Xi Murong's "Listener" (席慕蓉的《旁聽生》)

Attended a very touching talk in one of the lecture halls of the Convention Centre last Sunday. In fact, more than one by one of my favourite poetesses, Xi Murong. First, there was a public recitation of three of her poems. That was followed by a talk on what made her write what she did. Although she was not supposed to be doing a recitation at the second talk, she couldn't help herself: towards the close of her talks, she recited again two of the three which she did at the earlier session.

Although I saw a picture of Xi Murong once on the internet. It was a completely different experience to see her in person. One sees her as she narrows her eyes, as she adjusts her hair, as she gestures with her fat fingers, as she unconsciously touches her scarf, as she laughs or smiles her embarrassment when she recounts how she was taunted by his brother and husband about her complete ignorance of the principles of physics, as she lifts her head in reverie of the pastures, the hills, the rivers, the grassland, the trees, the skies of Mongolia, as she recalls her stares of utter amazement at the inscription on the back of what she originally thought was a 9th century Han stele in Mongolia, carved in her native language, when she saw it for the first time. As she recites the last few lines of the poem I recently translated "The Border Farewell Song", one could hear the trembling in her voice,  choked with irrepressible emotions. At that moment, I could no longer withhold my own tears. It was so moving. What drew those reluctant tears from my tear glands, which seemed suddenly to have taken on a life of their own, completely evading my control, was her honest unabashed and undisguised love of her motherland, which before her first visit, remained, as she said, only her father's "homeland". In one of her earlier poems, the "listener" or "auditor", she recounted how she felt about her native country.

Jean de Florette & Manon de Source (戀戀山城、恩怨情天)

There was no concert for me this weekend. Instead, I went to see two films based on a 1953 4-hour long film by Marcel Pagnol, drastically cut at the time by the distributors for commercial reasons and remade by Claude Berri in 1986 from the novel which Pagnol later published. It's a story of the epic battles between love and revenge among two generations of certain peasant families in the French Provence shortly after the first world war. The double-bill is featured as part of film offerings of Le French Mai this year.

The first, entitled Jean de Florette, stars Yves Montand as César  Soubeyran, nicknamed  'Le Papet', Gérard Depardieu  as Jean de Florette, Daniel Auteuil as Ugolin, Elisabeth Depardieu as Aimée Cadoret, Margarita Lozano as Baptistine and Ernestine Mazurowna as Mannon Cadoret and the second film, called Manon des Sources, additionally features the beautiful Emmanuelle Béart as the grown up Manon.

As the film opens, we see a simple minded Ugolin, one of the two surviving Soubeyrans in the region returning from war to his uncle César Soubeyran, an old bachelor and owner of a stone house and farm. He returned with a secret project: growing carnations instead of the traditional potatoes, maize, pumpkins etc. But they got a problem: carnations soak up water like a sponge. They know that their neighbor Pique-Bouffigue, had a partially blocked up spring in his land which they wanted so much to buy for growing his carnations. They decided to pay the old man there a visit but the man wouldn't sell the land to him at any price and said ironically, they could have the land only over his dead body. During the negotiations, they got into a quarrel and the man fell from a tree, hit his head against a rock and died! As they were determined to have the land, the Soubreyrans secretly went to block up the spring completely so that the land would be worth much less in case  whoever would inherit the land could be persuaded to sell it to them. T​hey then made inquiries and found out that the man had decided to give the land to his sister Florette de Berengere, Papet's old flame, who married Crespin, a blacksmith in another village years ago whilst Papet was
recovering in a military Hospital in Africa during the war. So Pepet wrote to an old friend who knew both him and Florette well, Grafignette. But the reply he got said that the day she got César's letter, Florette died and gave everything to his son Jean de Florette. Jean, a hunchback with a heart of gold, a Parisian tax collector and a city intellectual with romantic dreams of the bliss of rural life, who soon arrived with his singer wife Aimée Cadoret and their 5 year-old daughter Manon. Jean plunged himself enthusiastically into his plans of raising rabbits, and crepins, tomatoes, carrots, onions and some other crops according to books and agricultural studies about soil type, plant characteristics, statistics about rainfall etc. But he had some problems: he did not have enough water and had to store water in a cistern. But he threw his heart and soul into his project and worked day and night and spent all his savings on improving the farm but fate had it that he had to die during an accident whilst trying to dig a well: he got hit by a flying rock blown into the air from the force of the dynamite he was using to blast the well,. He had wanted to see and hear the sound of water gushing out from the proposed well but he got too near to the mouth of the proposed well for his own good. After his death, Aimée decided to sell the farm and leave. The moment they got the land cheap, the Soubeyrans danced and unplugged the hole blocking the spring. Manon sees them and understands what happened. She shrieks, runs towards the hills and decides to stay. She did so as a shepherdess because she liked the Italian gypsy couple who lived about 2 km from her house who treated her as if she were their own daughter as a little earlier, his father did not evict them from his land.

