only because they want to (I am such a handsome fellow), but then they all end up making accusations when I do not volunteer to offer them my freedom in payback. Their accusation is that I am playing games – that appears to be the usual term for sleeping around; apparently there are men who keep the score and work incessantly to improve it; but the truth is that I am not sleeping around; and that it is they – the women – who are playing games because they fraudulently offer a supposedly free product only to submit an invoice for it in the end anyway.

An interesting aspect of this whole thing is that the strategy is so generally practiced by women all over the world. Hence it must be instinctively encoded: over millennia of practice the women-folk have evolved a hardwired technique that works. This means, in turn, that by and large men can be expected to fall for it, which is to say that men are prepared to propose the bargain: hitching up in return for free sex. Perhaps they too are hard-wired that way, since, surely, the sex can’t really be worth the settling? But perhaps it is: perhaps most men won’t get any unless they do; and perhaps they can’t live without the any. (Why it should be so puzzles me, but is perhaps explained by the general drudgery of men’s lives outside of sex).

I continue to choose to be naïve. The result is a succession of girlfriends who come hopefully and depart in a huff, but both come and go of their own volition: several months of plenty followed by several months of draught. This too makes me think of evolutionary psychology: it is very much living like our evolutionary ancestors in the African savannah, they lived the same cycle of feast and famine. (In their case it was according to the seasons).

Pan Tadeusz -- by Spielberg

An aunt has reverently brought it in her bag and given it to me with a warm recommendation. I received it with profuse thanks and deeply held misgivings. The poem (“epic” they like to say in Poland, meaning that it is an Illiad, which it is not, it is a very successful opera buffa in verse) takes approximately 12 hours to read out loud in its entirety, how could one turn it to a two hour film?

But this, the film’s biggest problem, turned out not to be a problem at all: the script writer did a fine job of selecting relevant spoken parts, eliminating the narrator (who has most of the poem’s text) and yet leaving the story’s outline coherent and thus transforming it successfully into a play. But perhaps he still left too much dialogue. Perhaps the full story is still too long for a dramatic work and perhaps that’s why the actors rush breathlessly through the text. But then perhaps they do it for another reason: perhaps they received instructions to speak their lines as if they were prose in order to make it the film more movie-like.

But it doesn’t work. The dialogue rhymes; there is do disguising its rhythm. The truth is that Pan Tadeusz must be declaimed – chanted – in a certain artful/artificial manner, reminiscent of the way the British read Shakespeare (and Americans can’t); which is how it is read on public occasions and how one learns to read it in school. It’s artificial, yes, but artificial can make successful theater: the ultra-artificial Noh is by and large good. It was both – artificial and successful – in the black and white TV production of Pan Tadeusz made in the 1970’s. But this – this seems as if the actors were trying to get rid of the text, spit it out and run away; as if they were embarrassed by it.

Add to that atrocious ham acting; Technicolors; and the non-stop obnoxious soundtrack and you get the picture. With embarrassment I had to admit to myself the disastrous truth that Wajda has lived long enough to turn out perfectly respectable Spielberg.

What a pity.

I had a dream

Perhaps it is living in the country, in these great swathes of silence lit by slanting afternoon sun; or perhaps it is all the films I have been watching; whatever the cause, I have been remembering my dreams: more of them each day. This morning’s is the first proper dream memory I have had in years. The dream was about a beautiful and headstrong young woman in whom I was in unrequited love. It was a highly unlikely situation: I don’t like slim, elfin blondes, have never been in love with a much younger girl, and have never been hopelessly in love. Perhaps my mind was creating a film script in which I only agreed to be an actor? The unlikeliness of the situation was in the back of my mind as I dreamed.

Now, the girl liked me, in the way in which most young girls like me because I was interesting to talk to, polite, generous, and – safe: the typical maternal uncle-figure in which so many men my age cast themselves in Asia. But our age difference was detrimental and she would not have me. Apparently, and unlikely, I mooned.

Then there was a crime twist: a murder had been committed. While rummaging in the house in which we both (and several of our friends) were staying, I stumbled upon evidence that she, my love, was the murderer. The murder had been premeditated and ambition-driven (the details were not clear in the dream); this cast the girl in a suddenly much more interesting and attractive light, the viewer-cum-script writer in me thought: now, I could imagine taking an interest in a girl like that.

The final scene was an ending straight from an Iranian film: it was a kind of party, with general conversation and joking, at which she and I sat or stood side by side. I knew already; and I knew that soon she would find out that I know. And as I talked and joked I wondered what would happen when she did: would she decide to kill me, too? Or would she offer herself as a bribe? I remembered thinking fearfully that the former would be the more acceptable option: you see, it would have been shameful and ignoble to win her – or any woman – through subterfuge.

