on the german landscape, and oh, how romantic it is

Some thoughts on the film Young Goethe in Love.

  Towards the end of 2011, or maybe the beginning of 2012, mostly on a whim, I went to see a German movie co-written and directed by Philipp Stölzl.  For reasons I cannot fathom, while its German title was, reasonably enough, Goethe, for English audiences they felt compelled to call it Young Goethe in Love.  I suppose the marketers figured no on in this country knows who Johann von Goethe was.

  Okay, okay, I know lots of people don't know who Goethe was.  For your edification, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German poet in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  He wrote one of the most famous versions of the story of Faust, fed into the very prettily-named sturm und drang movement ("storm and drive," or "storm and urge"), and in so doing also helped start the Romantic movement.  Also perhaps not so well known amongst Americans is that English speakers did NOT invent Romanticism; German-speakers did.  And the film is about a seminal period in Goethe's life, when he met Charlotte Buff and in falling in love with her felt inspired to write The Sorrows of Young Werther.  Which, incidentally, set off some of the first-known copycat suicides upon publication.

  Anyway, enough facts from the germanophile.  What I really want to say about the movie is that it was gorgeous.  At times the plot was simple, and, yes, romanticized; but I think we can let Stölzl have that given his subject matter.  I'm fairly certain that there was a bit of "cleaning up" of the images of the German landscape and all the young, beautiful Germans romping through it, but I suspect the landscape itself is real (and even the young, beautiful Germans).

  I don't know enough about the history of Romanticism to speak at length on the subject, but the movie did make me wonder if the German landscape itself — all that endless, rolling green; the rivers winding around hills; and the sort of always slightly askew look of very-well-built-but-also-very-damp houses in German towns — if maybe the attachment to that landscape might explain more about the emergence of Romanticism in Germany than a revival of interest in Ancient Greek literature.

  The love story was sweet, though my heart will always belong to the clear-seeing pragmatism of a Charlotte rather than the convinced idealism of a Johann.  And I did learn, as a result of seeing the movie, the somewhat chilling fact that in German there are different words for different kinds of suicide.  But in the end, I re-watched and ultimately bought the movie because of the visuals.  I've also been reading a lot of poetry by another German poet, Friedrich Hölderlin, another lover of the German countryside.  So it's on my mind.  But I think I will happily rewatch, over and over again, one shot:  from a distance of perhaps a mile or more, Johann and Charlotte approach each other from opposite directions, the clouds moving the shadows around the hills; the grass still, gold, and green; the trees moving with the unconcern of those who have watched this scene play out before.

Identity, Artistic and Otherwise

            The title of the second chapter of The Artist's Way is "Recovering a Sense of Identity."  So I guess this is part two of twelve on creativity.


