Ishamel, the narrator of Moby-Dick, and The Pequod’s first harpoonist Queequeg may be literature’s original odd couple. Illustration by Mark Summers from Moby-Dick (facing p 78) Barnes & Noble Books.

Readers of this blog will be aware of my Melville enthusiasms.  (Ahoy, another white whale sighting dead ahead!)

I recently responded to a discussion of Moby-Dick on the Goodreads website, and then decided to share my thoughts here, slightly enhanced.

Julia,
I am very happy you’re giving Moby-Dick another chance. Each time I read the book I gain a fresh and amazing experience. I wonder why Ruth gave up after 50 pages – what she mainly read was the budding friendship between Ishmael and Queequeg. Is she put off by that? I find it the most humanly engaging relationship in the book, a rare and fascinating 19th-century example of a pan-cultural brotherhood, and what Leslie Fielder once called one of the great American love stories.

Ishmael reflects: “I began to be sensible of strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. So the soothing savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very indifference speaking a nature in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland deceits.”1

Admirably homosocial dynamics aside, I see an almost mystical love hidden in Queequeg’s request for his coffin to be built.  He recovers from his fatalistic gloom, but he has intuited the demise of the ship. After all their bonding, Queequeg has also intuitively created the richly symbolic means for his best friend to survive. In the novel’s famous last scene, the wooden coffin pops up out of the water as the ship sinks and Ishmael grabs hold of it for dear life. That “orphan” survives alone, to tell the grand tale. We all have plenty to thank Queequeg for.

I recently read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and — as much as that book offers commendably provocative (but rhetorically heavy-handed, for a storyteller) portrayals of slavery’s evil — by comparison Melville’s handling of race is far more interesting and nuanced, and insightful about the complexities of multicultural relations.

Those examples range as broadly as the comic byplay of Stubb and Fleece the black cook over the hunger-crazed sharks (CH 64),* to the classic racial confrontation and masterful pan-cultural interplay of “Forecastle — Midnight” (Ch. 40), to the devastatingly cruel treatment of Pip followed by the stunningly unexpected paternal adopting of him by Ahab, even as the black cabin boy has become psychologically disabled by his trauma at the hands of his mates and the unfathomably indifferent ocean.
And of course, there’s the delightfully odd couple, Ishmael and Queequeg (who walked away from a cushy life as Polynesian royalty to adapt to Western culture while retaining his own traditions), and Ishmael’s visit to the black church service.

Nor does Melville shy from strong storytelling by avoiding possibly stereotyping characterization, with the mysterious and ominous Asian harpooner Fedallah. But Ahab’s covert hiring of him and his gang clearly reflects the captain’s deranged monomania. We all know today thugs come in all colors.

All this is amazing for a mid-19th century author, and set a cosmopolitan standard to this day and sociologically explains part of the book’s greatness.

Further, the novella Benito Cereno brilliantly demonstrates how Melville dramatizes the tragedy of slavery while demonstrating that no race is above savagery. One question he asks here is, to what ends savagery is used and when is it ever justified? Time has shown that perhaps no author of any color or gender did better on these topics and I’m not sure if any have since.

Another thing I love about Moby-Dick is Melville’s clear and complex fascination with (and love for?)  whales, which permeates most of his writing about them (e.g. “The Grand Armada”Ch. 87, or “Does the Whale Diminish?” Ch. 105 and “The Dying Whale” Ch. 116), even aside from the purely cetological material and his one chapter of defending the “glory and honor of whaling,” which seems almost obligatory and understandably a bit defensive. Thus, the powerful and moving vividness of the Man and/vs. Nature theme.

To venture into deeper waters implicit in this theme, Melville may have chosen a white sperm whale as a symbol of what Edmund Burke called “the dynamic sublime,” and “in Ahab, Ishmael and others we see different human reactions to it,”  according to a Harper’s magazine essay written after the BP oil spill, which treatened and may have harmed, among many other creatures, the endangered sperm whale, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“Modern man of power fears the whale, feels threatened by it, and is obsessed with his destruction. Modern man is driven by the desire to dominate his environment and chafes at those aspects of the world cannot control…The vision of Melville’s narration,  however, appreciates the beauty and majesty of the forces of nature even as he reckons with their power and unpredictability.” 2

Unlike Ahab, Ishmael and Queequeg especially appreciate these forces because their daunting task to kill these gigantic, magnificent creatures, for the sake of the precious oil that lights lamps and street lights. This is part of what Ishmael, a fledgling whaler as the story begins, learns from Queequeg.

Only a master harpoonist like Queequeg knows truly what a great creature he is grappling with. In one extraordinary scene ( which no filmmaker has ever managed to stage) he literally dives into the water and crawls inside a fresh whale carcass to pull out a crew member who has accidentally fallen into a cavity cut into the whale. So he’s also a sort of Jonah turned hero.

All I can say is, dive in someday yourself– say, during a damp, drizzly November in your soul or a sun-blessed August afternoon on your shoulders.

(For those who feel the need to get their feet wet first, or for a wonderful young person’s illustrated condensation of the book, I recommend Moby-Dick presented by Jan Needle and illustrated by Patrick Benson, Candlewick Press 2006. The book offers marvelously evocative artwork and a reasonably good condensation [down to 33 chapters] with explanatory chapter intros by Needle, who has been shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian children’s fiction prize. See book cover below)

 In the novel, it is Fedallah, not Ahab, who gets accidentally entangled in the harpoon lines on Moby Dick.

Notes

1 Chapter 10 – “A Bosom Friend” Moby-Dick  or, The Whale, Herman Melville,  A Longman Critical Edition, Ed. John Bryant and Haskell Springer, Pearson Longman 2007, 62

*a good discussion of Fleece’s black dialect is in the”revision narrative” footnote (p 265) to the Longman Critical Edition, mentioned in my footnote above.

2  Melville — What the Whale Teaches Us —  http://harpers.org/archive/2010/05/hbc-90006992

Paul Ryan practices his squeeze-the-money-out handshake with a Republican in a Chicago fund-raising event. Courtesy Publius Forum 

Below is a little exchange for those who think my first post about Paul Ryan was simplistically reductive by characterizing him as a right-wing ideologue budget geek who sees humanity in terms of mathematical digits https://kevernacular.com/?p=676

Take a look at this You tube chat with Bill Clinton. The ex-president somewhat disingenuously says he hopes the Democratic win in New York won’t be “an excuse to do nothing ” about Medicare. He’s surely well aware of the The Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan.