A philosophical essay

Conundrums are questions which cannot be answered (or so says a philosopher). (Karl Popper, I believe). Such questions are the true concern of philosophy, all else being science adds another (Berlin).

Well then, here’s a bit of philosophy.

Krawczuk’s Seven Against Thebes proposes two sets of conundrums.

The first arises out of the easy fragility of literary monuments. And so, the anonymous heroic epic Thebaid, first cousin and contemporary of the Iliad and the Odyssey, in antiquity often regarded their equal, widely read and admired for nine hundred years, was lost. So was Antimmarchos of Kolophon’s Thebaid, the controversially groundbreaking remake of the Homeric epic, the first example of the new genre of erudite epic, loved, hated and argued over for seven hundred years. So were most of the works of Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles; numerous others of whom we only know by name (the Sykion cycle of dramas in praise of Adrastos, a hero of the Thebaid); and uncounted thousands – tens of thousands? – whose existence we can only guess.

Now, recall the literary treasures of the Niniveh library, both those which had been lost for sixteen hundred years and recovered and those, much more numerous, perhaps 80% of the library’s content, which had been lost for good: the astounding proof of the existence of a thousand years of literature of Babylonia. Yet, until 1920’s we had had no inkling that such a thing had even existed.

Or think of the lost middle age of India. It was as vast and populous as Europe, as ancient and as cultured. Between her ancient classics – The Vedas, the Upanishads, The Mahabharatas, The Tripitaka on the one hand; and her middle age literary flowering of Ujjain on the other; there stretch a thousand years of deafening literary silence. From it only here and there fabulous ruins of abandoned stone temples jut out. Their walls are covered with incomprehensible carvings illustrating their now lost literature, today incomprehensible. That literature was written on palm leaf. Palm leaf has to be recopied every generation or else it is devoured by rot. If a war or an epidemic interrupts the copying, all is lost. And was. Forever.

But is it really lost? Did we – or anyone – really have it? And whose loss is it? Theirs or ours? And that one thousand million letters of medieval Indians are lost, what loss is it exactly? As it is, we have more literature than anyone can ever read; we are not at risk of running out of something to read; what loss then is it if part of the production in which we are drowning up to our ears is mercifully lifted from us? If, by a miracle, ten thousand Indian classics from the lost middle age were to be recovered, who on earth would have the time to read them?

And there are other ways of losing: take Statius’ Thebaid, from the second century A.D., one more retelling of the same Theban story, this time in Latin. For over a thousand years it was read and admired as one the best works of Latin letters, a paragon of style, a textbook of locution. Today it isn’t lost but – forgotten: no one ever reads it. Younger works have upstaged it – Dante, Milton – for reasons that are not really apparent, except that moderns prefer, god only knows why, works written in their own language (or about their own gods?). What difference does it make that the Statius’ Thebaid has not really been lost, when it is not read? One might as well put it to the torch: it would not be more lost that way and perhaps – more regretted.

And there is the other set of cultural conundrums jumping at me as I read the book: the conundrums of repetition. Over the span of eight hundred years the expedition of seven against Thebes was set in epic form no less than three times (once in Homeric times, once by Antimmachos, and once by Statius); and the various dramatic settings of the epic are without number (Krawczuk discusses at least ten). What made the ancients go back to the same story over and over again? What makes us go back to the Trojan War?

Perhaps the reason is precisely our awareness of our memory’s frailty.

Whenever we choose to repeat one old story, we steal resources (time, manpower, memory) from another. (Each time we reread Milton we fail to read Statius and each time we retell Troy we fail to retell Thebes). So perhaps we repeat old stories on purpose? Anyone after two decades rereading a book which he once read and put aside will be struck by how little he has remembered of it; and how poorly he had remembered what he did. And it gets worse: sometimes we get to the end of a book only to realize that we had once read it.

Burdened with so much to remember, we forget. So perhaps we repeat old stories constantly so that we may manage to remember something?

It is not a great discovery that without remembering, and repetition, there would be no culture; and countless class B movies about amnesia have taught us that without remembering (and repetition) we would not be ourselves. It follows that we must try to remember and thus are doomed to repetition. As long as one remembers (repeats?) – the horse at least (the horse, the wooden horse!) the past is not entirely lost; and one isn’t entirely uncultured.

Which leaves me with the final conundrum: why the horse? If what defines a culture are the stories it chooses to repeat – its canon – then, out of all the stories of ancient literature, why the horse?

