Why Did Dharma Travel East?

The camera work of Why Did Dharma Travel East? was apparently shot under my artistic direction. My photo folder is full of shots exactly like the film’s: dark naked trees against luminous evening sky; surface of the water with reflections of sky, autumn leaves upon it, and fish slinking below; glowing tufts of susuki grass dancing in the sunlight and wind. I have seen a lot of excellent, very beautiful photography these three months, but none which resembled my own in topics and camera angles so much.

This is a mystery: while I am capable of appreciating other work – often with a gasp of surprise (for it would have never occurred to me to see that particular shot) – this camera work seems wholly familiar, it covers a ground which I have already covered myself. The director’s mind and mine have followed the same trajectory; they have come down the same path. It’s no use saying the path is informed by North Asian aesthetics (susuki, bamboo, pine, cherry) – because other North Asian directors do not strike me the same way. That we both started in the same place helps me understand it a little – there are only so many paths through the medina which start in the main souk – but it does not explain why we two have taken the same turn all the way down. It is as if we had walked together.

*

The motto explains the film’s central idea, I think:

“To the disciple who asked What is truth? silently he (Gautama Buddha) showed a flower”.

The flower is not truth; it only symbolizes all those things in life – in fact, nearly all of them – which make the question of truth totally irrelevant.

*

But the film also has a plot: it is the story is of a man “destined” to take care of his blind mother (i.e. he is her oldest son), but who abandons her in order to become a monk; yet, in his hermitage, he is riven by the feelings of guilt. His teacher tells him that love and filial duty are like all other chains of passion: they must be broken in order to attain liberation; it is a noble, courageous and difficult step to take; a necessary step and, for its difficulty, an admirable step.

But the man, struggling in meditation like a tethered cow threshing in a pen (a great photographic sequence) seems unable to free himself of attachment; and attaches himself to his teacher instead. A very long, slow and beautiful scene of cremation follows the teacher’s death: the master had foreseen the ritual as a possible moment of liberation for his student. But will the cremation at last liberate him of his last worldly attachment? Or, on the contrary, will he now find the hermitage unbearably lonely and return to the world defeated? The ending leaves these questions unanswered.

*

China (and in its wake Korea and Japan) are quite unique in having evolved a bi-ideological moral system. On the one hand, there is the official ideology (in China it is expressed by Confucianism) which does what ruling religion does everywhere: it supports the family, business, government, contractual obligations and the rule of law against any rebellion by the individual who may find these institutions oppressive. This is, as Joe Campbell might say, the right hand path, the path of the elder sibling.

And then there is the left hand path, the path of the second born: Buddhism, the philosophy of rebellion. It is preached openly, under full protection of law and general respect, if not exactly in full daylight. It is subversive in the extreme: the state and the family are prisons from which a man must break; emotions, including the “moral ones” (like guilt, obligation, duty, love) are evil and to be avoided; the self does not exist and has no business of existing. In fact, we do not exist; there is no one here; what happens to “us” is therefore immaterial. Each of these paths, the right hand path and the left hand path, exist in full light, are legally recognized and held in general respect (if not always in high regard) and most citizens will be familiar with their teaching. For most people, the philosophy of private life falls somewhere in the middle; the mean generally lies closer to the Confucian ideal perhaps, but when the mean becomes unbearable, there is the escape route – the vent – of Buddhist teaching which says outrageous things like: “it is your duty to abandon your mother”; or “when you see Buddha, kill him”.

It was certainly not any sense of tolerance which allowed the Chinese to evolve this system, so unlike the philosophical tradition of Christian Europe where insistence on theological and moral party line was the norm for millenia and still so in living memory. Perhaps the Chinese simply recognized that the safety valve of Buddhism was indispensable for the better functioning of the society.

Does the relatively high profile of Buddhism in China make it easier for individuals to rebel and for those around them to accept the rebellion? Perhaps. If so, the question in the movie's title could be interpreted as a complaint of the West.

