When A Plot Is Not the Problem

As you dear readers know, I like analyzing structures. I like to discover how the bits and bobs fit together, find symmetries and rhymes, and watch parts overlap, disappear, and reemerge. In the world of film this task is mostly the work of the writer, and today in film this is the goal most often left unfulfilled. Occasionally, though, a movie will sport a splendid script and be let down by other elements. It's easy to think that a solid plot can anchor any movie, and to a good degree it can, but it's also instructive to see just how much other work is needed to bring structure to life. Two films illustrate the point.

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Iron Man 3
Written & Directed by Shane Black. 2013.

If you summarize the plot, Iron Man 3 sounds phenomenal. First, we have the Tony-Pepper plot. After battling the interstellar guests during the events of The Avengers, Tony Stark's mechanical mind is rejecting the variables he can't compute. He's stressed and endures panic attacks up to the point of needing to distract himself by constructing endless variations of his Iron Man suits. He alienates Pepper, whose obvious love he'll need to accept while he rejects his obsession with the alien attack in New York.

Second, we have the plot of political intrigue in which The Mandarin, an America-hating terrorist, begins claiming credit for bombings against American targets. The attacks escalate until eventually both Iron Man and Iron Patriot, one of Stark's suits the government ripped off and re-branded, are on the job. On the one hand Tony wants to swear off Iron Man for Pepper, and on the other hand he wants revenge against The Mandarin for putting his trusted manservant, Happy Hogan, in a coma.

Third, Tony has a new entrepreneurial rival in the form of Aldrich Killian, a scientist whom Tony once casually scorned and who now has developed a technology, Extremis, to augment and repair the human body.

The script interweaves these three elements with one clever twist: Extremis is unstable, with patients exploding, yes exploding, around the world. What to do? Killian uses the character of The Mandarin as a front to claim the explosions as terrorist attacks and then kidnaps Pepper to extort Tony into using his genius to perfect Extremis.

Now that's pretty slick, but Killian and The Mandarin are actually interesting foils for Tony Stark. Like Tony, Killian is a man of extraordinary intelligence. He's idealistic and passionate, yet as his project fails and he fails legitimately to acquire help, he turns to vanity and crime to support his goals. Killian's character was formed when Tony abandoned him early in his career and the spurned doctor retreated to the shadows to pull strings in anonymity. The crucible of Tony's character, in contrast, was that cave in Pakistan where a stranger saved his life and Iron Man was born. After that, Tony didn't retreat tot he shadows but publicly took control of his company and publicly became Iron Man.

Furthermore, The Mandarin is a caricature of Tony. As Iron man Stark is the brash, rich, ingenious American and The Mandarin, like Whiplash before him, is Tony's reflection, not opposite, and intended reckoning.

So what's wrong with Iron Man 3? Another critical element too often overlooked by critics, filmgoers, and anyone not in the middle of directing a movie: the setting. The effect is that all the characters are all over the place, destroying any possibility for interaction and development. Happy is in a coma, Tony's in the midwest, Pepper is kidnapped who know's where, The Mandarin is in Florida, Killian is out and about, Jarvis is out of commission for half the movie, and Rhodie is flying around the world looking for The Mandarin.

The ending could have rehabilitated the movie if the characters had smoothly converged, but they do so with confusion instead of clarity. Rhodie and Tony converge on The Mandarin, but then he's a fake and Pepper is somewhere else and then the president is kidnapped from Air Force One by Iron Patriot in which isn't Rhodie but Killian's man and then Tony tries to stop him but he's not actually in the suit, and one suit is back in the midwest and then some suits come from back in California and then everyone's together at some random shipping dock in Florida. Got that?

Writer-Director Shane Black surely realized things got frayed and such explains the coda of narration he gave Tony for the end of the movie. Tony doesn't say anything that's not implicit, but those ideas doesn't feel implicit because we've forgotten who and where everyone is and what they're doing. The lack of attention to setting turned a perfectly good script into what looks and feels like a mess.

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Oz The Great and Powerful. 
Directed by Sam Raimi. 2013.