Poesy or Iranian films, part 2

To which Werner von Kottwitz replied that I was mistaken and that in former times Americans produced films and literature which abounded in circumlocution. He pointed out Hollywood productions from 1930’s through 1960’s and the novels of Henry James as examples – both produced in the days of uncensored speech and no-nonsense political discourse. He ended by proposing a counter-theory: that the American “How am I supposed to know if you do not tell me” is not a sign of extraordinarily thick skulls but –ordinary rudeness. They say they don’t understand, he said, but what they mean is that they don’t care. Any polite person, and that means well-brought up one, knows to listen carefully to the words of others and to pay close attention to little clues as to their feelings.

The fault, in other words, appears to be one of stress-free childrearing. Which dates, incidentally, to 1960’s, when the last American circumlocutory films ended? The data fits well the Polish phenomenon, too.

Les Brodeuses (Sequins) part 2

But people who do not appreciate textiles, objected Wudekind, could still appreciate the scene: it shows the heroine’s true pleasure at her work (she is an embroiderer); and that her work has become a kind of refuge for her. She quits her day job, sends her boyfriend packing, refuses to attend her mother’s wedding – all because she wishes to be left alone; to be left alone with her work. It is her reclusion; her haven. By showing her pleasure with her work, the scene works within the story and can be appreciated on other, non-aesthetic levels as well.

Agreed, I replied.

And, besides, a good aesthetic element, like good soundtrack (or salt or wine in food), heightens the pleasure of the story told. It transmutes the ordinary into the extra-ordinary: as a result of its presence, the ordinary story suddenly seems worth telling. And I did not wish to suggest that the film’s story was stupid or the rest of it aesthetically dull. Rather, I wanted to say something else: that, viewed from purely aesthetic perspective, the film has a core, or a crescendo; and that the surrounding matter is duller, a kind of setting for it.

Look at me follows the same formula. There the concert – its aesthetic core – is actually emphasized in several ways: first, throughout much of the film one is preparing for it; second, an important dramatic development takes place during the concert.

The two films are a kind of genre, then: psychological drama told beautifully and organized around a core aesthetic event.

Les Brodeuses (Sequins)

Pretend for a moment that a film is nothing but an aesthetic object.

Then the aesthetic core of Sequins (Les Brodeuses) is the 120-second sequence around minute 36: the heroine looking at a piece of sequined embroidery. The camera glides over the piece, sliding gently in and out of focus. The frame cuts back to the heroine’s eye seen up close, then back towards the piece. Soft notes of Martinet’s wave suggest the clinking of trembling sequins. It is very beautiful.

Anyone interested in art textiles recognizes this scene as a very good depiction of what happens to us from time to time in front of a particularly beautiful piece. Everyone else will probably be challenged by the scene and pleased to get back to the plot when it again resumes.

That may be one reason why the scene is only 120 seconds long. Hard-boiled textile fans like me would not mind it to last 120 minutes; but presumably such a film’s mass appeal, and therefore commercial value, would not be very high.

In fact, such a film – of exquisite beauty – about Japanese silk kimono textiles has been made by Fujitsu; I saw it in Maebashi in 1992; it is nowhere to be seen or found, for any money. No one markets it because, presumably, there is no market for it; or at least the films owners do not think there is.

Perhaps this is not quite right: today, internet marketing makes it possible for very small projects to be economically viable: it is cheap and easy to target narrow interests such as textile collectors. But Canal+ and the other sponsors of Sequins do not usually want anything that micro-focused. It is OK for any project they sponsor to feature Monteverdi arias or sequined embroidery – they are not Visigoths; but they also need the mainstream usual: plot, drama, especially love drama, best if fulfilled in the end. (And it is).

But perhaps that conventional content (and it is very conventional: an older single woman dealing with her only son’s tragic death; a younger single woman trying to decide whether to keep her baby) also serves as a setting for the central scene, the way a ring might set a stone, the face the eye, the body the face, the altar its statue; the way swathes of dull Miltonese set the far-in-between moments of utter and disarming beauty. The aesthetic rule number one is that a beautiful object’s setting must be duller than it itself, or else it will exhaust the eye and steal the show.

Not that the film is dull – it is all visually very beautiful; and the story is touching and well and intelligently told. But aesthetically speaking, everything in the film is duller than this sequence. As well it must: its beauty is difficult to match.

(2/8/09: Good bye, South, Good bye has the same sort of aesthetic core: the four minute motorcycle ride through the hills around Chia-yi, the director's ultimate nostalgia trip; and mine, too)

Atheist theories of redemption

I don’t know why L’Enfant has won the golden palm. That is, I do know why – because of the social issues it tackles; and also perhaps because the makers’ earlier films have been very good and did not win it, so the award was a kind of belated recognition. But I would not have awarded the film: its victory in the competition aside, it is actually a failure.