Ryan paints himself as the hero rising to save America from the morass of political paralysis, then adds: “We know the math, but we had to put ourselves out there,” pumping Clinton’s hand. “It’s all about the math. The ex-prez may have met his match as a political schmoozer, with this blue-eyed, iron-pumping bizarrely friendly, Ayn Rand-reading Catholic family man.

The Simpson-Bowles plan has as accurate and effective mathematics as anything proposed, but it doesn’t drain the blood of the middle and lower class and the sick and disabled, so that the superrich 1% can gorge themselves into utter grotesqueness. The Ryan Republicans have cravenly fought the proposal into paralysis, at every turn. Even reflexively moderate met Mitt Romney told Sean Hannity recently “My plan is very similar to the Simpson-Bowles plan.” It won’t be when his VP-candidate gets his mitts on it.

As Joe Klein of Time rhetorically asks, should Pres. Obama make a make a strong case for the Simpson-Bowles plan, perhaps in his convention speech?

“Absolutely. It’s called leadership.”

Otherwise we may be doomed to the horrors of “Mittamorphosis” (see previous posting), a president transformed into right-wing, bloodsucking creepy crawly that Kafka never quite dreamed of.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_vDQCuHFOU

The literary geek in me couldn’t resist this posting — a devilishly ingenious mockup from the Pragmatic Progressive Facebook page.

And to go to the source of the inspiration I offer this:

“What about sleeping a little longer and forgetting all this nonsense, he thought, but it could not be done, for he was accustomed to sleeping on his right side and in his present condition he could not turn himself over…”

Now, poor Mittor had Paul Ryan lying on top of him. He could no longer even budge!

“…His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared with the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes.” (from The METAMORPHOSIS — Franz Kafka)

http://www.facebook.com/#!/PragProgPage

Franz Kafka “The Metamorphosis” from Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories, 1883-1924  Schocken Classics  p. 89

The Wisconsin recall election was really “all about courage.” – Rep. Paul Ryan.Ready for another heaping helping of courage? It’s truly bizarre, this new species of corn-fed Republican extremist being grown in progressive Wisconsin, home of Fighting Bob La Follette. Presumptive Republican Vice President-nominee Paul Ryan (right, above) and Gov. Scott Walker seem to earn half their votes with their disingenuous boyish charm.

It’s partly because they’ve never really grown up. Life is still a game of Monopoly, for them. Both strategize by masterfully manipulating numbers — dollars and statistics — as if abstract numbers are all that count in the world any more. What strikes me most about Paul Ryan is that this self-described geek (who, gee whiz, loves his peanut butter and honey sandwiches) is a pure numbers man, a weird sort of breathing automaton.

Yes, we need to do something about the deficit, but virtually every effective administration has functioned with a deficit. And this most extreme shortfall is courtesy, of course, of the last Republican administration, which went hog-wild with defense spending, and then dawdled while New Orleans drowned.

Of course, unlike even many mainstream Republicans today, hawk-boy Ryan still thinks if we keep throwing incalculable numbers of young Americans into harms way on the other side of the world, we can solve all the problems of ancient societies and cultures which we understand poorly, and have no right to to attack, unless they have attacked us. It’s a demonstrably outmoded mega-military mentality.

Now comes Ryan, posturing as if the deficit is all President Obama’s fault, and threatening to gut or eliminate Medicare, Social Security, food stamps and virtually all the social safety nets of our civil society.

The problem is, as a budget geek legislator, all he seems to know and understand is numbers. People are merely big, cumbersome numbers to him — to be jiggered around and preferably away, because they complicate his brilliant computations with their unpredictable (and predictable) human needs to survive. He is the essence of the contemporary technocrat geek, divorced from human reality.

Well, surprise, Rep. Ryan, any way you slice or dice these numbers, most of them represent vital support for living human beings — who work (or try to), procreate (like pro-life Republicans insist they should), bleed suddenly or suffer slowly, grow old, or die before their time.

Meet America, Congressman.

So Ryan keeps smiling and arguing about numbers, as if his god, Math-is Maximus, will solve all our problems.

Oh, we now know he’s a workout fanatic because his father and grandfather both died before age 55 from heart attacks.

But what if his heart genetically fails him at age 52 — disabling him? Well, he can probably afford his own private health care. But most other 52-year-olds in the same situation – or a myriad of disastrous other ones — who end up losing their jobs couldn’t afford care under his plan, because they will have no disability safety net.

Just take a voucher, he’d say, and good luck. But you should’ve worked out even harder!

Survival of the Fittest, the Luckiest and the Richest, who pay nothing extra to cut the deficit — that’s Ryan’s plan.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen, the top ranking Democrat on the House budget committee, says Ryan still refuses any compromise. We want to improve the quality of programs not cut the quantity, Van Hollen says.

Ryan wants a neat, streamlined, mathematical, cold-blooded policy. Pure genius, Congressman.

I can imagine what he’d do if his own grandmother’s wheelchair failed and she rolled screaming down a hill.

How convenient. He’d scratch his head for a moment, and continue tabulating and subtracting. And now, smiling for the cameras.

That takes real “courage.” I can think of other words for it.

A test of “total recall.” Do you recall this scene from “Night of the Living Dead”?

A Sunday op-ed page essay and a blog post got me thinking a bit more about my recent “smart phone zombie” post, because I’d been debating with myself whether I was too much of a scold — even given the very scary car-death statistics and the troubling societal research. https://kevernacular.com/?p=557

The smartly serene Buddha sightings by the blogger Myth Girl in her review of the remake of Total Recall http://mythgirl.org/2012/08/06/total-recall-a-message-for-our-times/

got me pondering about how that great Buddhist wisdom of being “in the moment” is more pressing the more we accumulate memories over time. Not to devalue history, which I hunger to know and understand with every passing day, as humanity seems to not heed its lessons. I argued that such healthy mindfulness of the moment seems compromised these days by an over-involvement with personal electronic devices while out in society and in nature. The Buddha may have known we’d consequently endanger ourselves while operating lethal weapons– like cars. So her foot is perpetually off the pedal while doing what she does best — meditate and transmit wisdom.

Certainly there’s plenty of wisdom to be found on the Internet but I fear all too often that people are gleaning information at best on their mini porta-brains. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as the Seinfeld gang might say.

But it begs the question of how much these things are really helping our intelligence, and guiding us into a future of unlimited human potential. Naysayers have been telling us for a while that “Google may be making us stupid.” That’s debatable. Harvard professor of psychology Daniel Wegner gravitates to a reassuring standpoint in his New York Times Sunday Review column of August 5.http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/opinion/sunday/memory-and-the-cybermind.html?_r=1

The illustration accompanying his column shows smart phone users walking around with their heads in one big shared cloud.