Boy everyone hated this movie, didn't they? The plot seems awfully good though, at least as far as Oz is concerned. Oz is a semi-talented fraud in our world, but when he is transported to the Land of Oz he must learn to put those same skills toward a noble purpose. In our world he acts for himself, but he must learn to save the Emerald city for its people.  In our world he had contempt for average people, in Oz he had to learn about them and respect them if he is to learn and use their virtues to defeat the witches. He must be the same man doing the same things, but with a different purpose, and in doing so become a new man. Works for me.

Now a lot of people had a lot of problems with the rest of the movie. They blame James Franco, the acting, the special effects, James Franco, the silliness, the lack of wonder, and James Franco. Yes, all of those elements were a little flat. The problem, though, is that Oz doesn't hit its beats. You know, beats: those notes which typify a scene. Arrivals have to feel like arrivals, meetings like meetings, departures departures, battles battles and so forth. Each scene has to feel like a type of scene and clearly move you along. No beats means no flow and a drippy flow equals a soupy movie. How can a ridiculous and cheap movie like Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters work? It hits its beats. Beats make your movie feel like something going somewhere.

The lack of beats in Oz means that the whole movie up until the final battle, which is expertly handled, feels like a slog. So what beats are missing? The arrival at the Emerald City, the departure from the Emerald City, and the adding of characters to the motley crew. These things happen, but they don't feel right, they don't feel important, and they don't feel like they move us forward because we're not quite persuaded that they do. Sometimes the beat is missed because of acting, sometimes because of direction, but it happens too often here.

Add to that sluggishness the fact that all of Oz's character development occurs at the end, and the movie feels empty even though it has a lot going for it.

Of course Sam Raimi knows movies and knows how to hit his beats. What happened? I think he modeled his Oz after the 1939 classic, but realized, correctly, that campy acting and whimsical musical numbers would not appeal to a modern audience. So out went the whimsy, but nothing filled its place, and it's the music that kept the original together. What keeps today's Oz together? Only the plot, which is not quite enough.

That Fair Wage

Fair. Oh what they've done to you, poor little word, treated so lovingly by The Bard,

Fair encounter / Of two most rare affections! (Prospero)

and by Keats,

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave (Ode on a Grecian Urn)

Chaucer,

Or if you'd rather, have me young and fair, (The Wife of Bath)

and Wodehouse,

Ever since their first meeting she had wanted a fair chance at those ankles (Piccadilly Jim)

For what crime are you so scurrilously appended to that stern word wage. Now the fair adjective sports a happy plethora of meanings: just, legal, ample, moderate, unobstructed, even, free from imperfection, clear, light, pleasing, and civil. Surely among these none fit the bill but just. When people clamor for a just wage they want a wage which is existing in justice. What could this mean in the absence of a philosophical system weighing virtue and distinguishing among proportion, rectification, reciprocity, and equity. (See V.5 of the Nichomachean Ethics.)

We can further chastise the sloppy use of fair, and their weaseling out the work of philosophy, but let us charitably presume well-intending simply mean that no one should unduly suffer by lack of essentials. What does this have to do with a wage? How can a wage be unjust? It's neither just nor unjust freely to exchange your services for any particular good. If you make the exchange, then it was valuable to you. Your wage is part of an exchange of services, not a measure of what you are worth or deserve as a person.

Similarly we may ask why a wage must be the sole means to security. Outside of a feudal economy of lords and serfs such socio-economic thinking is incredible. In a free economy and society in which no one is granted a legal monopoly, it's incumbent on the employer only to pay the agreed wage. In contrast, it may be incumbent upon everyone equally, if anyone, or perhaps especially family or friends or neighbors, to protect the weak from deathly lack. Yet why should the employer suffer the burden?

Of course the employer might not shoulder the burden but raise the cost of his goods if he hires the employee at the "fair wage" at all. In this case, the customers shoulder the burden of the employee. Why should they, purchasers of this particular good, support the employee? It's not self-evident, to say the least. In times past, friends, family, fraternal societies, and the like cared for the downtrodden. Professionals, such as doctors, treated the poor gratis as custom, not by bureaucratically managed legislative fiat.

It's curious, though, how often and many people are persuaded by the allure of the "fair wage." It just sounds so rosy. They don't seem to translate fair wage into more plain terms:

a demand from an employee to be paid a particular wage, regardless of how much he serves others, how well he does so, regardless of the demand in his locale and that demand over time, regardless of what other skills he might use more profitably, and regardless of, in fact, all variables save his own entitlement. Not quite so fair, by any of its meanings.

