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Pedestrians Are Always Suspect

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Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) with Drawing of Orpheus

He was, to quote Wikipedia:

French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual artist and critic. He was one of the foremost artists of the surrealist, avant-garde, and Dadaist movements and an influential figure in early 20th century art.

He was, to quote one newspaper essay, a Renaissance man.

In the United States, he is probably best known for his films La Belle et la Bête (1946) and Orphée (1950). Although he created some paintings, he is probably better known for his line drawings, many referring to Greek myths such as the drawing of Orpheus illustrated above and used in the titles of his film on Orpheus.

“The Birth of Pegasus” (1953)

With his surrealist and Dada experience, Cocteau’s work is sometimes underestimated because the artist never took himself that seriously. I love the scene in Le Testament d’Orphée (1960) where the poet (played by Cocteau himself) is arrested by motorcycle cops who, when asked what the charge was, say, “Pedestrians are always suspect!”

There is no lack of artists who take themselves very seriously. Even his film masterpiece Orphée is not only profound, but profoundly funny in spots.

In Love with Moominland

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Some of the Inhabitants of Moominland

Other than Lewis Carroll and L. Frank Baum (author of The Wizard of Oz), my favorite children’s literature author is Tove Jansson of Finland. Beginning in 1945, she created a world called Moominland, inhabited by a variety of engaging non-human characters. Chief among them is the Moomintroll family, consisting of Moominmamma, Moominpappa, the Snork Maiden, and Moomintroll himself (itself?).

It has been a few decades since I picked up one of the volumes of the Moominland saga. Today, I just finished reading Moominland Midwinter (1957). I found myself falling in love with the weird, utterly engaging world of a valley inhabited by lovable weird creatures.

One of my favorites is a philosopher called Too-Ticky. At one point, she muses:

I’m thinking about the aurora borealis. You can’t tell if it really does exist or if it just looks like existing. All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured.

A true Scandinavian, she also ponders the following: “One has to discover everything for oneself. And get over it all alone.” Too true!

For an annotated list of all of Jansson’s Moominlit, click here.

“The Absence”

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From French surrealist poet Paul Éluard comes this lovely poem called “The Absence.”

The Absence

I speak to you across cities
I speak to you across plains 

My mouth is upon your pillow 

Both faces of the walls come meeting
My voice discovering you 

I speak to you of eternity 

O cities memories of cities
Cities wrapped in our desires
Cities come early cities come lately
Cities strong and cities secret
Plundered of their master’s builders
All their thinkers all their ghosts 

Fields pattern of emerald
Bright living surviving
The harvest of the sky over our earth
Feeds my voice I dream and weep
I laugh and dream among the flames
Among the clusters of the sun 

And over my body your body spreads
The sheet of is bright mirror.

Favorite Films: Orphée (1950)

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Jean Marais as Orpheus in Jean Cocteau’s Orphée

This is a film I have loved for upwards of sixty years, ever since I first saw it screened by the Dartmouth Film Society. It is the only film I have ever seen that makes a stab at showing us what happens after death—without looking totally silly.

The story is based on the Greek myth of Orpheus the poet and his wife Eurydice, variously mentioned by such authors as Plato, Plutarch, Apollonius of Rhodes, and others. Eurydice dies, and Orpheus, while still alive, goes to the Underworld to get her back. The gods agree, but with the condition that he must never look upon her face again. If he did, her spirit would be instantly wafted back to the Underworld.

Jean Cocteau places the tale in postwar France and adds some interesting touches. Death is personified as “The Princess.” Played by the lovely and elegant Maria Casares, who falls madly in love with Orpheus. Among hr assistants are François Périer as Heurtebise and Édouard Dermit as Cégeste. One enters the underworld by walking through a mirror wearing special rubber gloves, which convert the mirrors to a waterlike substance. The ruins of Saint Cyr Military Academy serve as the Underworld, where Orpheus and Heurtebise go to negotiate with a tribunal in a grimy meeting room.

The Last Shot: The Princess and Heurtebise Go to Meet Their Fate

I have seen Orfée at least a dozen times, and each time was as magical and striking as the first viewing. Along with the same director’s La Belle et la Bête (1946), it is one of the glories of the French cinema, indeed of world cinema.

Saints and Angels

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The Archangel Michael Vanquishing Satan

I suppose I was always something of an unbeliever. Even when I was twelve years old and had to choose a confirmation name at St. Henry, instead of picking Michael or Joseph like all my classmates, I selected Alexander. When asked who was St. Alexander by my friends, I said it referred to Alexander VI, the notorious Borgia pope who was possibly the worst of the so called bad popes.

This evening, I was reading an amusing review of a book by Eliot Weinberger entitled Angels and Saints. Among the angels described are:

  • Nadiel, the angel of migration
  • Memuneh, the dispenser of dreams
  • Maktiel, who rules over trees
  • Taliahad, the angel of water
  • Hanum, the angel of Monday

The saints could be even more outrageous. Anne Enright’s review in the New York Review of Books includes the following tidbit:

Many of the beatified were early Christian martyrs who were hard to kill, and the details of their deaths receive more space than the manner of their lives. (I will never find again those two Roman martyrs who died by being turned upside down while milk and mustard were put up their noses, nor check through the multiple volumes [of Butler’s The Lives of the Saints] to see if I dreamed this, which surely I did not.)