Incidentally, it seems very hard to make a successful film about music

just as it is very hard to write a good book about it. It's hard to find words to say what music says or does to us because it is all non-verbal, from another part of the brain. Most films and books about music fail because the authors either end up making vague but grossly exaggerating poetic claims about the value or importance of music; or they end up making a work about musicians instead, whom they do not know and imagine to be strange, other-worldly beings.

The Music Teacher

The attraction of The Music Teacher was very easy to explain to Madame (because Madame is a queen): beautiful interiors, full of Chinese lacquer screens; European Japanoiserie vases, marble busts; elegant ladies with their hair up in long-necked lace blouses wrapped in rich Paisley shawls; a noble-looking, perfectly dressed older gentleman in an open carriage with a younger lady, on a tree-lined avenue, in spring time: profoundly felt tragic words, a sudden spring squall. The story is preposterously silly; but with visuals like that, who cares?

A rather deft analogy

That novelists are especially knowledgeable about love – that the knowledge comes with the territory so to speak – could be said to be as true as the claim that bankers are especially well qualified to run banks well. Which, of course, they aren’t. Oh, they certainly are qualified to run banks – they know how to be boss, how to climb the corporate ladder and fight internal power struggles on the way up, and then how to keep their enemies down once they are on top. But managing the institution for solidity and profits are quite another matter.

Likewise with novelists: they know how to write novels. Whether the novels are in any way a true depiction of life is another matter altogether.

That Trollope didn't know any women

Trollope’s portrayals of women aren't very convincing. This is true, it seems to me, of all portrayals of women by all Victorian male writers. Such were the times: like in India today, men and women lived gender-segregated lives. The result of gender segregation is incomprehension and mythmaking by the members of one sex about the members of the other.

This explains Trollope. (And Conrad – a sailor!)

I have noticed before that even today, in our coeducational society, children raised without siblings of similar age and opposite sex tend to have a much harder time understanding the opposite sex in their adulthood (and fewer but far more stormy and complicated romantic relationships). Boys raised like me, on close and intimate terms with several women (both siblings and aunts) tend to get along easier with women, perhaps in part because they have a more pedestrian and practical view of the sex. We are less likely to say silly things of the sort my painting teacher likes to say "the watercolor technique is like women -- it is thoroughly incomprehensible".

That all men are pigs

Von Kottwitz notes that representations of males in English novels are overwhelmingly negative.

This is understandable in novels authored by men: novel readers are by and large women; men writing novels will therefore, like all men confiding in women, want to say "all men are pigs", because to say so is thought to deliver their real intended message -- "but the fact that I can say so shows amply that I am not and, therefore -- love me".

Why women novelists should want to say that all men are pigs, is less clear. Is it perhaps a matter of trying to earn popularity by appealing to girl-solidarity? (Us-against-them sort of thing).

Thus, English-speaking women are thought by novelists to want to see men portrayed in bad light. The question therefore arises: do they really want to see men in bad light? Or is it another misperception of novelists, another proof that to be a novelist is to be hopelessly cut off from the world?

(After all, sitting all day at a desk writing is not a particularly good way to learn about the world).

Intimacy, take 2

Twelve times new moon has risen in the East, // twelve months have fallen from the calendar like leaves, // since I’ve set out to emulate with love // the Spartan prose of maitre de Maistre. // My work I judge a remarkable success: // my language here has been forceful and direct, // and, just like the prose of the Neapolitan man, // it’s couched in brave terms // thoughts by and large of limited appeal.

Now I am tired of writing prose// in poor imitation of ordinary speech. // Why clothe plain thoughts in equally plain words? // Wherein lies the interest in ordinary speech? // Let’s let the language be fun to read // at least if the thoughts themselves are but grey mice.

Well then, here goes my first attempt: //

The Intimacy was a disappointment, // a disappointment bound to happen since // it often happens in pursuit of art // that by rifling round it, one stabs himself // upon a work of premeditated dreck. // (This happens less so – thankfully – in film // than in other forms of art wherein // ugliness and unhealth have long since passed // for intellectuàl depth).