The creators explain (in the interview included in the DVD) that the film started in their minds with the image of a young woman angrily pushing a pram – as if she wanted to get rid of it. Hence the film’s initial working title was The Woman with a Pram. If so, it is telling that the film tells us next to nothing about the woman: the heroine is a blank; she hovers on the edges of the film, mostly out of the camera’s view. It is perhaps sexist of me to say so, but the problem could be that the creators are men. Some men manage to be blind to female psychology; even not to look at it – the way the hero of the film refuses to look at his son. Thus, it would be typical of this problem that The Woman with a Pram would eventually turn out to be a film about… the unwanted child’s father.

But his figure, too, is a failure. The creators say they wanted to make a film about how a father who does not want his child could change, could come to love it, become its true father. The film does not show it: in the final scene the hero and the heroine kiss and cry; but this could be because he’s ended up locked up – a tear-inducing condition, not necessarily a remaking one. Nothing explains how or why the man’s attitude to the child has changed, or even how it could. Psychologically, I felt, the film fell flat.

Aesthetically it was like the creators’ other films: indifferent, relying entirely on the story and the shooting and cutting technique for its interest. Not surprisingly perhaps: the authors claim Seraing descent; and Seraing is a hollowed out red brick post industrial failure zone (near Lille, Belgium). Growing up in Seraing one would not have had much opportunity to cultivate one’s aesthetic faculties.

It is also like their other films in dealing with human misery through redemption. (Their best film actually bears that title). Redemption in their vocabulary appears to be the theory that things can become better – we can be forgiven, we can wash away our sins, we can be saved – which means supposedly that things can get better – through heartfelt desire to change and strenuous, unceasing, single-minded work in that direction.

It is a Christian message.

Though not quite: it is an atheist message and therefore more hopeful than Christianity: the creators of L’Enfant seem to think that salvation can happen here, in this world, while Christianity was more sober in its evaluations of chances of redemption here and now: salvation’s fruits were only promised in the other world. Christianity also offered a possible (if unlikely) mechanism of redemption: the agency of God who guaranteed to save the well-meaning and hard-working. It is not certain what, in the film creators’ vision, guarantees the supposed causal link between good intentions and hard work on the one hand and the contented fruits of redemption on the other.

By contrast, both Look at me and Sequins have a Hindu message: the situation is bad and there is nothing much that we can do about it. But we can have a little beauty in our lives and it makes all the difference.

Kaos, part 3

The makers of Kaos prefigure the scene on the dune of the Pumice Island. It seems to emerge gradually from the surrounding story in increasing focus. First, arriving at the station (whose name is illegible), Pirandello sees boys holding out their arms before jumping and rolling down a small pile of sand; later a brief flash – 10 seconds –

occurs of his mother as a child holding out her arms outstretched and gazing ahead with a kind of elation before the story cuts back to wherever it was; then, in the end, when the scene comes towards the end of the story – the girl opens out her arms, gazes at the sea and leaps – it is, as it were, recalled by our minds. There is a kind of “aha”: so this is what has been trying to boil up to the surface. The director has set it up in our mind. A trick, but a good one.

Speaking of Kawabata

Why does J. Martin Holman, the deft translator of Old Capital, think the book’s themes are “the gulf between the sexes, yearning for the virginal ideal, the linking of nature and man”? What about the passing of the old? Note the descriptions of old Kyoto; of its festivals, now mostly dead; of troubled kimono shops branching out into transistor radios to save their skins; weavers weaving on handlooms, for Chrissake.

Has Mr Holman, a brilliant translator, forgotten that the very bell of the Gion Shoja Temple announces the impermanence of all things?

Zuihao de Shiguang

Three Times is better titled in Chinese – Zui haode Shiguang, or Best Moments, since one of the two characters used to write “moments”, guang, really means light: this is a felicitous word to describe Hou Xiao Xian’s camera work (long still shots in natural light).

The middle “moment” is a delightful surprise: a visually opulent, color silent film set in the floating world in Taipei in 1911, complete with lavish Qing outfits and interiors. Both it and the first “moment”, set in 1960s in Kaohsiung, are visually very beautiful.

By comparison I have found the third “moment”, set in Taipei in 2005, difficult to describe as beautiful; I couldn’t like either the colors or the costumes (or rather lack thereof); its story – the contorted love relationships of a mentally ill person – is another “modern” element to which I find it difficult to relate. I wonder what the director’s intention was: did he mean to contrast visually beautiful past with visually ugly present? If so, this would explain why the 2005 moment it is the only one of the three “moments” which betrays – in fact, dwells on – a fault in the heroine’s beauty – her dense freckles.