Review: Jonny Quest [TV]

Throughout my weeklong miasma I watched a good deal of TV, so remarkable is it for demanding absolutely no cognitive activity from the viewer whatsoever. Anyway, as I watched and watched I began to notice a lack of cartoons in my viewing. So as I looked and looked I found only a lot of junk on Cartoon Network, vulgar and dappy nonsense. Saturday morning cartoons have shrunk to a small quarter of badly animated singsongy nonsense for children.

Now I watched a lot of nonsense growing up, but I had Garfield and Friends, which was splendid satire of TV itself, poking barbs at writers, producers, networks, and the viewers themselves. I also watched reruns of Rocky and Bullwinkle, with their cleverly retold fairy tales and fables from Aesop, and of course the adventures of the titular moose and squirrel, which always turn satirical, skewering everything from college sports to the stock market to government assistance.

One of my favorites, though, I looked up this passed week and found not on TV but streaming from Amazon Prime: The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest. The show only lasted two seasons with a total of 52 episodes, but what a blast it is.

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Like all good adventure serials, the premise is simple. Dr. Benton Quest and his son Jonny scour the world investigating unusual phenomena. Along for the ride are Benton's friend, Race Banner, and his daughter, Jessie. Countering the kids' unrestrained zeal is their friend Hadji, who brings a dose of prudence and moderation to their plans. Inevitably, adventure calls and inevitably the kids, separated from Benton and Race, must fend for themselves and help save the day.

It won't do to summarize serials, but we should look at what makes Jonny Quest so satisfying.

First, JQ walks a reasonable line between visual excitement and graphic violence. While cartoon action programming has mostly vanished and there's no standard or median today, it's easy for a show to be too bloody or squeaky clean. JQ has a surprising amount of violence, but there isn't a lot of visual detail. People sure do die, though. They're shot, blown up, trampled, impaled, and eaten. Many episodes open with a spectacular death as a maguffin, just like movies. This is just the right level of realism to remind a young boy that the world's a dangerous place, but not enough to shock him with the blood spattering and limb-flying gore of 300 and Call of Duty. It's just enough to remind us that Jonny is in some real danger.

Second, there's no backup. The cavalry is rarely, if ever, on the way. Jonny and friends have to start thinking and acting for themselves. Help is not around the corner.

Third, there is a palpable masculine vibe to the show. Tools, technology, myths, legends, globetrotting, danger, mystery. . . all without Jonny being nannied to tie his shoe laces, go to bed, and look both ways before crossing the street. It would have been more dramatic if Jonny's mother were living and she could contrast the boys' zeal, but her complete absence gives the show a freewheeling boys-and-toys energy.

Fourth, there are plenty of toys, both electronic and traditional. On the one hand the team has the digital wizardry of "Quest World" and its array of 3D imaging, computational, and data-sharing abilities. On the other hand the team invariably finds itself in the middle of nowhere, technology lost or destroyed, and resorting to devising traps, making fires, makeshift weapons, and guile. It's a welcome blend of the geeky and brawny, either of which grows tiresome on their own.

Fifth, and some people will balk about this one, the Quest team explores plenty of myths, legends, and tall tales, with them on occasion turning out to be true. Hardline materialists will balk, and the tales are silly, but if all the mysteries turned out to be false then the show would lose the sense of mystery which drives it. The writers probably could have finessed both ways with some fancier writing, but this is a dramatically acceptable turn even if we have to look the other way on occasion. These stories, from the philosopher's stone to the Mary Celeste, are springs of mystery which get us excited about investigating the world, and keeping them mysterious leaves the world, to paraphrase John Buchan, an oyster for the opening.

Sixth, the villains hold their weight. Among clashes with looters, poachers, predators, nature, and the supernatural, Team Quest has two fierce adversaries. The first is their formal nemesis, Dr. Jeremiah Surd, who dogs the team hoping to acquire their technology and take revenge on Race Bannon for the injury which consigned the doctor to a wheelchair. On the other hand we have Ezekiel Rage, who is equal parts brimstone-spewing preacher, Bond villain, and Jason Bourne. Both villains were spurned government agents, adding a political dimension to their personal vendettas with the Quest Team.