That alludes of course to the “cloud” of “linked people and specialized information field devices” that makes Internet sharing so intoxicatingly empowering, as we seem to be drawing from intelligence of virtually anyone and anything online.

. Of course the head-in-the-clouds metaphor can drift a different way, with an older meaning, depending on how the person is actually using their smart phone.

Wegner points out that the more forward-looking view is to accept the role of the Web as a mind expander and “wonder not at the bad but at the good it can do us.”

You know how full of a glass he’s drinking on this subject. He says that each time we learn who knows something or where (his italics) we can find information we are expanding our mental reach. This is the basic idea behind so-called transactive memory, he explains, a psychological theory that provides a way to understand “the group mind.”

That term makes me nervous in itself, of course, recalling Orwellian  “group think.” But  to illustrate the value of the “group mind,” the professor tells us of sharing “domestic memory duties” with his wife. I did that when I was married and certainly as a bookish single person I draw from many books and other sources I have not committed to memory, partly through my personal but hardly unique method of page-numbered note taking in the backs of books I read, and my messy files of underlined article clippings ( and yes, my seemingly bursting electronic “Favorites” file).

So I hope I can happily be among those who stay “plugged in,” rather than fall behind with what he terms the cowering “neo-Luddites.”

Nevertheless Dr. Wegner’s column fails to address all the people killing themselves and others while texting in cars and seemingly becoming socially atrophied by their self-involvement with their computers, whether at home or in public. I love the idea of social media, or I wouldn’t be Facebooking, friending and blogging (and trying, though not very successfully, to get people to respond to my posts:)).

But might we wonder how much all our digital social interaction is truly present “in the moment” rather than virtual, as the Buddha might say. After all, we never really know — except on Skype — whether there is a genuinely Buddha-like smile on the face of an electronic respondent, or whether it is a more calculated expression, that reflects our vulnerability to online manipulation.  When we’re all basically doing Skype online this concern may seem silly neo-Luddite hand wringing, so I’ll end (almost) with that hopeful “when and if.”

But I still want smarter-than-me smart-phone embracers to address those troubling issues not related to mind expanding.

After all, to aid your partial recall of my original posting, as a baby boomer, I’ve been a proponent of mind expansion for decades (and here I should insert a slightly stoned smiley face, although these days I would only use herb for pain management.)

So what you think? Is there little to worry about in the smart phone cloud?

Will we learn how to use our rampant, amazing technology for all the power and promise it seems to offer? Or will this morph into the manufactured Godzilla from Night of the Living Dead (see photo) that finally does turn and devour us because we are helpless to resist, as individuals, as a society and a culture?

Gore Vidal: Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Gore Vidal: John Lennon was a born enemy of those who control the United States, which I always say was admirable. Lennon came to represent life, while Mr. Nixon… and Mr. Bush… represent death.

The first quote by Vidal is one of the most famous by a person who was still living this week. It’s just fame derives from its pithy characterization of how deviously politicians, preachers and other influence-peddlers can rhetorically wrap themselves up in the Stars & Stripes, and become Teflon disparagers and demonizers of anyone who expresses political dissent, especially regarding the policies and institutions of United States.

I have a great love of America in the great, broad sense of the name, which implicitly includes the whole New World — North, Central and South America. I have a far more uneasy emotional and intellectual relationship with the United States, per se. I understand and love America especially for its indigenous culture and the way that  culture has inherently informed and shaped our society and our democratic politics, although this is a still-underexplored relationship, which I have attempted to deal with in my hopefully forthcoming book Voices in the River: The Jazz Message to Democracy.

But today I commemorate Gore Vidal, who died Tuesday, August 2, 2012, and who may have been the greatest living essayist in America, as his definitive collection United States: Essays 1952 to 1992 will demonstrate to anyone who dips into it. This monumental anthology ought to be instructive to anyone today who strives to communicate articulately through writing, especially in the no-holds-barred electronic media. So yes, I’m talking about bloggers, like myself. Vidal’s writing helps to give me pause, to reflect how much craft went into his essay writing. Whereas one must wonder how much care, deliberation and craft goes into blogging these days, when the pressure is always to churn out something new and maybe flashy, provocative or trendy that Internet browsers might just latch onto.

That’s not all bad, of course. Vidal was a brilliant provocateur. Note that Vidal’s comments about John Lennon suggest that the most outspoken of the Beatles implicitly criticized the United States for using its then-supreme post-Cold War political and military power as a warring empire. Lennon, by contrast came to represent life, as epitomized in this great song of societal idealism “Imagine.”

So I choose to commemorate Vidal for the critical thinking that permeates the magnificent volume of essays. Thus, he titled it United States rather than America — had it been titled the latter, I suspect it would’ve been a more celebratory collection.

Rather in the volume’s “State of the Union” section, various essays critique the political nation-state that elided or institutionalized oppression at home and whose main international presence has been its military muscle — and the emotional and quasi-intellectual trait that most often buttresses and informs it: patriotism.

Accordingly, I quote from his essay “Patriotism,” written originally for The Nation July 15 – 22, 1991.

Vidal — though he could sometimes adopt a patrician tone of superiority — began in self-deprecating style, recounting when he attended a Gore family reunion in Mississippi, as former Vice President Al Gore is a cousin of his:

“I knew no one at the gathering but I was at home. Who would not be when confronted with 200 variations of one’s own nose and elephantine ears? These clan reunions that are taking place all over the country are not a WASP phenomenon. Blacks have been searching out their roots for some time, while the original “Americans” never ceased to honor their tribal ghosts, just about all that we have left of them. Hispanics now live in blithe unassimilated enclaves in what Mexicans still refer to as the occupied lands seized by us from Mexico. Meanwhile, American Jews gaze raptly upon the recently exhumed ‘homeland’ half a world away from North America, and though most of them sensibly refused to go there to live, they allow the rest of us to finance (officially at a cost thus far of over $50 billion [as of 1991]) this land other Jews have occupied.

“Is it any wonder that, in the absence of an agreed-upon nation, our many tribes are unfurling their standards and casting even wider the webs of kinship for mutual support and defense against the state that no one loves? If the Vice President and Secretary of Defense chose not to fight for their country in Vietnam,* why should anyone fight for their country?