Or does he find the third moment equally beautiful with the first two? If so, is there something wrong with my relationship to modernity? Do I lack a device in the brain which would allow me to appreciate modernity?

(Others lack it, too: e.g. Kawabata).

The Sweetness of the air

Last year I lived an hour out of town; and over a mountain range. The air was sweet there. It is something that cannot be explained to a city rat: the pleasure of merely breathing in. The air in the city, even the cleanest city, is never sweet to breathe.

Now I am only a thirty minute drive from town; and in the same valley. The air isn’t bad here, like it is in town, but it isn’t sweet, either. And in the morning, when there is no wind, I can hear the traffic of the city.

The pleasure of breathing in: another thing we have been robbed off by economic progress.

Tudo isto é fado

Some Portuguese take great pride in saudade; and claim it uniquely for themselves; a whole industry of explicating saudade to the untutored (i.e. foreigners) has sprung up. The Brazilians, at least, and not without some meanness, have bought it: they say it’s the cause of Portugal’s backwardness.

Some Portuguese don’t buy it. Stuff and nonsense, says one. Of course there is a word for it every language: it’s Sehnsucht in German, longing in English. All this ado, she says, is nothing but deception: a chance to set oneself up as an expert in something, even though that something is an intangible, a mere poetic mood.

(This last is a funny thing for a poet to say).

But perhaps it’s not quite longing: to my ears, saudade may be more like Polish żal and Japanese kokai: the feeling of regret not that something has happened, but, on the contrary, that it has passed away; a longing, yes, but for a better past; a kind of philosophical longing, therefore: one resigned to unfulfilment.

Those familiar with the emotion, often claim unique expertise in it: when asked by the French about that strange mood they heard in his music, Chopin used to say it was ‘that uniquely Polish feeling of żal’. And just as the Portuguese are wont to say about saudade today, he also added: “you French have no word for it.”

Saudade’s prominence in some poetic traditions but not in others offers a chance to marry two theories of emotion: the module theory – that each emotion is produced by a dedicated device in the brain – which predicts that the same emotion would arise in men across the globe, no matter how far apart their cultures (since men with the device are spread equally across the world); and the awareness theory which proposes that an emotion may occur but be either recognized or not and that cultural models make the recognition more or less likely. In short, people everywhere (though perhaps not all people, some being by accident of birth deprived of the device) feel saudade from time to time; but only some have had the opportunity to learn how to recognize the feeling and celebrate it.

An interesting idea suggests itself: perhaps the once-great now-fallen empires – Portugal, Poland, Japan – the vanished supremacies – are more likely to celebrate the mood of longing for the past now irretrievably lost because they actually have a better past; and, more likely than not, one which can never be reclaimed.

Which says an interesting thing about the French: if they have lost a great colonial empire, they seem not to have noticed.

The fiery flower

Bolesław Leśmian was one the leading Polish poets of the twentieth century; to my mind – the best. His assumed name symbolizes his poetry; his name was originally Lesman, whose etymology I have not had the chance to investigate, either German or Yiddish (since, like most great Polish poets of the twentieth century, he was of Jewish descent). By turning it into Leśmian, the poet did more than declare his chosen cultural identity (by creating a name which, though totally unheard of till then, sounds readily and irresistibly familiar to the Polish ear on first hearing): he also foreshadowed in it all the main elements of his poetic style. The leś sounds adjectival, something forrest-like; green, natural imagery would forever dominate his themes; the mian on the other hand could be a formation of mienić – to sparkle or glisten – as his poetry does, dazzling with its brilliant verbal fireworks; or zmieniać, to transmute or shape-change, like a lycanthrope: it will be filled with odd changelings, beast of the forest, half animal half vegetable. And it will be full of words like leśmian – strange newly created words, oft onomatopoeic, always pregnant with all sorts of possible meanings, yet always thoroughly native, as if he did not invent but rediscover them.

His three books of prose – retellings of old fairy tales – are some of the best Polish prose ever written; the prose is strangely rhythmic and breaks out occasionally in rhyme. It makes me think of the Persian prose of the nineteenth century Indian poet Ghalib.

Not having my copy of Arabian Nights with me, I cannot look it up whether this story is found in the original Seventh Adventure or whether it is Leśmian’s own invention; if it is in the original, it is no doubt of Indian origin: King Mirakles is, after all, Brahma dreaming the universe; and his people are in fact us: blind by birth, stumbling unseeing, suffering, and desperately seeking liberation. As Leśmian writes them, the sixth and seventh adventures are also strangely reminiscent of Khazar Dictionary, a book about dreams, although in it, as in Journey to Ixtlan, the dream world is the real world, more real than this, in which one sets out to discover the truth; in those two books, one enters the dream world on purpose. The story of King Mirakles is the other way around: it likens reality to dream; and it wants us to escape dreaming. The goodness of dreams, says Leśmian, lies in the fact that they stop.