Finally, there's a slight but noticeable and welcome cultural thread running throughout. Whether it's Hadji's Confucian aphorisms, historical quotes or references, or Race's homespun wisdom, the team is wrestling with questions by means of ideas as well as guts. Whether it's fighting off poachers, outwitting their longstanding enemies, or rescuing artifacts, the team is always balancing whom or what to save and what to sacrifice. It's not always brilliant or novel, but satisfactory and satisfying for serialized adventures. In an especially nice touch after one adventure, Benton begins reciting the end of Tennyson's Ulysses, which Jonny completes, and without naming the title.

Jonny Quest isn't highbrow or perfect, but it's a young man's Indiana Jones or Hardy Boys. Sure, it'll introduce to him some interesting ideas, but more importantly it might stiffen his sinews and kindle in him perhaps a little of the old strenuous zeal. Most of all, it shows that Jonny's courage is the key to practicing the other virtues. A young man could do worse.

The show also has an irresistably energetic, swashbuckling opening:

Unity of the Muses

Mozart encompasses the entire domain of musical creation, but I've got only the keyboard in my poor head. –F. Chopin

Most minds relish the familiar. We like familiarity, consistency, and sameness, whether it's in our television programming, house furnishings, or daily routines. Yes, some people seem to worship all things new, but that's just an attempt to relive the thrill of novelty. Smart people are not exempt either, most only holding a few stock ideas about which they ramble before attaining senility. Even the mind of a genius is usually confined to relatively tight quarters. Yet we have all-encompassing geniuses like Aristotle and DaVinci, and lesser polymaths from Cicero to Jefferson, but far-seeking minds are the most rare, and the most rare of them was Mozart. Mozart absorbed, innovated, and perfected with a speed which amazes and terrifies. The Greeks would have called him δεινός, marvelous, wondrous, and terrible.

21 piano sonatas, 27 piano concertos, 41 symphonies, 18 masses, 13 operas, 9 oratorios and cantata, 2 ballets, 40 plus concertos for various instruments, string quartets, trios and quintets, violin and piano duets piano quartets, and the songs. This astounding output includes hardly one work less than a masterpiece. –George Szell

Absorbed, innovated, perfected. Each of those words needs a little qualifying. Mozart absorbed the work of his models with astonishing rapidity, from his father's early assignments at the harpsichord, in which little Woferl delighted, to string quartets, concerti, and fugues. One story from April 1770, when Mozart was fourteen and impressing the Italian contrapuntists in Rome, paints the picture. Herr Mozart and his son attended a performance of Gregorio Allegri's Fiftieth Psalm, a passion piece for two choirs, four- and five-part, which concludes with a finale that interweaves both choruses in nine-part counterpoint. Shortly after the performance the teenage composer proceeded to write out the piece from memory. (W. A. Mozart by H. Abert. p. 135)

From this immense facility for absorption grew Mozart's own interpretations in his early maturity. Hoary polyphony and contrapuntal exercises became the ebullient Salzburg masses. Mozart devours set after set of Haydn's string quartets and again and again throws the spear from sight. The prettified keyboard tinkering of the galant becomes an endless parade of Mozartian characters. The snoozy nocturnes and pompous end-of-semester finalmusik become the serene lightness of the Gran Partita. Endlessly rhyming, sing-songy, and audience pleasing singspiels become the the giddy love of Die Entführung and a frightening, untamed spirit is breathed into old an workhorse text in Idomeneo.

Finally, perfection unto death. The body of Mozart concerti is one of most stupendous achievements ever, without qualification. The endless variety of melody, the relentless ability to tease excitement and novelty from sonataform and even rondo, shifting keys, moods, and characters, is nothing short of astounding. Not only do we find with glee intellectual rigor and structural novelty, but even in its most tumultuous depths, the cosmos-rending D minor, the Mozart concerto is life-affirming, pleasing the heart and the mind. And what love Mozart has for his instruments: the jovial horn, the oboe here sprightly there melodious, and the chimerical clarinet.

All the while, through the counterpoint and delayed tonal areas of the quintets and the vast sonataforms of the operas, and the ever more-delicate symphonies, always we find a unity of style and affect. We're never distracted by learned or simple elements for all is reconciled by the most perfect taste and order. We don't hear a contrapuntal marvel when we see finale to Act I of Don Giovanni, we see a carnival. We don't hear a north German choral in Die Zauberflöte but see the initiate poised before his sacred trial. We don't listen for fugato in Piano Sonata No. 18, but delight in the interplay between these wildly diverse themes. There is only the music, unifying as it goes: time, place, us, everything.