“Suddenly all our turkeys are coming home to roost; and the skies are dark with their unlovely wings while the noise of their gobbling makes hideous Sunday television… We can do nothing at all. Jefferson foresaw the eventual degradation or her system and he suggested that we hold a constitutional convention once a generation. But neither our rulers nor their hapless critics will allow such a thing (“You see, they will take away the Bill of Rights”); plainly it is more seemly to allow the Supreme Court to take it away…

“In due course, the idea of the nation-state may become as obsolete as the nation-state, in fact, already is…In any case, it will be the collapse of the world’s already skewed economy that will make for great change, not the firing of a patriot’s gun at some national security fort.”2

You begin to see how uncannily prescient Vidal was — commenting on the transformational disaster of the world economy collapse, 17 years after he predicted it. And he certainly is provocative in questioning why anyone should fight for their country. This would seem to devalue the heroic efforts of veterans, but they, as individual soldiers, should be valorized and supported, even if most of America’s 20 and 21st century military exploits for which they were used (save World War II) remain eminently worthy of criticism. That is Vidal’s point, how the nation-state asserts its will and righteousness militarily, and now preemptively — often in the name of democracy.

And as a gay man, he surely spoke from first-hand experience as a member of an oppressed minority group driven to self-protective identity tribalism. He helped open the door to mainstream discourse for other gays — a testament to his creative powers, shrewdness and rhetorical skills — and perhaps his privileged background. But Vidal is not all gloom and doom. He ends the essay hopefully and yet with a characteristic provocation that shows you could never pin him down politically:

“From the one many. That could be our happy fate in a single, interdependent world, with no flags to burn, no guns to be shot in anger, no—dare I propose so dangerous proposition? — Taxation without representation? In short a new world disorder. Freedom, justice for all. CNN too. In hoc signo… (“in this sign you will conquer”.)

I would not have been so struck by Vidal’s early ’90s insights and critical acumen if I had not just read an essay by Nathaniel Berman in the Summer 2012 issue of Tikkun, the excellent and courageous magazine of “politics spirituality and culture.”

Berman’s article is Statism and Anti-statism: Reflections on Israel’s Legitimacy Crisis. And it delineates the complicated array of small groups, movements and sentiments that question the legitimacy of the state of Israel, which has increasingly used its U.S. – supported nation-states militia power in an oppressive and belligerent manner. Berman quotes provocatively lines “certain to shock American Zionists in the year 2012 “: ‘…For we preach anarchism. That is, we do not want a state, but rather a free society… We as Jews know enough of the dreadful idolatry of the state.. To pray to it and to offer our children as a willing sacrifice to its unquenchable greed and lust for power. We Jews are not Staatsvolk.’”  The quote is from the young Gershom Scholem in 1915, a passionate Zionist who Berman asserts “would become (though without retaining his youthful political radicalism) arguably the most important Jewish scholar past hundred years.”

Like the elder Scholem, I hardly see myself as a radical, but these ideas — commingling among Vidal, Berman and Scholem — make eminent sense in the chaotic world we live in today. The way we learn to co-exist in ”a single interdependent world, with no flags to burn, no guns to be shot in anger,” as Vidal put it, may be key to avoiding Armageddon, or the survival of the planet, if it does not fall to uninhabitable ruin from environmental abuse.

I would hardly advocate dismantling of our government — especially for all the domestic social good for the sick and needy, and the business empowerment it historically has provided. But perhaps a constitutional convention, as Vidal and Jefferson suggested, would help us remove such archaic albatrosses as the Electoral College, for example. (Talk about disproportionate taxation without representation!).

And note that Vidal also predicted in 1991 how the Supreme Court has become a political entity far more than a true judiciary one. One could argue our Bill of Rights has been undermined by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. In deeming that a corporation is an individual with the right to spend unlimited money on political influence, the court fabricated, out of sheer judicial hubris, a gargantuan mock American citizen. What corporation has ever, or will ever cast a vote in an election? How many persons of a corporation truly represent “citizens united,” apart from the one CEOs and shareholders  at the top one per cent? And yet, with that Supreme ruling, we now watch many millions of dollars influence a presidential election (and in my own state of Wisconsin, a gubernatorial recall election) far, far more than any individual citizen’s vote ever will. So our right to cast a vote as a citizen has been profoundly undermined.

So I do begin to see why a Vidal was worthy of the National Book Award for his collection of astonishingly trenchant critical writing about literature, culture and The United States. The deeply erudite Vidal was also a penetrating historical novelist, as he proved in such books as Burr and Lincoln (virtually definitive on their subjects) among others, and a brilliant social satirist, as in Myra Breckenridge.

Gore Vidal was not a patriot in the conventional sense because, as he notes in the beginning of the essay, that term is etymologically patriarchal and contributed to devaluing the role of women in shaping America, and thus devaluing their power and rights. Yet, Vidal was a great American in the best sense, capable of insightful dissent and constructive and, against bleak odds, hopeful criticism, inspired by all that he understood America has become and might still be.

May his writing, and the high standard it forged, live on for all who strive to essay in any medium.

*Vidal was referring — to under George HW Bush — Dan Quayle and Dick Cheney, who despite getting five draft deferments to avoid serving in Vietnam, became perhaps the most war-mongering administration member in modern American history, both as Secretary of Defense and then as Vice President under George W. Bush. As Melville wrote:

youth must its ignorant impulse lend —

Age finds place in the rear.

all wars are boyish, and are fought by boys

the champions and enthusiasts of the state.

— from “The March to Virginia” in Battle Pieces

 ——

1 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478049/quotes

2 Gore Vidal, United States: Essays 1952 – 1992 Broadway Books 1993, p. 1046-47

First Photo of Gore Vidal, courtesy of Two Roads Diverged: Gay Men and Women Who’ve Made a Difference. http://www.tworoadsdiverged.com/Famous_Gays.html

Second Vidal photo courtesy of blog at http://www.beppegrillo.it/

In celebration of the new home and PBS documentary of the extraordinary Barnes art collection (see below) I offer my humble rendering of a Cézanne painting, which he did in oil on canvas c. 1898, and I drew in pencil (and charcoal) originally in 2003. This is actually a detail — the actual drawing is several inches taller and wider than my scanner screen.

I rediscovered this drawing a few days ago, tucked away in an old sketchbook in my basement and dragged it upstairs. After enduring several of my residence moves and incalculable jostlings of the sketchbook (which spent quite a while in the trunk of my car), the drawing had become somewhat smudged, and I realized it needed stronger dynamic contrasts. I had originally done the whole thing in pencil. So now I pulled out and sharpened a charcoal pencil and began to dig into the drawing with it. I also added significant pencil detail to what I had done in 2003 and provided contrast highlights through erasures.

The original painting is titled In the Park at Château Noir and it is in the Louvre in Paris. You can see a reproduction of it on page 253, plate 49 in the catalog Cézanne: The Late Work published by the Museum of Modern Art.