            Most of the time I distrust the idea of identity.  Identity feels like a trap.  You tell yourself, "I'm the sort of person who..." and then you re-enact a behavior over and over again.  Say, I don't know, hurling yourself at romantic partners before knowing whether or not they have your best interests at heart.  (I know nothing about that.)  Then, when you decide you don't like the behavior's consequences anymore, you have to undo a sense of identity.  No small task.  But let's just say you achieve it.  You actually manage to change your deepest ideas about who you are.
            Congratulations.  Now you say, "I'm the sort of person who..."  Doesn't trust people?  Or, no, waits to get to know people really, really well and analyzes them with a therapist for years before you display any affection?  But now, what about the negative consequences of this identity?  How long before you decide it's time to change identities again?  I'm sure the correct answer is that you replace your old, defective identity with a new, perfectly well-adjusted version; someone who never smokes or drinks too much and always communicates clearly.
            Please, please post in the comments below if you or anyone you know displays these supposedly functional behaviors.
            "I am like this and this.  I am not like that or that."
            It's a curious mixture of reflection and willful ignorance.  To say that I am the sort of person who...jumps a little when I hear an ambulance siren...is to say that I have observed my body reacting a certain way when I hear an ambulance siren.  But rather than saying, "I notice that my body jumps a little when I hear an ambulance siren," I say that "I jump a little when I hear an ambulance siren."  Also, this particular reaction (which I've observed in myself since my accident this past summer), is really quite short-lived.  There's no reason to think that I went 32 years without displaying this behavior, and now it's suddenly a permanent part of who I am.
            I want to refrain from trying to sound too Buddhist here, mostly because I don't know enough about Buddhism to be more than a dabbler at this point.  But I will say that after relatively little experience with meditation, I'm pretty sure that 99% of who we think we are is made up.  Not just made up by us, either; made up by our societies, our families, our teachers and lovers and friends.  And perhaps more powerfully, by the gaps in our lives where those people should have been.
            At the same time, I notice that consciously working on a sense of identity can be extremely helpful as a writer.  American culture is none too kind to its artists, and to a certain extent you sort of have to repeat over and over to yourself that you're an artist, or poet, or composer, or whatever.
            But the catch is, I think, that it's only a starter.  I have been, since I started the Artist's Way this past summer, diligently returning again and again to affirmations.  I struggled with them initially, feeling they were corny, but then settled on a nice compromise with myself:  I never "affirm" anything that isn't true.  So, while Cameron at one point suggested writing something like "I am a prolific artist," I couldn't live with this phrase because even in my best moments I am not prolific.  If a female rabbit can theoretically produce as many as 800 children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren in a single reproductive season (!!!), a female blue whale is more my pace:  one baby whale every two or three years.  I can't remember exactly what the phrase I settled on was, but I went with something like, "productive."
            But then, what if I'm ever not productive?  Given that I'm a woman of still-re-productive capacity, a several-year-long distraction might be in my future.  At that point, since I think it's silly to say things which aren't true, I guess I could just say to myself, "I'm open."  Can I affirm I'm a poet at that point?  Is it helpful to do so, when I see myself failing to live out the identity I'm insisting on because Julia Cameron told me to do it?
            I've mentioned baby-making a couple of times here, and I suppose it's on my mind.  Because in all honesty, if I ever do take that particular leap, I would like to set aside my "poet" identity for a little while.  It seems like insanity to be nursing a newborn and dealing with things like colic and ear infections and sleep problems and (I assume) a rapidly deteriorating romantic relationship while trying to write inspired poetry.  Maybe it would be better to stick to "mom" and hopefully "decent partner" for a little while.
            But can you set aside your identity like this?  So much of who I am seems to have been waiting for me at birth:  caucasian; female; introverted; intellectually driven (and distracted); heterosexual; American; even Christian, to a certain extent; and on and on.  Can I set aside being a poet?  In my experience, my inspiration makes me miserable every time I try to set it down, and this makes me wonder if I'm entirely wrong in thinking identity is self-made.
            Vocation is a lovely old word, a very Christian old word, and one I like very much.  "Spiritual path" conveys the same sense, but I think my agnostic and atheist friends have a vocation to reject everything I believe in and they'd bristle to hear their work referred to as spiritual.  (For all I know they'd bristle to hear me call their convictions a vocation; I beg them to extend Christian forgiveness to me.)
            Vocation means "calling."  As in, someone called you.  Presumably, someone who is not you.  All I can come up with when I look at Samuel is that maybe when the soul says, "Here am I," it doesn't get to know the path beforehand, doesn't even know the identity it's been called to.

A Poem About Poems

Like an Ant Carrying Her Bits of Leaf or Sand
        by Jane Hirshfield


Like an ant carrying her bits of leaf or sand,
the poem carries its words.
Moving one, then another, into place.

Something in an ant is sure where these morsels belong,
but the ant could not explain this.
Something in a poem is certain where its words belong,
but the poet could not explain this.

All day the ant obeys an inexplicable order.
All day the poet obeys an incomprehensible demand.

The world changes or does not change by these labors;
the geode peeled open gives off its cold scent or does not.
But that is no concern of the ant's, of the poem's.

The work of existence devours its own unfolding.
What dissolves will dissolve —
you, reader, and I, and all our quick angers and longings.
The potato's sugary hunger for growing larger.
The unblinking heat of the tiger.

No thimble of cloud or stone that will not vanish,
and still the rearrangements continue.

The ant's work belongs to the ant.
The poem carries love and terror, or it carries nothing.

On Creativity, and the Safety of the Mind

            If you look at the top of this page, you will note that the subtitle of this blog — what I am taking as my mission statement, I suppose — is "on the life of the mind."
            It's an old phrase, one I came across when I was much younger, and I also discovered upon a search for the phrase that Hannah Arendt wrote a book by that title.  Which is appropriate, because I have a conflicted relationship with Hannah Arendt, and I like those things best with which I have a conflicted relationship.
            But for the moment, I want to talk about creativity, the mind, and safety.  I think I had creativity as one of the topics up for discussion on this blog, and I haven't gotten there much yet.  I recently finished Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, and I've decided to take her chapter titles as a (very, very loose) guideline for some posts on creation and being an artist.