*

Running past a thicket of bushes unknown to me, I saw out of the corner of my eye a flower so unusual and strange, that I stopped, arrested by its sight. It was a small flower, but woven as it were from golden flame, and it burnt so intensely, so brilliantly, that I covered my eyes with my hand, blinded as I was by the wonderous glare.

I plucked the flower carefully, afraid that it might burn me with its fiery cup. But I discovered that its flame does not burn at all, but stirs with its glow one’s vital powers and wakes one from all drowsiness. Immediately my exhaustion departed and I felt as if woken from heavy sleep.

I hid the flower under my cloak, so as to hold it closer to my heart; warmed by the flower it began to beat stronger and more gladly. It seemed to me as if I were continuously waking from various unpleasant dreams. Full of these awakenings, I ran on.

Then upon one of the meadows in the forest I saw a beautiful youth. He wore royal robes. He walked to and fro upon the meadow and every now and then he leaned forward towards the grass, as if looking for something.

I approached and heard that the youth, who did not notice me, was saying to himself:

“I am searching for you, o fiery flower, o flower of awaking! I am searching but do not find you! I know you grow somewhere on this island. Where are you, o fiery flower, o flower of awakening? How sleepy it is without you, how sleepy! How numb it is without you, how numb! How fearful it without you, how fearful! But I seek you in vain! My eyes see nothing so I cannot see you. I could at best hit upon your flaming cup with my hand; or hear the crackle of your fire with my ear. Dream… dream in me, dream… outside of me, dream… above me! Dream… near, dream… far, dream… everywhere, dream… all over!”

I listened carefully, but did not understand he youth’s complaints. He was so beautiful and so unusual that I felt a heartfelt friendship for him. And I guessed that he was searching for the flower which I had hidden under my cloak.

I approached another step; he raised towards me his large, blue eyes and appeared to look at me with them. But it was a strange, dreamy gaze… I felt that while looking, he did not see. My figure was reflected in his sky-blue eyes, in which there was nothing other but the sky-blue.

I decided to speak to the youth in order to announce my presence.

“Can you hear my voice?” I asked after a moment’s reflection.

The youth opened wide his sky-blue eyes.

“I hear your voice, though I do not see your person”, he whispered. “Are you an enemy or are you a friend of those who are sad?”

“A friend” I said quickly. “Do not fear me for I mean you well. I heard your complaints but did not understand them. I can see your person, and I can hear your voice, but I do not now who you are.”

“Dream… dream in me, dream… outside of me, dream… above me!” said the youth. “I am he who has never experienced anything on earth other than dream! In vain I visit this island every year! In vain I search for the fiery flower whose mere touch grants us awakening! Dream… near, dream… far, dream… everywhere, dream… all over! My eyes have till now not seen reality; only sounds and whisperings and rustlings from the real world reach me. On the north coast of this island there is a city. The king of the city is named Mirakles. A thousand million years ago Mirakles arrived on this uninhabited island, and lay upon the shore to invigorate himself with a nap. He lay down and fell asleep. And he dreamed a huge city, and thousands of subjects, and the beautiful Princess Chryseida, and palaces, and gardens, and mountains, and rivers, and streams, and birds, and flowers, and trees. And whatever he dreamed inside him, that too also happened outside him, and is happening even now. It does not exist, but it keeps on happening, and happening endlessly! Since one thousand million years ago the king has not woken up; he is still lying on the northern shore of this island, dreaming his everlasting dream. You can see his huge city with your own eyes, and his subjects, and the Princess Chryseida, and the palaces, and the gardens… All of this has been dreamt up; all of it is sleepy from exhaustion and dying to be woken up! All of it will disappear without a trace the instant the king wakes! Yet the king is unable to wake and his subjects in vain attempt to disturb him with their wailing and lamentation! Their eyes are sky-blue and blind like mine. They see nothing except the objects which the king has dreamt. They see nothing… they only hear. They are exhausted with this everlasting blindness; and the constant listening to whisperings, and rustlings, and sounds. Three thousand years ago Princess Chryseida heard the crackle of the fiery flower, which grows on this island, and whose touch wakes people from the deepest dream. And since that day, I, a subject of king Mirakles, and Princess Chryseida’s favorite page, each year set out into the interior of the island, to wander sightlessly and to feel with my hands for the flower of liberation! But my search has been in vain! Oh, when will the king Mirakles finally wake? Oh, when will we, his subjects, finally rest from his endless dreams and dissolve into thin air, like the dreams of other people?”