So I had suddenly rekindled my interest and passion for Cézanne. I had gone to New York to see the exhibit Cézanne: The Late Work in 1977. There I also saw the jazz guitarist John Abercrombie wandering wide-eyed through the crowd with a female companion, which seemed entirely apropos, given his highly textural and oddly lyrical impressionist playing style, extensively documented on ECM Records.

I began reworking my drawing ”after Cezanne,” one day before discovering the news about the Barnes collection, which is to be housed in a brand-new museum in Philadelphia and will be subject of a PBS documentary telecast for the first time tonight August 3, 2012.

Among its other distinctions, the Barnes collection claims to have more works by Cézanne than does the Louvre. But it’s a wide ranging collection of both impressionist and post-impressionist painters and artists.

Like many others, I consider Cézanne the father of modern art in that he opened the door to abstraction while delving as deeply into physical reality in a “deconstructive” mode as one could possibly imagine. One can easily see how this work led to Cubism but what truly impressed and moved me was the struggle contained within his art, which many people have commented on. It was an internal dialectic of visual tension what Hans Hoffman called the “push pull.” It was like Cézanne was trying to break the physical world down into its atomic parts and reassemble it again.

But his technology was merely the timeless oils and canvas done en plein air in the rough-hewn hills and valleys and peaks of France, especially his obsession, Mount St. Victoire.

His work always captured that rough-and-tumble quality of the rural French landscape; and because of that some people questioned his technical abilities, as they often did another modern art genius, jazzman Thelonious Monk. Actually a Cézanne painting would fit perfectly as the cover art for a Monk album, with the painter’s highly charged, asymmetric brushstrokes, echoing Monk’s inimitable attack of the keyboard and wonderfully woozy and ragged-jagged melodies. Both Cézanne and Monk were absolute originals and visionaries who transformed their art forms and thus will be remembered long after countless artistic and musical technicians are forgotten.

Calatrava’s Quadracci Pavilion from the South. Photo by davehearse’s photostream

“He rises!” — Gregory Peck, as Captain Ahab in John Huston’s Moby-Dick*

MILWAUKEE — There are very few buildings in the world to which Ahab’s phrase could be applied, after a building “rises” as a construction project. But the fateful utterance befits Santiago Calatrava’s Quadracci Pavilion for the Milwaukee Art Museum almost every noon, when the extraordinary building’s signature brise soleil  sunscreen wings rise and open, to perpetual wonder.

I have seen the structure close-up frequently on bike trips to the building this summer, and I realized that the season is a perfect time for fresh appreciation of an architectural masterpiece for our times.

After all, in summer the public travels past, through and underneath the amazingly dynamic structure, as sunlight and lake water highlight its glories of profile, depth and presence. Thousands of visitors also come to the lakefront festival grounds just south of the museum, for the world’s largest music festival Summerfest, and Milwaukee’s array of ethnic festivals.

Calatrava’s design “evolved into a very challenging building, full of curves requiring painstaking custom work and features that had never before been made for building,” writes Cheryl Kent in her book Santiago Calatrava: Milwaukee Art Museum Quadracci Pavilion. It is an audacious balance of sculpture and architecture, engineering and symbolic power.

Because, as Kent suggests, the pavilion transcends the conventional category of a mere building, it invites the perceptual imagination to take a voyage with it — part of the reason why it is such a perfect building to house creative art. This building seems to breathe with life, to a degree matched only to designs by Frank Gehry, perhaps the only other contemporary architect to rival Calatrava now with superstar status among the general public.

But what spurred my blog posting was the sight of the Calatrava from the Southerly perspective, as I turn my bike around to head back north toward my home in Riverwest. I saw something in the building I hadn’t noticed before, a relationship between the facets of its major features that sprang to life in a work already rich in symbolic resonance.

This vantage point allowed the tallest part of the structure to make metaphorical sense. Behind the pavilion’s main structure stands the great diagonally pitched pole, which secures long suspension cables for the pedestrian bridge, from the downtown to the pavilion entrance. As I look, the severely leaning pole evokes the main mast of a sinking ship. Accordingly the lower white sides of the main structure resemble the hull of a ship with flaring stern and bow.

Kent has termed the very front of the pavilion facing the lake, as “a cantilevered ‘prow’ that draws visitors inexorably with the sensational view of Lake Michigan.”

But what famously sinking ship do we think of? The Pequod, of course, captained by the monomaniacal Ahab, who led his entire crew, save one, to doom. And the ship is sinking, of course, because of the explosive monster that surges up triumphantly just ahead of the tottering mast, after having rammed it.

The more you look at this building, in this sense, the more whale-like it becomes, especially the area beneath the long horizontal “ship deck” railing. This lower configuration is a widely flaring section with buttresses supporting a balcony that shades large lower windows. The whole darker form resembles the horizontal shape of a captured whale — to almost exact scale and proportion – hooked up alongside a whaler to be stripped to its skeleton for its blubber, and the prized spermaceti, in the case of Moby Dick’s sperm whale species (see photo at top).

So, upwards we go to the climactic moment, where the brise soleil calls for a slight imaginative leap to extend the whale metaphor. But as the rising wings move skyward one can envision the long, white wing-like fins of the humpback whale, captured in a time-lapse sequence on film. Just below the wings, the brise soleil’s impossibly long blue-green windows fall from the central backbone like the sea itself, cascading off the body of the breaching whale.

If one still questions the aptness of this creaturely metaphor, consider the most obvious alternative. The wing-like brise soleil is often compared to a giant bird, but no bird of this scale ever existed, whereas the building’s proportions do come close to those of a whale, or no other creature.

And the unconvinced should step inside the building where its cetological qualities expand like a giant inhaling ribcage. The bone-white flying buttresses that curve over the long hallways extending along outside the east and west lengths of the Quadracci Pavilion’s galleries and gift shop resemble the ribs of only one creature, that of a whale.

One of the long butressed hallways outside the galleries of the pavilion. This photo and the one below are by Mary Ann Sullivan c 2002

So in these hallways and in the main foyer, one gets a Jonah-like sense of being inside of a whale. Standing in the cavernous 90-foot-high Windhover Hall and peering up, one seems to witness — from within — a mighty whale breaching skyward.

Windhover Hall, the pavilion’s foyer.