            We all hear common threads in how various artists, poets, actors, dancers, composers, and other creative folks describe the creative process for them.  My process is, for better or for worse, violently connected to my intellect.  I have emotional responses to many simple pleasures, yes, but ecstasy rarely comes without intense intellectual exercise.  (Though the times when it does are glorious.)
            So the life of the mind is my life, or the one I am called to at least.  There is much heart here, as well, something some exponents of literature and art would doubt.  I've heard every insult that can be hurled at James Joyce and T. S. Eliot and Robert Browning and Thomas Mann and all the rest of the dead white males who were nonetheless brilliant dead white males.  To those who find their work overly-intellectual, demanding too broad a sweep of knowledge of classical myth and literature, I can only say — for God's sake don't read them.  Don't read them, since it obviously causes you pain, and the time I spend listening to you could be better spent reading Kant.  That's right:  Kant.  Even Kant would be better than people insulting the things I love.
            Which succinctly brings me to my larger point:  reading and writing and thinking have, since I was a child, been a retreat from the world of people.
            Recently I joined a philosophy discussion group, which has made me even more conscious of how intensely introverted I really am.  Everyone in the group, I think, is under the impression that I am quiet.  Suffice to say, I am not quiet.  What I am is abjectly terrified.  There are PEOPLE, for goodness' sake, and they're TALKING TO ME, and they want me to actually ENGAGE with them when we've only just met (albeit months ago), and I cannot understand why I didn't stay home with a book and a glass of wine.
            Add to this the fact that I was bullied when I was a kid, and that I grew up in a culture that has no idea whatsoever to do with poets and artists.  The safe place was in books.  In murder mysteries, where things cleared up simply and tidily.  In Wordsworth and Lewis and Shakespeare and Yeats' Ireland and the Grimms' Germany.  I know many people recognize this use of literature:  escape.  Escape from the rich kids rolling their eyes at my too-short pants; escape from the girls who accused me of a sexual precocity/anxiety they apparently recognized before I did; escape from the boys who tortured animals and found me more friendly-looking than all the other kids; escape from the religion that I loved and feared in equal parts.
            If anyone reading this can relate, it is because we are among those who almost can't help but be carried away by books.  Images, stories, romances, deaths, and the gorgeous, sumptuous words roiling through your brain.  And all without running any real risk!  This is so safe!  A safe, comforting retreat.
            Recently a friend and I went out for dinner and talked about how various people in our lives have affected our creativity.  Family, friends, enemies, lovers, teachers...  One of the most useful discoveries I've ever made about being an artist came in 2010 when I tried to do the Artist's Way the first time.  It all hinged on the word "weird."  I realized that whenever I started to write something, and I didn't know where it was going, and I didn't like where it looked like it was going, the phrase "that's weird" would pop into my head, and away went the project.  My friend and I discussed this and many other discoveries we've made along the way of being writers, and we also talked about how we tended to use literature as a way of escaping the pains of social interaction and intrusion.  When suddenly my friend exclaimed, "But if those voices from family and teachers and whoever are in there saying 'This is too weird,' or 'This is too sexual,' or 'This is too intellectual,' or whatever, then how safe is your mind, really?"
            Which is to say, not at all.  I hate drawing oversimplified comparisons to current events about which I know little, but the recent shootings in Newtown, Massachusetts demonstrate accurately just how unsafe the mind can be.  Families with suicides can tell you.  So can addicts, or just folks with a good old-fashioned guilt complex.
            It's scary in there, the mind.  Full of the past.  Full of fears, both well- and ill-founded.  Full of loathing and nausea and so, so grasping.  Full of...well, you.