“Be of good cheer, o dreamt up youth!” I said with deep sympathy. “Here approaches the moment of king Mirakles’ awakening! I have the fiery flower for which you have been searching. I have found it a moment ago and hidden it under my cloak. Take me to your city so that I may touch with this flower the sleeping king and free all of you from his tiresome dreams!”

The unseeing eyes of the youth filled up with joy.

“Oh, blessed the day of our meeting, my invisible friend!” he cried out, reaching out both his hands towards me. “Oh, why was it not given me to see him who brings us liberation! Sadly, you shall remain forever mysterious and invisible to me, as is all reality. I only know your voice and in the vast expanse of the real world can only identify you by it. Follow me to our bewitched city… I will lead you, for I can guess the way in my dream. There, within the borders of our realm, my eyes will regain the ability to see – to see all the objects which are the stuff of our king Mirakles’ dreams. There I will not be entirely blind. Let us rush for our people are exhausted with the constant persevering in dreams and every moment of delay causes pain to our Princess Chryseida and all her dreamy compatriots.”

With a winged step the youth led the way towards the north shore of the island. I followed him and as I walked I felt the fiery flower burn ever more intensely under my cloak, as if it sensed that it would so soon touch the sleeping king with its flame. When we finally entered the city through its wide open gates, a wonderful and strange view came before my eyes. The whole city was sky-blue because king Mirakles had for one thousand million years dreamt a dream incessantly and restlessly sky-blue.

I saw sky-blue palaces, sky-blue bridges, sky-blue trees and flowers and birds; even the pavement of the street was sky-blue. Everyone was dressed in sky-blue clothes and scholars and wise men wore sky-blue glasses.

“My blindness has left me” said the youth. “I see everything, everything except you because you are not a dream of our king Mirakles, but a being of the real world. We shall soon come to the public square before the palace of Princess Chriseida and there, before all the people, I shall announce our joyous news.”

The square about which he spoke was before us. We stood before the palace of Princess Chriseida where a high bell-tower stood. The youth grasped the bell’s rope with both hands and pulling it violently he rang it in order to call to him the people of the city.

The square soon filled up with a huge throng of sky-blue-clad people, with the Princess Chriseida among them.

The bell fell silent. Then, in the silence, I heard a melodious whisper which rose from the lips of all present. Their lips whispered constantly:

“We are sad!... We are longing!... We feel lost!...”

The youth called out in a loud voice:

“Be glad and rejoice because among us is a man who carries under his cloak the fiery flower, the flower of awakening! This man has come here in order to wake king Mirakles and gift to us the possibility of dissipating and vanishing into thin air, just as the dreams of other people do!”

“Let him speak to us!” yelled the crowd. “Unable to see his person, we want to hear his voice! Let him tell us his name!”

“My name is Sindbad!” I called out. “The flower of awakening burns intensely under my cloak upon my breast! But I am not sure whether I should touch with it the sleeping king and wake him from this wonderful dream. You are all too beautiful for me to want to lnd my hand to your disappearance!”

“We are sad!... We are longing!... We feel lost!...” whispered painfully the crowd of the dreamt-up men.

Their whisper touched my heart.

“O bewitched people, o dreamt-up people!” I called out again. “I shall gladly fulfill your wish if only the beautiful Princess Chriseida confirms it. Do you hear me?”

“We hear!... we hear!... we hear!” whispered the crowd.

Princess Chriseida stretched out her arms in the direction of my voice.

“Sindbad” she said, “do this, the people of our city beg you. We are too exhausted with the long dream of king Mirakles; and with our blindness to all reality. We wish to disappear, to dissipate, to stop appearing to our king in his dreams. I do not see you, Sindbad, but I hear your melodious voice. I would gladly marry you, but I hasten to dissipation and disappearance; to rest.”

“We hasten!... we hasten!... we hasten!” whispered the crowds.

I was charmed by the exquisite beauty of Princess Chriseida. I approached, took her hand, and said:

“Come to your senses, O Princess! Why do you wish to cease to exist on earth? Oh, permit king Mirakles to continue dreaming this wonderful dream!”

“Give up your request, invisible stranger,” the princess replied. “Fulfill my and my people’s desire. Come with me to the shore where for millennia king Mirakles has slept and touch him with the fiery flower!”

The princess lightly ran ahead, pulling me behind her by my hand, which she did not for a moment release. The crowd, undulating in sky-blue waves, followed in her footsteps and mine.