As Kent notes, descriptive nomenclature sprang up among those working on the construction project to identify pieces in the building: they need certain parts of the ‘wishbone,’ the  ‘fishbowl,’ and the ‘hammerhead…’” So allusions to organic aquatic forms arose even during the construction. One can easily imagine the architect playing with aquatic symbols as he designed his masterpiece to overlook one of the Great   Lakes. Calatrava appears to have extended this creation into the vast and profound legacy of what many consider the Great American Novel, and a great allegorical story of America.

Given all this, a good idea for an art exhibit here would be a gathering of the profusion of visual art that has been inspired by Moby-Dick. In fact, the catalog already exists: Elizabeth A. Schultz’s masterful Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-century American Art.

The coffee-table sized book delineates illustrations for notable editions of Moby-Dick, including those of Rockwell Kent, Boardman Robinson and Barry Moser; the surprising array of abstract expressionist paintings and sculptures including work of Jackson Pollock, Sam Francis, Theodore Stamos, Paul Jenkins, and Frank Stella; narrative and realistic representations of Moby-Dick by artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert del Tredici, Maurice Sendak and Robert Indiana; various political cartoonists and arguably today’s most prominent and controversial sculptor, Richard Serra, who created in 1986 a whale-shaped and sized steel work titled Call Me Ishmael.

Given the often-long lead time for curating and scheduling major exhibits, a good target date for such an exhibit might be 2019, which would be the 160th anniversary of Melville’s visit to Milwaukee, when he delivered a lecture on life in the South Seas on Feb 25, 1859, based on his adventurers as a whaler.

Which leads us back to the actual ocean of Melville’s imagination. Recall this blog’s epigraph. The phrase “he rises” does not appear in the original Moby-Dick text during the climax of the long-awaited confrontation with White Whale. It was written for the 1957 screenplay version, by director John Huston and writer Ray Bradbury. In Melville’s book, the boat crew together beats Ahab to the call:

“’There she breaches! there she breaches!’ was the cry, as in his immeasurable bravados the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to Heaven.”

Santiago Calatrava’s architectural bravado seems worthy of Melville’s description.

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/overbythere/5614303727/sizes/o/in/pool-1779525@N22/

I ended my last posting with a heartfelt paean to the newest generation of American citizens in their 20s. Even if this may seem like a critique of that same generation, I write with the greatest respect for their potential and intelligence. But I’m compelled by a deep concern about a technological force that seems to have this generation in its grip.

I call it The Deadly Attack of the Smart Phone Zombies.

Trying hard to be cool urban hipsters? Or are they devolving into smart-phone zombies? You decide. Courtesy: Shutterstock.

You may recall the classic zombie B movie Night of the Living Dead, where all the decomposed humans who’ve come back to life wander around looking for human flesh. But they are pathetic monsters, in fact — easily eluded or out-run, and whatever intelligence they may have once possessed is shrunk down to their one fixation. But because of that fixation they are relentless — their only power — to kill and feast on human flesh.

In this case, the obvious intoxicating fixation is a darkly gleaming toy in the left hand.  The statistics are horrifying and seemingly improbable regarding its physical dangers(see below), not to mention the social problems. These seemingly innocuous zombies do kill. The notion that someone would be typing a message to someone while driving a car in traffic is so absurd as to be instantly thrown out of a screenwriting brainstorm for The Twilight Zone.

It’s because the people in The Twilight Zone are usually hyper-aware and all too sensitive to the strange goings-on and impossible situations that are closing in on them.

Not these people. And most of them are in their 20s and that’s what troubles and saddens me because it’s clearly a matter of cultural conformity and peer pressure. If you’re not texting or tweeting or adding Facebook friends, you’re just not with it.

Well, the reason you’re not might because you’re dead, if not a real zombie well on its way back to the grave.

Here are three incidents I witnessed today:

1. I went out biking and as I turned onto the pathway that leads to the main East side Milwaukee bike trail to the lakefront I approached a young mother with a toddler. She noticed me and instinctively shooed her youngster over to the right side. I always admire good maternal instinct. Imagine my shock when as soon as her son was safe she began meandering diagonally right into my bike’s pathway, her head down and re-engrossed in the zombie box. I had to break and she finally came to, and almost looked up.

2. I arrived at the aesthetic destination of each of my three times a week bikerides — the splendor of the Milwaukee harbor skyline highlighted by Santiago Calatrava’s addition to the Milwaukee art museum, a wondrously expansive work of sculptural-architectural engineering (more on that next time). A lovely 19th century style schooner drifted across the the bay and of course the birds delight — singing, swooping and skimming, and fanny-flashing ducks diving comically for fish, the surf lapping against the rocks, the elegant expanse of the Hoan Bridge and the humble yet amiably striking Milwaukee skyline. It all beckons the senses.

And yet, at the very moment where this whole scene unfolds before a pausing biker’s eyes, a young woman biker had stopped and instead of beholding the beauty, she had her head down in her zombie box pose. Apparently this was her reward for her exercise. Hel-lo??

3. On my way back, I’m on the very same pathway where I encountered the zombie mother, I now approached a young couple strolling ahead. I slowed down and coasted toward them until the man turns and sees me and steps aside. The zombie smart phone woman is oblivious. I’m forced to come to a complete stop.

I think the guy said excuse me. The woman was walking with the man totally engrossed in her zombie box. This was obviously not a romantic couple. Still, if I were him I would be insulted. I would say, “Roommate, if you walk out into the traffic on Locust and kill yourself, don’t blame me.”

These three instances all happened on one bike ride today, July 24, 2012. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not truly a Luddite. I have my own cell phone and I like to check my e-mail and add friends to my Facebook page — at home. I don’t have a problem with people walking down the street talking on the basic cell phone – much. I’ve even mixed my bike rides a few times with listening to Playaway’s utra-portable books on digital, but I’m not visually distraced. And Skype is mighty cool – at home or at Starbuck’s.

Part of the problem is that many in our society may be becoming addicted to virtual reality. We think we’re really connected but there’s a metaphysical disjunct between true reality and really always being virtually connected. And it seems clear it is a psychological addiction. I’m no doctor, but the best practical definition of addiction still comes from good old AA, and I learned about this because I was a member of Al-Anon, the offshoot support group for affected family members of alcoholics and drug addicts. I was once the husband of a bi-polar alcoholic — who is now dead. An addiction is a compulsive behavior which forces a person to lose control of their life — to where “our lives become unmanageable.”

If your awareness of your moment in the present shrinks to where you are risking lives and safety, your life is becoming unmanageable. You’re moving into zombieland. You are missing out on life, the proverbial flowers in front of your nose.