Mozart tapped the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breathtaking rightness. - Aaron Copland

Mozart's earthy side confuses many, whether it's by his priapic joke in the Champagne Aria, his song Kiss My Ass, or his bawdy letters to his cousin. It's not a side that would have confused, say, Catullus or Rimbaud, but it befuddles those who seek a clean idol. We need a pure font because we see time as expendable. We need to get and use as much of time and Mozart as we can. Yet it is time which is sacred, not the man Mozart. Yet he doesn't have to be because he has preserved the best of us in time, and we don't nee to horde it, nor do we even need to share it. We nee to be it. We need to feel his melodies in our step and his shapes in our thoughts. We need to feel his terror and chipper love, his lonely afternoons and sumptuous galas. Mozart is not the font, but the unity of the Muses, and beyond performance and beyond listening there is living, where the perfected goes on forever, though only for a time through us.

Mozart's music is the mysterious language of a distant spiritual kingdom, whose marvelous accents echo in our inner being and arouse a higher, intensive life. –E. T. A. Hoffmann

Bring Back the Funny Aesthetes

Complaints about a lack of diversity usually come from politically motivated quarters, but it's not a useless or inappropriate question. Is it not, at least potentially, significant when some person, group, or idea is completely excised from a medium of expression? Being sick this week I took refuge to the television and skimming around I began to wonder: where did all the funny aesthetes go?

Yes, there are plenty of intelligent people on television, in fact there is a superabundance of them, but there isn't any character I've seen in the classical, liberal, or traditionally educated mold. We have nerds, doctors, lawyers, detectives, teachers, and so on and so fort, but none of them live in the world of refined culture. In fact, they don't even visit that world. They're all brilliant philistines. While the aesthetes have never dominated either sitcoms or dramas, their complete absence seems remarkable.

The 1950s and '60 saw an aesthete in the surprising, furry form of Bugs Bunny. From the 40s to the 70s, in fact, the Merry Melodies star had hilarious run-ins with the classics, most notably musical. He fled Porky Pig to Strauss' Tales from the Vienna Woods (A Corny Concerto), became Mrs. Fudd on two separate occasions, to both Rossini's Barber of Seville in 1950 and then Wagner in 1957's What's Opera, Doc? Bugs even takes up the baton himself, the first time in homage to the great Leopold Stokowski conducting one poor tenor to a house-felling finale in The Long Haired Hare. His second turn at the podium is a satire of the conductor's histrionic gestures as Bugs conducts Franz von Suppe's Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna. Finally Bugs turns to performance himself and after a hilarious attempt to get Daffy Duck to pronounce Camille Saint-Saens, tickles the ivories of Carnival of the Animals conducted by none other than Michael Tilson Thomas in 1976.

Although it lacked persistent characters, the '70s also enjoyed the liberal erudition of Monty Python's Flying Circus, who veered philosophical in their philosopher's soccer match, and historical in their infamous sketches The Spanish Inquisition and The Funniest Joke in the World.

The '70s also saw the Odd Couple's neurotic Felix Unger, whose love of the arts ran afoul of his roommate's congenital sloppiness and barbarism. This was a revealing play of contrasts, with Felix ever hoping to show Oscar that the arts are for everyone. The show saw the duo manhandle Carmen and Swan Lake, opera club meetings gone awry, and the occasional poignant turn, like when the two quarreled about whether a multitalented protege should follow his talent for football or the cello.

Perhaps M.A.S.H had the most famous aesthete of the era, though, in the irascible Charles Emerson Winchester. Played by David Ogden Stiers, Winchester found himself the recipient of relentless scorn and pranks from Hawkeye and friends who enjoyed tormenting the major for his priggish pomposity, yes, but also for his overblown longing for the arts and civilization. This premise took turns comic, when Winchester's French horn drives his tent-mates bananas, and painful, as when Winchester treats a soldier who had lost a hand, and in doing so finds out the man had been a pianist.