Before the Words

            I watched Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette back in November.  I was so taken I actually bought it (something that almost never happens) and re-watched the movie.  There are many things to love about Coppola's work in this film, but chief among them, I think, is her ability to tell a story "before" a script.
            What I mean by this is that most filmmakers need the script in order to tell the story.  I'm sure if you watched most movies with the sound off, you would understand the story arc fairly well (we will exclude super-artsy Criterion Collection-type stuff for the moment).  But this is for two reasons which are not flattering to filmmakers:  one, we are visual creatures and love images; and two, there are only a few stories that keep getting retold, and even fewer in American movies, so as long as they didn't tell a completely nonsense tale, we'll get the gist of what happened.
            Coppola offers far more in Marie Antoinette.  Before the words (and I'm drawing a distinction between "script," which I think of as the whole conceptual storyline, and spoken words or lines), there is Coppola's movie.  There is Marie Antoinette, her eternal boredom and cluelessness, both of which she was clearly bred up for.  There is the fumbling and blandly endearing Louis XVI.  Marie's sexual frustration at the inept hands of her husband, and eventual passion with Count Fersen.  The necessity of producing a male heir, and her social stigmatization up until that feat was accomplished.  And of course, court politics assert themselves over and over again, far more, in fact, than the actual politics of France.
            "The problem of leisure / What to do for pleasure."  In the opening of the film, Gang of Four's lyrics tell you quite clearly the central problem of Marie's life.  It sounds like a joke problem — "Oh, how awful for you dear, so much money and no idea how to spend it" — but by the end of the film her life looked miserable to me, and not because of how it ended.  As in Lost in Translation, there are long, beautiful scenes which might very well lack words altogether, and Coppola has told you the story perfectly.
            It's been a long time since I saw it, but in Visions of Light: the Art of Cinematography, I remember some discussion about the ability to tell a story without words, before talkies came along.  Coppola, of course, doesn't deserve sole credit; Lance Acord, her cinematographer for both Marie Antoinette and Lost in Translation has a not-too-shabby list of credits to his name as well.  But I guess the point I want to make is that Coppola gives us a whole piece.  Not just a bunch of actors acting; not just a bunch of well-put-together scenes; and not even just a bunch of pretty pictures.  Her movies — from their soundtracks to their acting, from their cinematography to their lines, and even the post-production decisions — are of a piece.  One, lovely, consistent whole.

Daniel Craig and the Modern Bond

            I hereby dedicate this post to stating how much I love Daniel Craig.
            So yes, I am moving from The Pilgrim's Progress and discussions of reformation Christianity to James Bond, beautiful blond men, and movies in general.
            This past weekend I saw the new Bond movie, Skyfall, with the *sigh* gorgeous Daniel Craig.  I have seen a number of Bond movies, including all three of the Craig films, as well as most of those which Sean Connery starred in.  I haven't been keeping up on my internet reading, but I know I am not the first to draw comparisons between Craig and Connery's versions of Bond.  Sean Connery was always my favorite, until Daniel Craig came along, and I admit to having been somewhat surprised at Craig's casting and unsure as to how it would work out.
            This brings me to the first quality Craig brings to Bond which initially struck me as perplexing, but which ultimately I find much more satisfying to modern audiences:  brutality.
            Connery as Bond was always and forever suave and in control.  He moved with elegance, and seduced women with absurd ease.  Daniel Craig, however, is an entirely different man.  I suspect a great deal of Craig's brutal aspect has to do with his physical appearance.  He is stocky, extremely muscular, and while he does clean up nice in a tuxedo, his shortened and springy gait belies the surface of smooth decorum.  Certainly this is part of his appeal, in particular sexually.  Sean Connery appears to be the sort of man who makes love.  But a woman feels quite certain that Craig would (please excuse me, but I can't think of any other way to say it) fuck her silly.
            But as any person who has seen Craig's Bond will know, he also brings a vulnerability to the character which is at strange odds to Bond's necessary callousness about killing.  While there is a great deal of casual sex, Craig's bond seems to occasionally make the mistake of caring about some of the women he sleeps with.  And while I know I'm confusing fact and fiction here, I cannot help but see the fact that Craig sliced off the tip of his finger while shooting Quantum of Solace as symbolic.  To me, Craig is intent on making Bond both darker and more believable, a combination which almost always results in a far deeper connection between character and audience.  I never for a moment believed Sean Connery's Bond would get an owie; Craig, one worries, might well end up dead.  Christian Bale in The Dark Knight also comes to mind here.
            The weird juxtaposition of these aspects is brought out, in Skyfall, with Bond's brief encounter (and requisite shower-scene) with Sévérine.  When Bond meets her, he notes her tattoo, showing her long-ago abuse in the Macau sex trade.  He points out she must have been forced into the sex trade young, perhaps twelve or so, and that in seeking to free herself from one oppressive system she has made herself the victim of a sadistic man, Raoul Silva.  Bond offers to kill her employer if she can get him to the man.  All of this seems to indicate that Bond feels at least some sympathy for Sévérine.
            Later, however, Bond's empathy seems to have been false.  Silva has Sévérine beaten by his henchmen, and then carefully places a glass of 64-year Macallan on her head and invites Bond to shoot it off.  Bond misses the shot glass (and her head), after which Silva intentionally kills Sévérine; but Bond's only response is that it was a waste of good scotch.
            For me, the fascinating aspect here is that the contradiction within Craig's Bond is lodged there by necessity.  His brutality fits perfectly with our forever-escalating political violence, which itself belies our supposed concern for abused women.  Even now, drones are killing women who might very well be every bit as beautiful as Bérénice Marlohe, and even some less attractive ones we might be able to find it in our hearts to care about.  This is the world we live in, and it is the world of espionage which the modern Bond films try to inhabit.  Craig has, in my opinion, been instrumental in situating them here, and not in an imaginary world where the greatest threat is the disruption of a rocket taking off into outer space for safely unbelievable reasons.
            Craig's vulnerability also seems to bring him more into the modern world.  But then again, the Bond movies clearly depend upon tropes and clichés to convey meaning:  the unreachable heights of wealth; the gorgeous and exotic locations; even Bond's insistent egotism and somewhat tired jokes are needed.  And right along with these tropes are the women, who are themselves a kind of cliché.  But there is a problem here for modern audiences; on the surface, we find it less acceptable to dispose of women without any sense of empathy or justice.  Hence the modern touch about the sex trade, Marlohe's highly believable portrayal of a trapped and terrified woman, and Bond's eventual capture of her killer.
            Still, Bond is essentially a hired assassin, though he might be hired by a nation we currently have as an ally.  But Daniel Craig's interpretation of Bond, and the clichés upon which the Bond movies depend, hold a fascination which I look forward to seeing for two more films.

