A Note On Book 1 Of Middlemarch

Principally for my own later referring back, I'm going to record, as they strike me, a few thoughts on Middlemarch.

A friend asked me whether I thought Dorothea Brookes's impulse to self sacrifice is "misguided or has she chosen the wrong object?"

I answered as follows, now being three quarters of the way through Book 1:

....From what I so far understand from the novel your distinction seems without a difference: her impulse seems misguided and due to that she has chosen the wrong object, if by object you mean her husband and service to him. Her impulses are misguided due to defects, imbalances, in her nature and character.

She seems to me to be foolishly and irritatingly self suppressing in being so fanatically self sacrificing. She is shown to be "ardently submissive." Her 18 year old piety has her repressing her sexuality at every juncture, even feeling conscience bound to forgo riding horses, which she has sensually enjoyed.

She is absurdly "theoretic." She is too "abstract," so abstract she can not see what is in plain sight before her. Her sister, less intellectual and more conventional, at least so far, is more sensible, common sensical and clear seeing. So, in one sense, are all those, everone really, who think her choice of a husband is nuts, against nature and bad for her.

Her annoying self sacrificing piety is actually, it seems to me, an argument in favour of the strength of the common sense of conventionality as evident in her uncle, in Chettam, in her sister and in Mrs, Cadwallader, even while Dorothea appears to be set apart from most by her apparent spirited vivacity, radiance, intelligence and moral seriousness, and even as Eliot makes the limits of conventionality, bound by the constraints of "provincial life," apparent.

So, thematically, Eliot seems nothing so far if not dialectical, everything having divergent qualities in tension with each other, qualifying each other, and complicating apparent meaning.

If the virtues of mercy and self sacrifice are what Eliot means primarily to extol, that has not yet presented itself to me...

A Few Thoughts On The Finale Of True Detective

There's no arguing the (in)adequacy of the finale. Adequacy lies in the eyes of the beholder. But there is arguing the focus and meaning of the series. And, in that contention, there is a tendency to be too binary: crime drama vs psychological drama centred on the detectives' relationship. It seems obvious to say it is profoundly both, which accords with the split in finale focus between getting the killer followed by the last quarter of the episode dealing just with Hart and Cohle.

The bridge between these foci is their interrelation, the former the ground for the latter, the latter dynamically affecting the former. The point here is that how we characterize the focus and meaning of the series informs our response to its finale.

For me, the finale worked for among the reasons Chotiner (see link below) argues. But a few points:

My take is that Hart's wife remarried. She lives in a big house. At the hospital, with what had been a family all together, she wears a wedding ring. This is all to me the husk of family, shaped by irreducible but permanently fractured bonds, with the ineffable sadness of irretrievable loss conveyed in Hart's tears.

In Cohle's descent into and ascent from the heart of darkness, from his experience of aborning death, he confronts the very limits of his brittle, soul destroying and defensive nihilistic cynicism, parading as a superior apprehension of the nature of things. That argument from both futility and his own sense of superiority was always in tension with his inexorable drive, his obsession, to do right and discharge his self-perceived debt, as evident in needing compulsively to solve the series's crime. It's on that moral basis, the need to set right and complete the episode 5 concocted faux resolution, that Cohle is able finally to convince Hart to join him in episode 7.

So there is for me a thematic closing of a circle as relationship finds ground for itself in crime solution, the unspeakable magnitude of the crime bracketing and defining the detectives' own imperfections, albeit haunting their lives, but giving truth and content to the idea of bad guys with their own darkness guarding against and warding off much darker and much worse than them. 

The last two episodes as procedurals show the detectives in their ascending relationship fulfilling their moral lives and their competencies in being true detectives.

Final note: the disappointment over unresolved details, clues, and mysterious significances is to me beside the point. All is not well. All the unresolved aspects of the murderous cult whose tentacles spread beyond these true detectives' ken and capacity, all the tantalizing clues and false positives slung throughout the series, they are all of a piece with the vast territory of the darkness the detectives understand they cannot surmount. They must be content with one of Auden's points of light that sets off and gets a measure of human purchase on the darkness.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116902/true-detective-finale-recap-episode-8

The Contemporary Meaning Of Masada

I've been thinking about the contemporary meaning of Masada for Israeli Jews while reading Ari Shavit's book My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel.

Masada, in brief, involved a sect of Jewish rebels who, after their fighting their way into Masada, ultimately and finally chose mass suicide, men, women and children, rather than face inevitable Roman conquest.