One saint to whom I regularly pray is …

Genesius of Arles
(France, d. 303 or 308)
A decapitated martyr, his body was buried in France but his head was transported “in the hands of angels” to Spain, where he is invoked as a protection against dandruff.

To this day, I wish I still had my collection of holy pictures of saints, which the pious Dominican sisters of St. Henry handed out to good students. (I was sometimes good.)

Saving the Day

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Crows in a Tree

Apparently Robert Frost liked crows as much as I do. His poem, which follows, is called “Dust of Snow”:

Dust of Snow

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

Simple and elegant. One of the reasons I love Frost.

Not a Nice Guy

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Representative Jim Jordan (R, Ohio)

Ever since Donald Trump came down that escalator at the Trump Tower to announce his run for the presidency on June 16, 2015, American politics has changed from bad to nightmarish. The ongoing travails of the House of Representative beginning with the ouster of Kevin McCarthy and the failed attempts by Jim Jordan to become Speaker of the House resemble nothing so much as the early days of Nazi Germany.

It seems the Republican Party is crawling with Brown Shirts Are we are heading toward some ghastly Night of the Long Knives in which the extreme MAGA Republicans with their totalitarian tendencies will be violently repudiated?

Jordan thought it a nifty idea to authorize threatening phone calls to the wives (?!) of Republican Congressmen who didn’t vote his way. It’s a long way from the America of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson or the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln. At the same time we are sanctioning Venezuela, we are becoming more like them.

Double ugh!

Amusing, But No Longer True

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H. L. Mencken knew how to write, but not everything he wrote holds up today. In Prejudices Second Series, he took a hatchet to the literary reputation of the American South in an essay entitled “The Sahara of the Bozart.” Since then, some of the best American writing has come from the South, including William Faulkner (at the top of the list), Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, Harper Lee, Zora Neale Hurston, Robert Penn Warren, and a host of others. Still, Mencken is fun to read:

Alas, for the South! Her books have grown fewer—
She never was much given to literature.

In the lamented J. Gordon Coogler, author of these elegaic lines, there was the insight of a true poet. He was the last bard of Dixie, at least in the legitimate line. Down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician. It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity. One thinks of the interstellar spaces, of the colossal reaches of the now mythical ether. Nearly the whole of Europe could be lost in that stupendous region of fat farms, shoddy cities and paralyzed cerebrums: one could throw in France, Germany and Italy, and still have room for the British Isles. And yet, for all its size and all its wealth and all the “progress” it babbles of, it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert. There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac; there are probably single square miles in America. If the whole of the late Confederacy were to be engulfed by a tidal wave to-morrow, the effect upon the civilized minority of men in the world would be but little greater than that of a flood on the Yang-tse-kiang. It would be impossible in all history to match so complete a drying-up of a civilization.

“In the Desert”

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American Writer Stephen Crane (1871-1900)

One of the great “What Ifs” of American literature is what we would have had if Stephen Crane had not died at the age of 28. As it is, we had a great novel (The Red Badge of Courage), an interesting novelette (Maggie: A Girl of the Streets), and two great short stories (“The Open Boat” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”). Here is a short poem from Crane, the last two lines of which were used by Joyce Carol Oates as the title for one of her early novels:

In the Desert

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”

Jane, You Ignorant Slut!

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Saturday Night Live Had It Right Way Back Then

Early in the 1970s, CBS’ Sixty Minutes news show had a segment in which a liberal debated a conservative. I could just imagine that CBS News was all thrilled they they were being “fair and balanced.” Then, Saturday Night Live parodied the segment with Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd, with Dan always opening with, “Jane, you ignorant slut ….”

That same genuflection to “fair and balanced” reporting results in segments where the political philosophy (?!) of QAnon is discussed with the same seriousness as the Federal budget. Attempts are made to mirror all sides of an issue, even when the one of the sides has (1) no merit, (2) no appreciable following, (3) dangerous repercussions to the nation. If you can’t find an articulate spokesman, there’s always of the more incendiary members of Congress, like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Matt Gaetz. Hell, you can always find some bozo in a Missouri coffee shop whose word the media will treat as if they were engraved in stone on Mount Sinai.

The misguided attempt to treat all sides of an issue as having equal merit has resulted in the public not knowing where to turn. That was certainly the case in the days of the Tea Party a few years ago, and still an issue when some bonehead in or out of office says something flagrantly stupid that is picked up by the press and widely disseminated.

So many news stories are picked up from Twitter (or X or whatever) and splashed around because they sound likely to result in fear or outrage. Trump’s tweets were certainly in this category. And we all know that even if he had no idea of how to run the country, our former president certainly knew how to manipulate the media.

Nowadays I am not likely to give any credence to political farts from the right or left. I don’t care what some Texas congressman or Trumpian fellow traveler has to say. My life is too valuable to allow myself to be crassly manipulated by people I do not in any way respect.