The central cònceit of this failing film // had had its promise: // anonym’s lovers who tryst once a week // but do not speak a word only make love // – and tragic disappointment which thereupon strikes // when at long last they do begin to speak. // “I had imagined” they say bitterly // “that you were wiser, better, and more int’resting”. // And thus the adage “Be beautiful and do not speak” // could here be taken to be the film’s main theme: // the beauty of the physical act fast followed // by the disappointing speech // (revealing as it is of minds // fearful, angry, confused and dull). //

Except that the pure ugliness of the sex – // and its astounding brevity // (two minutes on a worn out carpet floor) // mean that it is hard to see why anyone should // have expected better in its wake. // Unless, of course, the heroes thought the sex was great; // and the director wholeheartedly shared // in this quaint view. // Which surely means only one thing: // that people’s sex lives aren’t all that great.

Therein lies surely the source of all my doubt, // the inability to comprehend // my fellow men. // They’re poor and ugly and thanks to this // find goods and pleasures more difficult to find: // than Zobenigo, your true old friend. //They thus prize more highly the more lowly things // because their better – are too hard to find.

Intimacy

Intimacy was for me an accident at work. It was bound to happen: when digging in art sooner or later one stabs his fingers upon intentional ugliness. (It is remarkable, in fact, how little this happens in art film compared to other genres of purported art – installation par example).

The germ-concept of the script was interesting: two lovers meet once a week to make love; their love making is silent. It is anonymous: they do not know each other at all. This goes on for some time as it appears to suit them both. But eventually they meet outside of their usual setting, learn to know about each other, speak. It turns out a bitter disappointment. “I thought you were silent because you knew something I didn’t, because you were light years ahead of me in some way. How I hoped one day you would choose to speak to me to tell me,” says one of them, meaning “you don’t, you aren’t”: the ancient advice “be beautiful and do not speak” proven true again. I have observed it work: the main reason why Asian women appear desirable is that they are silent and therefore mysterious. Piercing the veil of that mystery destroys all: the holy of holies turns out empty: there isn’t anyone there. It’s all the in the veil. (If you know what is good for you, don’t pierce it. The heroes of intimacy, like most people, do not know what is good for them).

But there’s a problem with the picture: the sex. The disappointment happens when the heroes go from physical intimacy to conversation. It would be understandable because the conversation is so bad; but it is not because, well, the sexual intimacy is also – bad. There is a lot of it, it is pretty explicit and the clear impression is that it is ugly and – brief. The intercourse lasts two minutes, with stiff wind in the back: three. One is hard put to understand what is so great about it that contrasting it with the brains of the partners would turn out disappointing.

The only conclusion seems to be that the film presents average people: people with average brains and average looks and therefore both average possibilities and average expectations. Perhaps for the average sort – who look and talk like that – even this sort of sex is great.

Abbas Khiarostami: Ambiguity, its uses in art and its limit

In his “Ten on ten” Abbas Khiarostami talks about his ideas about the art of film.

These ideas are to some extent properly his as he’d never gone to school to study film or ever served as anyone’s assistant director. Yet, the ideas he talks about have been around for centuries. One makes art not by adding, but by subtracting, said a philosopher once; anything truly profound needs a mask, said, on another occasion, another; one must hide art with art, said yet another.

The idea that a certain amount of ambiguity in art intensifies the viewer’s experience is as old as art itself.

For Khiarostami the viewer is the person who creates the work of art – the work of art being not the film, but his inward experience. A good film therefore must not spoon-feed the viewer with clear messages; but stimulate him to think with kind of prolegomena: appropriately moving but incomplete inputs for thought.

In this sense, the Hollywood style of film-making, which sets out to tell an unambiguous story but in an emotionally absorbing manner -- by manipulating the viewer’s emotions (with, for example, the sound track which says, in fact: “now feel sad”, “now feel scared”) is, in Khiarostami’s words, “an act of theft in the dark” – quite literally in the dark, of course. It deprives the viewer of his intellect. It denies him the opportunity to think and interpret.