Jewish history is replete with attempts to destroy as many Jews as possible, culminating in Holocaust genocide, the meaning of which continues in the modern ongoing existential threat posed to Israel by her neighbouring enemies.

Given the Holocaust as a culmination of Jewish history carried forward by the continuing concrete and real danger of national extinction, Masada, I argue, finds its contemporary meaning in Israel seeking to protect itself existentially with its nuclear arsenal.

So Ari Shavit writes, "But the debate was neither moral nor ethical. In the Israeli siege-republic of the 1950s and 1960s, the memory of the Holocaust felt very close, as did the existential threat. Both of these factors underpinned the general agreed-upon moral justification regarding the right to acquire a nuclear option."

A Few Brief Notes On 12 Years A Slave

With some reluctance I just saw 12 Years A Slave.

I have strongly mixed feelings about it.

One problem was, I saw it at a neighbourhood type theatre and the sound was muffled in places so that I was distracted by missing some of the spoken lines. And the screen wasn't high quality so that I missed such brilliant filmed clarity as there is. I think the poor screen quality blunted some of the scenes' impact.

I have to cop to finding the movie tedious generally and at times irritatingly so. I kept glancing at my watch, not wishing the movie was over but wishing it could pick up its pace some.

Which isn't to say it isn't strongly affecting. Clearly it is.

But other than the poor screen quality, I don't know why I wasn't fully feeling it. There is for me something detached and distance-making in the film making. I couldn't get inside it emotionally though for sure individual scenes shocked and horrified me.

A few points among the many that could be made:

I didn't feel like twelve years had gone by. There was something static and staged in the movement of the story, like the movie was more a series of staged scenes that were united by subject matter but lacked being part of a dynamically moving story.

I think Ejiofor was inert in his acting. But I have a two sided reaction to it. I think in his acting and as he was directed, he and McQueen were trying to convey his sheer powerlessness. And there was something intensely anti heroic in his needing to whip Patsey and in his inability to stop Fassbender from doing it. Every internalized Hollywood instinct made me wish for some last minute save of her by Northrup, that he might turn the whip on Fassbender in some Django Unchained revenge fantasy. But of course he couldn't; and the directorial restraint in Northrup needing to cow-tow to Fassbender and do some of the whipping, however half heartedly, is shattering. So I could appreciate the quietude in Ejiofor's acting. But the suppressed rage, the internalized fury of his frustration, his longing for his family, all that kind of emotion eluded me. So I found his acting paradoxical.

Myself, I find  a clue to the-for-me inert, staged quality of the movie in what is effectively a jarring set piece of liberal piety in Brad Pitt's speech. It was so heavy handedly didactic and so at odds with brutal, unsparing and effective realism of the slavery shown throughout the movie. I have to wonder what McQueen was thinking.

A final note: I noted on FB that I saw Broken Circle Breakdown. I was so moved by it that I didn't feel like carping about the odd this and that. I feel no such compunction about 12 Years.

Analysis Of Seamus Heaney's North

So here we see Heaney, as voice of the poem, alone it seems, retuned to a lonely “ long strand” of Atlantic shoreline, hammered into a specific geographic shape in a blacksmithing image—“hammered shod.” He stands before the immensity of what he beholds, the alone quality and the immensity captured by “…found only the secular/Powers of the Atlantic thundering.” 

There seems a combination of blunt awareness—“found only”—and some complex intellectuality—“secular/Powers”—and the poetic registering of what he beholds in imagery—“long strand,” hammered shod” and “Atlantic thundering.” The central contrast in the first quatrain is between the sole figure of “I’ and the vast, ageless power of what he finds, the mighty Atlantic working its natural will, so to speak, on the land.

There is some continuity in his state of mind into the second quatrain suggested by “unmagical” as what he “found only” in the first quatrain is implicit in what he now confronts—“I faced”.  Heaney is unmoved and uninspired by whatever Iceland beckons and even more so by the “…pathetic colonies/of Greenland…” But the last word of the second quatrain, “suddenly,” signifies the explosion in mind. 

Now, moving to the third and fourth quatrains, his imagination is fired by the contrasting images, the “fabulous” laid low by the ignominy and ultimate futility of their fates: “These fabulous raiders/those lying in Orkney and Dublin”, Measured against/their long swords rusting,” (and I wonder if there’s a suggestion of poetic measure in “Measured against”). Their doomed fates get specific prominence in the fourth quatrain.