According to a June 2012 Mobile Mindset Study that extrapolates its results to the entire country, about 60% of us (particularly those 18-34) can’t go for more than one hour without checking our phones for messages, getting online, or whatnot. Addicts are classically in denial so they don’t realize how insidious the force is, especially because the addiction initially seems a great empowerment, and here’s where the devil lies in the weeds or more precisely, in the details.

This is an addiction to minute detail, to all the tiny bells and whistles crammed into that little electronic palm Oz — the games, gizmos, the blue horses, old Friends episodes, ads up the wazoo, and endless fleeting conversations and gossiping going on between fellow zombies hither and yon.

They think they’re smart, cool and connected. Perhaps they are connected and importantly so at times. And there’s no denying the value of cell phones in emergencies. But they do look and behave like social zombies. Or perhaps like lemmings who lost their herd wriggling heedlessly to death in the sea. Or they resemble a ponderous beast of burden, who walk around with their heads down, trying to blot out the dullness, misery and pain of their existence. Those are inherently sad creatures but for very different reasons than the behavior I’m discussing.

And yet, could it be that we humans are trying to compensate for the dullness, misery and pain of our existence? That life might indeed feel as constricted as a beast of burden — if I am addicted to my tiny little talking toy in my fist. We all grow bored with the same toy, no matter how engrossing, after a while and yet if we are addicted, it may lead us into a kind of living hell that we cannot admit because after all we’re cool.

We might keep on doing it until we might eventually crash into each other in our cars while texting each other. The police officer pulls the phone from my death grip and reads on the tiny screen: “Hey dude, want to go see ‘Waiting for God–.’ ”

Okay, I’ve pushed this thing to a dramatic absurdity, a scenario I hope Samuel Beckett would appreciate. But here are the statistics. The National Safety Council estimates at least 28% of all traffic crashes – or at least 1.6 million crashes each year – involve drivers using cell phones and texting. NSC estimates that 1.4 million crashes each year involve drivers using cell phones and a minimum of 200,000 additional crashes each year involve drivers who are texting. The announcement came on the one-year anniversary of NSC’s call for a ban on all cell phone use and texting while driving.

“We now know that at least 1.6 million crashes involve drivers using cell phones and texting,” said Janet Froetscher, president & CEO of the National Safety Council. “We know that cell phone use is a very risky distraction and texting is even higher risk. We now know that cell phone use is a factor in many more crashes than texting. The main reason is that millions more drivers use cell phones than text,” she said. “That is why we need to address both texting and cell phone use on our roads.” 1

So this is not just my rant. “For the smart-phone users, they’re totally, constantly engaged with the private sphere, and it’s reducing the basic roles of public space,” Tali Hatuka, who heads the Laboratory for Contemporary Urban Design at Tel Aviv University, lamented to The Atlantic magazine. She sees technology’s darker side, as did Norman Mailer, who once pronounced unequivocably that technology is the devil’s playground.

“This is not a good thing,” Hatuka continues. “The public sphere plays an important role in our communities: it’s where we observe and learn to interact with people who are different from us, or, as academics put it, it’s where we come to know ‘the other.’”

In their surveys, Hatuka and colleague Eran Toch also asked questions about what people remembered of the public spaces they’d visited just 10 minutes earlier: what did those places and the people there look like? Smart-phone users couldn’t remember much at all; in effect, they weren’t paying attention in the first place. This suggests, Hatuka says, that the ubiquitous smart phone may even degrade the way we recognize, memorize and move through cities. We will lose many of these benefits when we’re one day all walking around thumbing our Twitter feeds, The Atlantic reporter wrote.

Okay I’m a baby boomer and I know people still mock us for being potheads. But if we diminish our brains in any manner by smoking pot we also expand other parts of our minds with the stuff and potentially, for millions of others needlessly suffering, herb helps with chronic pain. And most cannabis smokers do it privately in our home threatening no one, except perhaps themselves, only if they abuse the drug.

I mean, we boomers came up with Cheech and Chong movies, man! We know we’re goofs when we’re high and giddy out in public. But the pot joke is ours — on us — man, and by now as old as dirt.

How old is it?

“That’s so 20 seconds ago.”

Yep, that’s the historical sense “smart phone” manufacturers are providing in their sales pitches: “That’s so 20 seconds ago!” — the ultimate in smart phone-chic inanity.

Laugh track cue?

Sigh.

Don’t get me wrong, please. I’m not trying to play a generation gap card here because again — I have the highest regard for the 20s generation, probably because they remind me of my generation, of our idealism and our seemingly limitless change-the-world potential, much of which we squandered, or fell prey to cultural backlash. We are still trying to right our wrongs and all the rest of those perpetrated by corrupted Western civilization, in our small — or ambitious — and hopefully wiser ways.

But that’s why I don’t want to see the young citizens I teach make mistakes like we made, because I love these young people, I really do. If they make mistakes that means I may very well be mistaken in my own teaching — especially if I don’t speak up like this. But they’re aware of the problem, to some degree.

Last year, one of my Marquette University freshman English composition and rhetoric students did an eloquent presentation on this very subject, telling of a popular, charismatic high school friend who was gruesomely killed because someone was texting while driving, an extremely powerful testament. The student, a tall, striking blonde, finished on the edge of tears. The classroom was deathly still and then broke into a warm applause. Full of pride, I really wanted to hug her, but I probably would’ve gotten arrested.

As Milwaukee’s renowned comic writer, secret saxophonist and philosopher Art Kumbalek says, “Man oh manischewitz what a world, ain’a?”

1 “We now know that at least 1.6 million crashes involve drivers using cell phones and texting,” said Janet Froetscher, president & CEO of the National Safety Council. “We know that cell phone use is a very risky distraction and texting is even higher risk. We now know that cell phone use is a factor in many more crashes than texting. The main reason is that millions more drivers use cell phones than text,” she said. “That is why we need to address both texting and cell phone use on our roads.”

http://www.nsc.org/Pages/NSCestimates16millioncrashescausedbydriversusingcellphonesandtexting.aspx

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2012/05/how-smart-phones-are-turning-our-public-places-private-ones/2017/#

http://article.wn.com/view/2012/06/26/Smartphone_Addiction_Is_Sweeping_America_Report/

Anna Paquin as Lisa Cohen confronts a bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) about his role in a woman’s death.

Anna Paquin blisters the screen in Margaret in one of the most amazing roles by an actress in a recent memory. She’s a 17-year-old named Lisa Cohen, of deeply questioning intelligence trapped in a vice between forsaken justice and don’t-make-waves conventions. Is it any wonder she’s driven to a virtual primal-scream state? What fuels her internal cauldron is a philosophical question: Can the pure but troubled heart of a teenage girl provide a cue for humanity to reconstruct its legal system so that justice rather than money are served?