There is no such thing, says Khiarostami, as understanding art; there is only a number of different possible reflections about it. To illustrate the point, he recalls having once seen a Swedish film, of the dialogue of which he understood nothing. Yet he liked the film so much that he went right back to the ticket window, bought another ticket and saw the film all over again: he had been deeply moved by the interpretation he had invented for the film. Later he had found the film’s script and discovered that the plot was not quite what he had imagined it to be and that he had liked his own version much better.

It is this mechanism that he wishes to stimulate in the viewers of his films. He does it well.

Yet, there appears to exist a limit to the amount of ambiguity art can take before it becomes downright silly. The prescription to success appears a well-crafted kind of ambiguity, one susceptible to numerous but well founded and interesting interpretations. The next step in this research must be a better understanding of just how ambiguous ambiguity should be on the one hand and can be on the other.

Trollope, freedom, and happiness

An older American man, a voracious reader of literature and the classics, wrote me forcefully and with conviction, about the evils of Anthony Trollope. The fellow, he said, wrote prescriptively and hated young women. I wrote back that I liked Trollope and never saw any much hate in him; that, in fact and au contraire, he seemed to me quite ironic and detached from his novels, their Victorian pattern, his heroines, and their moral and otherwise travails, regarding them all with a measured, sympathetic but unserious eye. The American then wrote back to confess that such had been his impression also until – he entered into an online discussion with some (no doubt American liberated female) readers (almost certainly aspiring academics). That, he said, opened his eyes to the truth. It also worked up his bile.

It surprised me to see that he of all people should choose to borrow the opinion of others regarding literature. What is the point of reading 2000 pages a week and being one of the most well-read men around, if one is unable to form his own opinion afterwards but ends up toeing some party line in the end?

It is interesting, incidentally, how many angry young women there are these days around the academia in the West: angry on account of being unfairly oppressed by the chauvinist males. Now, that young academics feel oppressed is not surprising: the field is crowded with talent and the rewards are meager, meaning that in terms of blood per dollar, the academia probably fights the toughest, most difficult and yet, financially speaking, the least rewarding corporate battles out there; every academic is bound to be a highly strung person. Given such circumstances, that women academics should turn to womenslib theory as a competitive weapon (something with which to beat the males) is not surprising; and that they should use it to stoke their own ambition (by feeding their internal rage), is understandable; but that they are as a result a knot of seething anger and bristling aggression is unfortunate.

Zobenigo has slept or has had close dealings with several such aspiring female academicians and has since learned to avoid the kind altogether: there was altogether too much confrontation, too much tension, too much unhappiness. Zobenigo prefers easy human company; or else – none at all.

In the less liberated parts of the world – Thailand, Morocco – where no doubt women are less liberated and (perhaps) more oppressed, there is less anger; women seem both happier and more pleasant company. There is a paradox here: one wonders: what is the point of liberation when it appears to breed more unhappiness and dissatisfaction?

Perhaps someone might say to this, oh, happiness is unimportant; what is important is freedom. In other words, the unfree must be set free even if it cost them a measure of happiness.

I am not sure whether I am sufficiently enlightened to understand this line of thinking.

Modernity

"Modern living in Chiang Mai", said the copy. That’s all it said. "Modern living in Chiang Mai".

It puzzled me.

The ad was for one of those overpriced, overcrowded, aesthetically indifferent development projects in the near suburbs. Since it could sell neither affordability; nor natural beauty; nor peace and quiet, it proposed to sell – like many projects who have nothing of value to offer – modernity: modernity as a break with the stuffy old past, modernity as an aspiration.

Yet, no one really has any notion what modernity is supposed to consists in. It seems to be something we make up as we go along. Which is why I was puzzled by the ad: I didn't know what it meant. Perchance it meant nothing?

Of course, I realized, this amorphousness made the term perfectly handy for bullshit art: since anything could be called modern, anything usually is. The term's appeal to bullshit artists then is clear.

Its more baffling aspect is its appeal to those upon whom the bullshit artists prey; that is, those who buy into schemes labeled as "modern": the meaninglessness of the term does not appear to deter anyone from wanting to pursue it, to be modern, whatever that may be.