On Frasier Crane, who spanned the '80s and '90s, it'll suffice to make two comments about it. First, nearly every episode featured some cultural context, whether he and his equally picky brother were arguing over a recording, they walked in singing Wagner, or they were making quips about random cultural trivia from Middlemarch to O. Henry. These touches were slight but voluminous, selling the fact that these guys lived and breathed the rarefied air. Second, there's a consistent thread of Frasier's elitism distancing himself from other people. In one episode, offended by a scurrilous graffito, Frasier tries to open up to the common man, only to find himself swarmed by the masses. One of the show's best bits, typically, is a combination of the highest and lowest brow.

Part I of Three Valentines. S06.E14

It'd be easy to let the science fiction and special effects distract from the high culture of Star Trek: The Next Generation if it weren't so frequent. Whether it's Captain Picard speaking French or even Latin–gasp!–the crew concerts of Chopin and Schubert, or performing Henry V and Cyrano de Bergerac, the Enterprise was not a ship of war but of exploration, a sort of traveling cultural capsule of Earth. Alongside, or inside, also dwelled the android, Data, with his attempts to study and mimic humanity by playing the violin, writing poetry, painting, and acting.

Alongside Frasier, the two other most influential shows of the '90s made few but significant nods to high culture. It was hilarious to see the vulgar quartet of Seinfeld, with their petty concerns, interact with the world of concerts and culture, which they always proceeded to bring down to their level, as when one Pez dispenser destroys a performance of Beethoven. Meanwhile on the Simpsons, in a brilliant but brief bit of satire, the town of Springfield votes to build a new concert hall. Success! The people fill on opening night, and four notes into the first concert, of Beethoven's 5th, everyone leaves. The people, philistines that they were, knew they had to at least make a little pilgrimage to the realm of high culture.

I'm not just talking about hoity-toityness either. There are no classical intellectuals or aesthetes on Downtown Abby, for example, despite the formality of the time and place. Aesthetes often bewail the lack of funding for the arts and the prominence of the arts in our society, and they often do so with just cause. I wonder though that the seemingly complete disappearance of the arts from representations of life, from art, in this case popular television programming, might indicate that the cause is further gone than we thought.

We're Not Dead Yet

We're not dead yet, but I have been quite sick all week. Our annual commemorative Mozart essay will come a week late, on Feb. 3. Posting will resume later today with some reflections on my illness-induced gluttony of TV. (It's all positive, really.)

Thanks as usual for staying with us!

The Wanderer

The second most boring part of teaching is reviewing material, for it catches the teacher in the doldrums between summarizing and examining. Said teacher always wants to teach something new, but the students would say such is not review. True, true. So alas we must say again what was said before. And say it again and again ad infinitum. The most boring of the teacher's tasks is proctoring. Here the teacher is caught between daydreaming and that unpleasant task of policing. The other day, though, all the students had finished their tests and in the fifteen minutes before we were permitted to leave, I picked in desperation a book off the shelf to stir my stilling mind.

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What I picked up was Heart of Darkness, and what I found of course and in irony was the serene stillness of Conrad's opening with its pacific water, flat sails, and seamless sky. What caught my mind, though, that is before the school bell shattered it once more, was not the quiet grandeur of the Thames or the brilliance of its description as introduction, but  Conrad's characterization of Marlow as a wanderer.

The seaman, we learn, is always at home at sea, for the sea never changes and all boats are the same. The seamen's minds are sedentary, their stories singular.  These men may move about, but on the ocean his mind is ever at home. One might say of them what the narrator says of their stories: they have a direct simplicity. They're simple, perfected, self-contained. Later, Marlow comes upon a book, reflecting again on the type:

The simple old sailor, with his talk of chains and purchases, made me forget the jungle and the pilgrims in a delicious sensation of having come upon something unmistakably real.

There is something authentic and revealing in such simplicity. Conrad's brilliant touch, though, is adding that someone had written notes in the margins of the book, and in cipher at that. Some greater intellect had come along and contributed incomprehensible commentary, muddling the simplicity as Marlow himself muddled the luminous Thames, describing it amidst its brightness as, "one of the dark places of the earth."

Marlow, in contrast to the simple seaman, is a wanderer, not with respect to body for he sails about like his fellow seamen, but rather Marlow is a wanderer of the mind. His stories are not about a simple moral but an unfolding, enveloping meaning.