That question lurks close to the core of screenwriter-director Kenneth Lonergan’s stunningly ambitious character drama. It has such a compressed emotional and intellectual fervor that I ended up with a slight headache, and yet I wanted to wrap my head around it for so many reasons.

My entryway came surprisingly the next day when I happened to watch film maverick Sam Fuller’s daring 1963 film of social commentary Shock Corridor on TCM.

I doubt Lonergan had this connection in mind but bear with me as we travel into the anguished interiors of Lisa’s mind. She’s a heroine and rightfully and righteously so. Both Paquin’s Lisa and Constance Towers, as Cathy, the female lead in Shock Corridor, appear to be each filmmaker’s voice for social justice, crying in in the wilderness of cynical greed and compromised justice that society has engulfed itself in.

And in both characters, the voice is embodied in a peculiarly sexualized persona which lends deeply Freudian or at least psychological tension to their messages to themselves as well.

In Fuller’s film, Cathy is the stripper girlfriend of Johnny Barrett, the scheming reporter trying to fake his way into a mental ward so that he can write an exposé story and win a Pulitzer Prize. Cathy’s a literate wit who despises Johnny effort to “earn a journalistic halo on the cover of LIFE magazine.” She continues: “Dickens didn’t put Oliver Twist on the couch because he was hungry…Hamlet was made for Freud, not you!”’ She’s personally afraid the “whole Jeckyll-and-Hyde business will backfire and make a psycho out of me.”

In Lonergan’s film, smart Lisa has a little bit of an on-the-edge Hamlet in her, which makes her such a fascinating and loaded character.

She witnesses a horrible death when a pedestrian, played by Allison Janney, grotesquely loses a leg under a bus and bleeds to death in her arms. Lisa feels partly responsible because she distracted the bus driver by selfishly trying to ask him — through the closed bus door — where he got his cowboy hat, as the bus accelerates from a stop.

She first tells police the pedestrian tried to cross against the red light, thus exonerating the bus driver from any guilt. But she can’t live with herself and goes to the police later to change her testimony. Lying hidden in the bloody gutter is a larger case against him and the New York public transit system.

But Lisa’s pressurized, lonely struggle for justice and to safeguard the public spurs her to extreme behavior. She lashes out excessively in a classroom discussion over what was worse — the 9/11 attackers or America’s warring response to it. And her sexuality seems in the grip of her crisis. She rashly calls an unsuspecting friend and asks him to come over and deflower her virginity. Later, with her desperation over the case intensifying, she seduces her exceedingly understanding math teacher (she’s a lousy math student) played by Matt Damon, a confused mixture of fraternal rectitude and mealy-mouthed obsequiousness.

Matt Damon, a sympathetic high school math teacher, meets with his troubled student Lisa Cohen in this scene from Margaret. photos courtesy: foxsearchlight.com/margaret/

He’s fascinated by this intelligent and torn young woman, whose sexuality throughout is encased in a quivering need for love and understanding — and for a sense of her place in an adult world that goes by rules and conventions that chill her soul. She senses that the math teacher is sensitive enough to understand her.

Lonergan — whose superb but comparatively modest You Can Count on Me revealed his gift for character portrayal, convincingly quirky dialog and a staunch faith in family — shows how deep he can delve in Margaret. Two stars from the earlier film return: Mark Ruffalo cowers and cringes soulfully as the bus driver and Matthew Broderick, Lisa’s  English teacher, reads her class a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem (below) that mirror’s Lisa’s experience. Lonergan read the poem on a recent Fresh Air radio show and named his film after the poem’s character Margaret (but didn’t name his lead character after Margaret, a confusing decision.)

And the director relieves the psychological intensity with cinematic interludes of New York cityscape, including an astonishing shot of a car-choked Manhattan street seen from high above at night. The endless caravan of lights seems to penetrate to the unfathomable depths of Lisa’s darkened soul. The light down there can’t be fully extinguished.

After considerable anguish and doubt she does the right thing — reporting the facts of the incident correctly, but unlike Hamlet she does not have the lethal power for an avenging justice.

I’m not suggesting Lisa is a candidate for a mental institution like the one graphically depicted in Fuller’s film. But the film suggests how close she, and perhaps any one of us may come to a kind of madness — especially if we face harsh systemic realities honestly in a world feeding on delusion and denial.

Her behavior continues unpredictably right to the end of film, but her persistence burns eloquently. And her need for love stretches desperately across the gulf between her and her mother, an off-Broadway stage actress absorbed in her career.

This much exposition seems necessary for this complex film, yet if we pull back and reflect, Lisa’s footsteps lead her into an inner version of the shock corridor of the Fuller film. Here’s where the two films’ fearless exploration of sexuality, complicity and various types of guilt intersect.

After the reporter in Corridor gains admission to the asylum his seductive girlfriend haunts his dreams and conscience. I won’t do justice to Fuller’s tersely incisive and frightening film about how tricky mental delusion can be in anyone. My real subject is Lisa’s tight-rope walk over insanity or deliverance — over the pit where the light of love and justice seems never to reach.

Margaret also gets you thinking about the anonymous, secret millions of dollars that are now turning our democratic election process into a stealth game of attack ads and other byproducts of a corrupted system. Or about Penn State football coach Joe Paterno milking the university for millions in a secret exit deal — exploiting the intense pressure of the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal. Say it ain’t so, Joe, even from your grave.

This remarkable young character also made me think of my recent freshman English composition students at Marquette University. They consistently stunned me with the zeal and passion of their involvement in selected social issues, virtually to a person. These were sensitive, smart and engaged young citizens hardly any older than Margaret. Is it too much to say they may be our damaged democracy’s only hope? I think we must heed and treasure them when they burn brightly as precious jewels of moral brilliance, lighting our way through the darkness of the present.

p.s. after viewing Margaret again in November 2017, I could add a number of comments about this rich work of art.  But I’ll only note how brilliantly real Lonergan’s dialog is. It never sounds written, rather the deep, impulsive utterances of uncertain souls often stumbling against each other verbally, exposing their insecurities and pain. Finally, the borderline verbal chaos melts into a deep, primal hug between Lisa (Margaret) and her heretofore-disconnected actor-mother. This whole tale is pretty operatic. So Lonergan declares art as the spiritual bridge — a simpatico scene mother and daughter are watching from Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann.

After reading the Hopkins poem below, see this blog link for an interactive survey of connections between the poem and the Lonergan film: Interactive blog for Hopkins poem from “Margaret.”

Spring and Fall   By Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89).