We arrived at the northern shore. Upon it, lost in sleep, king Mirakles lay. He was so gigantic that he made the impression of a living hill, a hill breathing calmly in its sleep. The crowds dreamt up by him sighed when he sighed, they rubbed their eyes when he rubbed his, they cried when he cried in his sleep.

“Take the flower from under your cloak!” the princess spoke.

I took out the flower. It blazed upon its stalk.

“Approach the king!” the princes spoke again.

“Wake him!... wake him!... wake him!” yelled the crowd.

“O princess!” I called out. “Think what awaits you! You will cease to exist and you will never be again! I love you and I want to marry you! I will take you into the real world, into real palaces and real gardens, where real flowers bloom and real birds sing!”

“My eyes are blind to all reality” replied the princess. “I shall never see the wonders which you promise me. Can you not understand what torture it is to have to cry the instant king Mirakles cries in his sleep, and to sigh when he sighs, and to smile when he smiles at his dreams? Oh, allow me to dissipate and vanish; allow me to stop being the dream of this king!”

“Wake him!... wake him!... wake him!” the crowd whispered again.

At that instant, king Mirakles cried in his sleep. A group cry shook the whole crowd and the slender body of the princess. I have never heard such a cry! Only then did I understand the full extent of the misery of these strange creatures. I have decided to interrupt the dream, to end their suffering. I approached the king and slapped him in the face with the fiery flower, which disappeared from my hand in that instant. At the same moment Princess Chriseida, and the crowd, and the whole city dissipated into nothing and vanished into thin air.

King Mirakles moved, rubbed his eyes, and got up to his feet.

He was so gigantic, so tall that he did not even notice my presence.

“How long I seem to have slept!” he said to himself. “I had a sky-blue dream of some kind, but where is that dream now? Where is Princess Chriseida? Where are the sky-blue palaces? Everything has disappeared without a trace!”

I walked away quickly from the giant because I have spotted a ship sailing near the shore. I waved and the ship immediately pulled up.

I ran on board and advised the captain immediately to depart, because I was afraid of the giant king. We got some fair distance away when I heard the voice of king Mirakles again as he spoke to himself:

“I shall lie down on the shore and dream another dream. After this last sky-blue dream I want now to dream a purple dream!”

King Merikles yawned and lay down on the shore. And he must have instantly fallen asleep because both the captain and I, and all the sailors, saw a new city arise on the island by degrees, full of purple palaces, and purples gardens, purple trees and flowers and birds. Shortly, the city filled with a great throng of people in purple clothes and it seemed to me that I spotted among the crowd a newly created princess as beautiful as Princess Chriseida.

But soon the ship moved away and the city dreamt up by King Mirakles slipped out of our sight.

After three months’ sailing, the ship arrived in Basra, from where I hastily returned to Baghdad.

How to make an art film

Look at me is a psychological drama of the sort the French do well. The making of, on the same DVD, shows the extraordinary trouble taken to shoot it. The script is good and so is the acting; and it is, as it is always with Agnes Jaoui, beautifully filmed.

It has started in her mind, I suspect, as a movie about Amor, a kind of lamento della ninfa, the middle part of Non havea Febo ancora from Monteverdi’s Eighth Book of Madrigals. The aria is incredibly beautiful; but how to do justice to it in a film? A short video of it – MTV style – would have been too short: the aria is so much greater than the 5 minutes it last; one wants to say more about it; or at least talk about it longer, even if he has not much to say. A full length documentary about the painstaking, endless practice necessary to learn to perform it, on the other hand, would have been too dull for most viewers – interesting only to us, hopeless fans of classical voice. But a film in which a psychological drama plays out while the heroine practices for the aria’s performance – and performs it – now, that does the trick.

In the course of the film, Agnes, who always acts in her own films, sings snippets of it; she has a beautiful, strong, well-trained voice. Was she once a professional singer? In the scene, she and the heroine (who isn’t dubbed but sings the part as well as acts it, in a very good voice which is yet believably amateur) walk about a church, taking turns belting out snippets of the aria. They are trying out the acoustics, supposedly; but no one really does that this late in the game – the concert is to be later that day. What they are really doing is just belting and hearing themselves; and giving us the opportunity to hear how well it sounds. It does.

I suspect the whole point of the movie is that one scene; its central point, anyway.

Herein lies an art lesson: the best films (books, dramas, paintings) about some things are the ones that aren’t really about them, but, as it were, next to them, alongside them. The ones which mention it at most in passing. Which approach it, if they do at all, tangentially. Whose connection with the subject matter is unobvious, hidden.

In this case the connection is hidden: both the lamento and the film are about unrequited love. The story of the film – the tragedy of a daughter unloved by her father – grows out of its true subject, the aria, like a flower out of its invisible seed, buried underground.