Now one could surely discuss the theme of simplicity in Heart of Darkness, but I hadn't read the book in a while and I only had fifteen minutes. What was on my mind, then, wasn't the rest of the novel but a piece of music, Schubert's Der Wanderer an den Mond.

Schubert's song of Johann Seidl's text shares Conrad's fascination with simplicity. Here, the moon is simple and perfected, at home everywhere just like the seaman, even though it ranges far and wide. Opposed is the poet or speaker, who is a stranger wherever he goes. We sense this isolation in Marlow as he recounts the life of the Thames throughout history, always an observer, and sits "like Budha."

Marlow and Seidl's speaker sit at that mediating, meditative point between simplicity and complexity which stirs, perplexes, even torments the observer. Seidl longs to be at home although he lacks the simplicity of the moon, and Marlow admires the simplicity of the simple seaman untouched by the "detestable incomprehensible."

Thinkers perhaps too often idolize intellect, insisting it is edifying and unifying and not isolating, but seeing the boundaries of the comprehensible makes, as Waugh wrote, "a tedious journey to the truth," a journey, "confused with knowledge and speculation." The faithful also too often, perhaps, pontificate about the joyful universality of the faith without emphasizing the peregrinate nature of the worldly journey. The invariable existential question–compare Seidl's moon to Camus' omnipresent, impotent sun in The Stranger–leads he who walks the path of perception or faith, to a tortuous, wandering journey through seeing and seeking the incomprehensible in the light of the simple.

So Let It Be Written

Two hundred twenty one years from the founding of the republic, in the year they called 2008, the people of the nation America turned out in record numbers to vote in a landslide victory for the first black president of the country, Barack Obama. At that time the nation was laboring in economic depression after the previous president, George W. Bush son of George H. W. Bush, also a president, had removed regulatory laws, permitting banking procedures that precipitated the crisis.

So committed to the presidency and the nation was the statesman Obama that before he assumed the office he established the Office of the President Elect, which prepared the way for the new administration. While the first speech of his administration, called the inaugural, does not survive, it was referred by the authorities of the time as being "worthy of marble" and comparable to the most ancient masters of public speaking.

Energized and empowered by his party's control of the legislature, the democratic President passed laws which halted the recession and began putting the nation's suffering unemployed back to work by funding new jobs. These measures were roundly supported by economists but pilloried by the defiant republican party who resented his leadership. Thus President Obama saved the economy by means of laws, without which the nation surely would have suffered beyond the scope of grief. In the following months, succeeding the President's efficacious recovery laws, the economy slowly stabilized and supported by further government spending, recovered slowly throughout his tenure.

After defeating the pirates East of Africa, President Obama began to reconstruct the nation's image throughout the world, which had been stained by his predecessor. He strengthened diplomatic ties with Russia, stood firm against the nuclear ambitions of Korea and Persia, called North Korea and Iran at the time, and by his most exceptional speech at Cairo renewed dialogue with the Muslims of the world, to whom he declared, "The people of the world can live together in peace." Indeed peace reigned throughout the rest of the President's administration, except for his deposition of an obscure tyrant from North Africa some years later.

Having secured stability throughout the world, President Obama sought to bring new security to America in the great tradition of progress. He drafted historic legislation which would bring affordable healthcare to all Americans. When the legislature brought the matter to the people, the people approved it. When the legislature voted, it was passed. The law was then challenged by several states whose claims came to the Supreme Court, at the time a body of radical conservatives, who eventually declared the law legal. Eventually the law took effect in 2013, after President Obama's landslide reelection, and after technical problems stemming from a foreign contractor, fulfilled its goal although healthcare costs would continue to rise due to lack of regulation.

Despite the fact that conservatives and anti-government radicals overtook the republican party and the House of Representatives, denying the president means by which further to enrich the nation, President Obama was one of America's greatest presidents. An apocryphal story best exemplifies the man and leader. When a dispute arose in the city Boston between an officer of the law and a college professor, President Obama invited the men, differing with respect to color of skin, to the White House to resolve the dispute. In the end, the professor and the patrolman by Obama were reconciled to one another, as the world was to America by that same president who was part Solon, part Solomon and whose only vice was the excess of virtue by which the nation's radical's restricted the country's final steps toward progress.