But then, perhaps this precisely is the term's appeal: that no one knows what it means? An amorphous principle is convenient: devoid of clear rules, isn't likely to impose upon us any onerous ones (which could be inconvenient). A modern person -- one living by the lights of modernity -- is free to violate the rules of the past in the name of modernity but isn't obliged by any new rules in their place.

In short, modernity is nothing and -- this is precisely its appeal.

Raoul Ruiz

In French cinema my biggest discovery has been Raoul Ruiz, a Chilean émigré who stopped filming in 1967, at emigration, and then resumed again in 1996; I have only seen two of his recent films so far, The Genealogies of Crime and Ce Jour-la, but they have made me hunger to see more (Klimt and Le Temps Retrouve, a rendition of Proust). Both the films which I have seen had been shot in exquisite, lavish interiors of beautiful villas; with stunning, acrobatic camera-work which distracts the viewer away from the action towards the incredible interior decoration; camera-work which is beautiful and often weird – steep angles looking up staircases or up from the floor; camera swinging back and forth rotating 180 degrees through the ceiling while going from one interlocutor to the next; reflections in mirrors, two way mirrors, reflecting pools, shots through empty glasses and full fish tanks; background shadows distorted by moving lights foreshadowing future events. The plots are extremely odd (in a Borges kind of way), hard to follow, intentionally confused in a myriad little ways (some are there clearly for no other reason than to sew further confusion: for example, a certain person, called by everybody ‘Monsieur George’ keeps correcting them that his name really is ‘Didier, Georges Didier’, but if you freeze the frame to look at his business card you see that his name is ‘Didier Georges’, etc.); some multiple roles are played by a single actor; and the heroes play psychoanalytical games in which they switch places (I-am-you-and-you-are-me) adding further confusion. The dialogue is often inscrutable, practically Bretonian. The final resolution appears to wash over one at the end, a bit like a Faulknerian sentence, in a not-quite revelation: you end up with the feeling that you get it, kind of, almost. Or – do you? It’s really quite wonderful in a reassemble-an-ancient-text-from-a pile-of-broken-cuneiform-tablets sort of way; like exploring an ancient rediscovered subterranean funeral maze of a lost and forgotten civilization. The genealogies of crime I watched through once and then immediately pressed the play button to watch it all over again, this time taking frequent pauses to inspect particular shots.

It could be compared to the better films of Peter Greenaway (The draftsman’s contract, The Cook, the thief, his wife and her lover), except that it is far brainier, far more intelligent.

Periodicity

Picasso, I am told, worked in periods. So do I: several years back I was seized by textiles; I read every book on textiles I could lay my hands on; visited every museum and every private collection; spent countless hours looking through reams of cloth in shops and warehouses. The ‘period’ culminated in two extended driving trips, one in India and one in Thailand, going from one weaving center to the next to see the work and to buy samples, sometimes still on the loom. Perhaps the greatest fun was driving through villages with the window down and listening for the clack-clack of the loom, then following it to find the solitary weaver weaving under the house, a few strokes at a time in between cooking rice and seeing to her children; and barging in on her to see the work.

Then there was the Iznik tile period, which took me to Istanbul and Iznik and London and Lisbon; the South East Asian dance-drama period which took me to Bali, Bangkok and Java on numerous occasions over three consecutive years; the Italian painting period before it, with repeat visits to both Italy and all sorts of museums all over the world; and the Baroque opera period before that, during which I crisscrossed the Atlantic chasing rare performances of obscure works, spent hours in audio-libraries and acquired a vast collection of records. And always read, read, read.

Now I am discovering cinema, an art which I have always ignored. Good films had seemed so far in between; now I know that they were simply hard to find, a problem thoughtfully solved for me by a local video store entrepreneur. So, I have been watching films, three, sometimes four, a day.

There appear to be many branches of art which I have not yet discovered: enough to keep me busy next thirty or forty years.

(But how do I square my misanthropic insistence that my happiness must be self-sufficient with the fact that so many of my pleasures are man-made?)

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.