Dark Clouds

Okay, okay.  I swear after this I'm really done with The Pilgrim's Progress.  I was too charmed by Bunyan's "Author's Apology for his Book" to not include just a tiny little excerpt here.  The next few posts will probably center around movies and maybe an opera, and then onward to Swift or Plato (not sure which yet).  For fun, note the definitions of oldish words at the bottom.


Dark Clouds bring Waters, when the bright bring none.
Yea, dark or bright, if they their Silver drops
Cause to descend; the Earth, by yielding Crops,
Gives praise to both, and carpeth not at either,
But treasures up the Fruit they yield together;
Yea, so commixes both, that in her Fruit
None can distinguish this from that; they suit
Her well, when hungry:  but if she be full,
She spues out both, and makes their blessings null.
    You see the ways the Fisher-man doth take
To catch the Fish; when Engines doth he make?
Behold how he engageth all his Wits;
Also his Snares, Lines, Angles, Hooks, and Nets:
Yet Fish there be, that neither Hook, nor Line,
Nor Snare, nor Net, nor Engine can make thine;
They must be grop't for, and be tickled too,
Or they will not be catch't, what e're you do.
    How doth the Fowler seek to catch his Game
By divers means, all which one cannot name?
His Gun, his Nets, his Lime-twigs, light and bell:
He creeps, he goes, he stands; yea, who can tell
Of all his postures, Yet there's none of these
Will make him master of what Fowls he please.
Yea, he must Pipe and Whistle, to catch this,
Yet if he does so, that Bird he will miss.
If that a Pearl may in a Toad's head dwell,
And may be found too in an Oyster-shell;
If things that promise nothing, do contain
What better is than Gold; who will disdain,
(That have an Inkling of it,) there to look,
That they may find it?  Now my little Book,
(Though void of all those paintings that may make
It with this or the other Man to take)
Is not without those things that do excel
What do in brave, but empty, notions dwell.


                     from "The Author's Apology for his Book", The Pilgrim's Progress, by John Bunyan


carpeth:  to "carp" is to find fault and complain constantly, to harp on petty grievances; or nag or fuss.
Yea:  Yay!  Actually, you probably already knew it meant "yes."
spues:  old spelling of "spew"; to vomit or cast out through the mouth.
divers:  old spelling of "diverse"; often used where we might say "various" or, if you want to sound really glamourous, "sundry."
a Pearl may in a Toad's head dwell:  a toadstone was a stone believed to be formed in the body of a toad and worn as a charm; believed to be an antidote to poisons.

            All definitions from my good old American Heritage Dictionary, with a detail about toadstones from Wikipedia.