The seeming ignition of “magical” marked by “suddenly” and fabulous, the fifth tercet suggests, are voices of historical/poetic imagining initially drowned out by the ageless and unthinking thundering of the Atlantic, as the evolving poetic imagination works off what “I” beholds: “…ocean-deafened voices/Warning me…” 

The warning voices have returned to him, the “I” of the poem,  “lifted again,” just as “I returned” to the long stretch of wild shoreline. His historical/poetic casting back, consciousness drawing and imposing meaning on what is beheld, is filled with “epiphany and violence”, the phrase linked to “suddenly” and the following images culminating in “those hacked and glinting”.

The sixth and seventh quatrains following the pattern of subsequent images laying the “fabulous raiders” low, start with promise. The first two lines of the sixth quatrain seem to turn on a hopeful, meaningful, note of optimistic possibility. There seemed promise in “The longship’s swimming tongue,” was in “I’s” mind “buoyant with hindsight—“ (I don’t fully understand the meaning of “buoyant with hindsight.” But “buoyant” suggests an uplifting exuberance that fits nicely with the image of the ship moving through the ocean waters, as if in looking back at the Norse ships heading out there is optimism in the outset of poetic/historic recollection.)

The memory of that buoyancy as imaged by the tongue of the longship speaks to “I.” The buoyancy of hindsight informs the content of what is imagined said. So Thor, a hammer wielding God associated with lightning and storms and thunder and like explosions of nature, is the original “secular Powers” of the Atlantic, raw and “unmagical”, now imagined as myth, the secularism of the  bay as “hammered shod”, now ,in myth, “…Thor’s hammer swung/To geography and trade,” still “buoyant with hindsight”, but giving way to dumb coupling and revenge, and then progressing worse to “The hatreds and behindbacks/of the althing…,” recalling “the unmagical/ Invitations of Iceland”. 

So now what was originally one step after the blunt registering of what’s originally seen, the mind, beginning to do its apprehending and reconstructing work, has come back round to the more fully imagined deceitful corruption of “althing”.

I question the meaning of the phrase “Exhaustions nominated peace,” which I can’t confidently answer. Does it suggest that “Exhaustions” as a personified subject have nominated peace; does it suggest that “Exhaustions nominated” is an adjectival phrase modifying “peace; or does it suggest both at once? I like the latter suggestion but, in any event, we have moved far within a few poetic lines from the buoyant hindsight to a peace born of bloodletting exhaustion, “nominated” suggesting a temporary contingent choice while historical memory as a national proposition, in contrast with “I’s” singular poetic/historical imaginings, hatches and keeps alive, “incubating”, “the spilled blood”, that image linking back to the imagery of carnage laying low “Those fabulous raiders”. 

The “longship’s swimming tongue” continues to speak—“It said”—beginning the third last quatrain.  Interesting that now for the first time the spoken words take quotations marks, suggesting a virtual person to person talking to “I”, a clear direct communication. 

I sense that the advice/instruction to “’Lie down’” picks up thematically the “Exhaustions” of the “nominated peace”, suggesting that in the poem’s terms “the political is the personal.” “Rest from the depredations you have imagined in recollection,” the ocean voices seem to be saying to “I”. “Go, poet, inside your head to the store of language you have saved--‘word-hoard’--and strain to dig deep there as you hunker down and in,--burrow’”. “Concentrate, draw your mind in concentration, so what shines can be let out“…coil and gleam/Of your furrowed brain.”

That furrowed intensity finds verbal repose in “Compose” that starts the second last quatrain. What is to be expected isn’t a pervasive sheen of light, an illuminated overall answer, but rather flashes of insight lighting up in instants the darkness, in what will be a “long foray”, which is an odd phrase since “long”, which complements the fullness of “compose”,  is tense adjacent to the notion of “foray” as a sharp, brief, military-like advance. 

So, it seems, the theory of poetic composition may be conceived of as a series of energetic lightning-like thrusts, “aurora borealis”, into and against the pervading darkness, itself the culmination of historical/poetic recollection arising from the poetic mind, alone, facing and envisioning “the Atlantic thundering.”

Finally, in the last quatrain, the swimming tongue’s advice, against the largeness of horrible imaginings thrusting “I” into consuming darkness, becomes home spun and to hand and immediately physical. “I’s” eye is to be kept clear, as clear as an icicle’s blister, and is to trust, against the recollected litany of horribles, the remembered feel of the most prosaic things, “nubbed treasure/Your hands have known.”