Memento

Memory is a strange word for a strange concept. What does it mean to remember? Our English word memory is not helpful, conjuring images of a faculty of remembering, as if drawing water from a well. The clunky memorize has its connotation of firing synapses, but tells us how, not why is memory. Latin's tenere in memoria is an improvement, suggesting as it does the activity of holding in memory, as does its recordare, the holding of something in one's cor (stem cord-) or heart, living spirit. We retain something of this understanding in the phrase, "learn by heart," which alas seems to be ebbing away.

As we often do, though, we turn to the Greeks, and not just to their pair of λήθη and μνήμη, forgetfulness and memory, but to the famous discussion of memory which concludes Plato's Phaedrus. This passage is often quoted by proud memorizers who revel in recollections of their favorite poems, and while it's all well and good to wag a finger at the philistine who can't quote a line of any significance, it doesn't answer much to say tritely that reading print simply weakens the memory. It even elucidates little to say that the written word is not knowledge, as pretty as the thought may be.

Plato's insight, though, comes soon after the oft-quoted and there he idealizes not the tender of letters who sows words in the garden of letters for recollection, but the dialectician who plants words in souls, not perfected but alive, potent to propagate. This claim sounds incredible, for how can an idea differ simply by its location? This is surely some ploy to lay secret knowledge in the hands of the few. Our lack of imagination often fails philosophers, but especially Plato who might jest about our mental infecundity. Here, imagine a word in a book: it does nothing. If one asks it a question, as Plato said, it responds nothing. Yet the word in the mind partakes in our activities, observes them and changes them, even perchance changing itself. It is only passed on if by, or through, a memory.

There is something of this thinking, quite unexpectedly, in Aristotle's causality wherein man, the lover of understanding, seeks that "why" of things which is both question and answer, and in understanding fulfills his nature and the promise of worldly intelligibility. Understanding, then, is a reconciliation of self and other, and to remember Plato and Bach and Horace as much as mathematics and astronomy is as much to know oneself as to know them as to know the world. To hear the words of the mass not as spoken text but as an awakening of the words within you, an awakening of words shared, transferred through time and transfigured through the sacrifice, is the reconciliation of all things.

Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
–Little Gidding

The Lost Calendar

Time is shaped or it is incomprehensible. Scientists peer in vain back at the still time before time which began time and forward through the eons to time's still termination to avoid the eternal presencing through space. A poetical thought few if any minds can live on, man seems to find it simply one damn thing after another. Man must fix time for himself. Art satisfies man as it does for it seems to tame time into something recognizable: film sculpts time, music meters time, and painting stops time. For moments these move the soul beyond the world but they cannot remove his intolerable shirt of fire.

The Christian calendar orients man's world around Christ while we dwell in the world, reconciling the corporeal and transcendent. Scripture and saintly homage, sacred remembrance and theology are all reconciled through the mass. The Christian however calendar is also gone, replaced socially by secular holidays and that most sacred bourgeois feast, the weekend, and liturgically by that ternary bloc of Advent, Lent, and Ordinary Time. The epoch of Christ's redemption, the years Anno Domini, are now the years of the "Common Era," an epithet slapped on by those so indolent, unstudied, and cowardly that they didn't even have the decency to fish for a new date from which to start their age. Even the French Revolutionaries had the decency to do that. Add to this disorder the rotation of scriptural readings and the liturgical breakdowns and we have a true loss of time, season, and center.

You'll notice that the leading image above isn't that of a liturgical calendar. How many of those round doohickies (left) do you see, taped and torn, festooned around schools and church vestibules everywhere? I've never known anyone to find it more inspiring than its color-coding. With it's arbitrary transferring and shifted observances, it's the fruit of tinkering and not tradition. The image above is that of the Labors of the Year, that is, the seasonal organization of life which results from the order of the Christian calendar.

It is no coincidence and to their credit that the online spaces of so many Catholic writers and bloggers become calendars where they mark the feasts, posting paintings, pieces of music, and prayers which they are discovering for themselves. They miss the order, surely, but also the pleasure which shaped time gives, for the calendar gives not only purpose but season to worship as does a Bach cantata or an altar cover of Bernini.

The traditional mass, its shape of and through the year, and the art of its expression are instead of interminably presencing through time, of time, man, his expression, and God a perpetual reconciliation. The alternative is one damn thing after another.