Here is a theory of how poetry builds out the most immediate, the most elementally physical into an aesthetic and human answer to the raw and awesome continent-shaping power of great natural forces and to the what the terrible things men do to each other from  the venal to the tragically mortal. The humble constituents of this answer get captured in language, as poetry builds out of “bleb” and icicle” and “nubbed” and “hands” and as “I” transmutes the voices his mind brings to sound over the thundering Atlantic into the project of I's poetry.

Spoiler Alert: The Broken Circle Breakdown

SPOILER ALERT The Broken Circle Breakdown

I thought it a wonderful movie. My view of it is that thematically it put a coldly materialist view of the world--Didier--against a softer, spiritually yearning view of the world--Elise--in the face of a most wrenching imaginable tragedy, the terminal illness of a beautiful young child and then her death.

The movie's music, a couple of hundred years of peoples' responses to the terrible vagaries of life, its terrible fatedness, is full with songs about death and dying and grotesque human conduct, with the promise of heaven waiting. Take Go To Sleep Little Baby, a lullaby draped in death and cold loneliness. It was sung in Brother Where Art Thou too.

Didier is quite block headed, IMO, about his atheism. So even when his cancer stricken daughter projects her child's terrifying anxiety onto the bird that kills itself flying into the glass "terranda" he can barely bring himself to affirm her longing for some beneficent meaning in the "birdie's" death. After Maybelle's death, Didier can't bring himself to soften his insistent rationalism to allow Elise to find some comfort in spiritual signs, hopes and beliefs. His block headedness, almost fanaticism, about his view of the world reaches a minor high point when he argues against warning birds with signs not to fly into the glass on the basis that will slow down evolutionary progress in them towards a biological answer evolving in them over time.

In my view, maybe idiosyncratic, he can't really understand the music he plays and sings, which is so full with religion's answer to life's deepest mysteries. Happiness can exist kind of easily and thoughtlessly when things go well and right, but the existential rubber meets the meaningless road when tragedy strikes.

So, more profoundly, he finally drives, Elise, now Alabama, away from him and to her own death by his uncontrollable stridency and aggressiveness about what has befallen Maybelle. Even his uncontrollable outburst at the final performance shows his need for meaning beyond brittle rationalism to accommodate his deep grief. Had he been more sensitive, more yielding, more comforting, he might have saved his love with Elise, of even as Monroe and  Alabama, with the American type promise of a fresh start. At the end finally he succumbs much too late, two deaths too late,when he whispers to his dead wife to greet his daughter for him in heaven.

I didn't talk about some of things in the movie I felt contrived, like the final music at Elise's bedside, because right now I'm not in the mood to puncture the hold the movie has on me with criticisms of it.

Your thoughts on any of this?

The Broken Circle Breakdown

I've been wanting to see the Belgian movie The Broken Circle Breakdown. Not because it's got a nod for best foreign film for the academies. But because one of its main themes and its musical backbone is bluegrass, music I love. It was playing, as they say, at a theatre near me. But my plans to see it kept getting thwarted. Maybe unconsciously because its basic story line has a little girl of six with cancer, a subject that puts me away.

I glanced at a few reviews: most reviewers said seeing it was hard going.

I couldn't find anyone who was able to or wanted to go with me: "Belgian bluegrass musicians, a little kid with cancer? I don't think so."

Anyway this morning, 2, 1, 14, I drove myself through a growing snow storm to the other side of the city to a funky little independent movie house for a noon showing, The Kingsway, where the cashier was nice enough, or oblivious enough, to think I was under sixty. I told her the bitter truth and went upstairs to "Screening Room E," about the size of my basement, where a small six of us watched it on an undersized dull screen, the film quality just a cut above home movies.

I fell apart watching it, crying through a lot of it. I almost never cry, not being set up that way. The sadness is as rending as the music is glorious. The acting is wonderfully natural. And the movie visits the most profound questions about life and death and how we try to deal with shattering loss. It shows bluegrass in one way as an art of the attempt at getting a calming and comforting grip.

I was dying to talk to one of my six fellow watchers about it all after but that didn't come about.

I don't want to say much more, give any more away, or put any knocks against the film. It should be seen, I think, not knowing all that much about what happens. But I'd love to kick it around with someone.