In part two of the film, Manon had grown up into a beautiful girl. During one of his hunting trips, Ugolin saw Manon bathing and dancing by the side of a pond and could never since get her off his mind. He secretly placed birds in the traps set by Manon in the hills so that she could sell them in the market and get some money and then clumsily but sincerely declared his love for her but she would have nothing to do with him because she overheard from some poachers that Ugolin and César had deliberately blocked the spring in his father's farm. Whilst looking for a lost goat, she discovered by accident the source of the water supplying water to what used to be his father's farm and also to the whole town and decided to do exactly what the Soubreyrans did to her father. She plugged it up. In no time, the whole town was in uproar because of water shortage. An emergency meeting was called during which an expert from the water resource department explained various theories about why the water dried up but could ofter no solution except for water to be brought in from elsewhere in a water truck. Manon realized the serious consequences of what she had done and confessed to a new teacher whom she met by accident but whom she fancied. He encouraged her to undo what she did. When Ungolin saw how she looked at the teacher, he realized that he had no hope of ever winning her and hanged himself on a tree. At her wedding, old César met Grafignette who told him to his surprise that Florette had in fact written a letter to him when he was in Africa to tell him that she was pregnant with his child and that she would wait for him to marry her but that not having received any reply from him, she married the blacksmith to give their child a father. Césa then realized that in fact, Jean de Florette was his own son ! He was crushed and decided that there was no reason for him to continue living. After having made a will in which he gave everything to Manon, his granddaughter, he lay in bed to die.The last hope of any Soubreyran having any male heir had died with the death of Ugolin and his death spelled the end of the Soubreyran line.

The films were excellently made, with beautiful music specially written for it by Jean-Claude Petit its theme music adapted from Verdi's opera "La forza del destino: Ouverture" (the power of destiny) hauntingly played on the harmonica by Jean and later by Manon.The acting by Daniel Auteil, Emmanuelle Béart, Gerard Depardieu and Eves Montand were uniformly good. I like the irony in the film: those who knew the truth could not speak like  Baptistine, the mute domestic maid of César and those could speak, like Ugolin and the the townsfolk, the poacher etc. would not speak: it was  through the hard-heartedness born of his greed and need to preserve his family name,that Papet destroyed his own and only hope of achieving his dream. He repented. Too late. The film portrays very well the kind of rural attitude prevailing in Provence at the epoque: its conservatism, it hostility towards strangers, the value it placed upon family honor and its land, its superstitions, its petty jealousies and small mindedness and its unwillingness to lift a finger to help someone regarded as an outsider etc. I also like the symbolic images used in the film: the central images of the film are water and land. Neither is fruitful without the other. Cesar left the pregnant Florette (motherhood) for war (masculine aggression) and the needed communication between the male and female part of humanity was lost (the letter which went astray in the war) as a result of which a physically deformed child was born: Jean, a hunchback city folk who would rely upon knowledge and science instead of rural tradition and superstition to till the land (the human unconscious and mother of all growth) to make it fruitful and raise rabbit. He died from the explosive force of modern technology. Their daughter Manon, a beautiful lively, freedom loving shepherdess tending goats (male sexuality) is also associated with the source of the spring (the water nymph of folklore) and for that reason has power over the entire town because of her control over the supply/interruption of the life giving water. What led Manon to the source of water is a "lost goat", deep inside the crevices amidst the hard rocks of the craggy mountains, and the image of the town people sucking from the tap (a phallic symbol) in the town square. Thus the film reveals the complex networks of cause and effect, the conflict and resolution of human dilemmas involving its principal elements: tradition and science, the city and the countryside, male and female, love and revenge, human initiative and the twist of fate operating through chance to produce an ironical result: the one who harms others for the sake of his own family ends up harming most himself and what he most desires; the one who relies on sheer intellectual power without assistance from tradition shall also die by the same and the water nymph of pure innocent love who reneges from her desire for revenge finally inherited both the land and its life-giving water. Only love combined with knowledge and tradition will thrive.  

A Diversion

Deleuze is right. In real life we experience daily the process whereby one idea or concept mesh or fold into another bigger one and which second idea or concept may mesh or fold into a third even bigger one and so on and on until we come to an idea or concept which is co-extensive with all of reality as we know it and perhaps into an even bigger and vaster and more complex but invisible and unknowable reality in which our world is just one tiny dimension. Alternatively, one idea may strike another idea an angle  and its force may impact it so that the second idea will be slightly or substantially transformed depending on the force of the impact and of the encounter. There is a third scenario in which one tiny component of one idea or concept may develop and branch out and grow until it is so big by comparison with the original idea or concept of which that component was originally its component will as a result of such branching out and growth, become or appear by comparison to have formed or become not the mother of that branch but one of the children of that branch.i.e. when the relation of trunk and branch will be reversed, as happens in the case of what was originally a tiny bud along the body of a ginger root growing underground growing  into another huge "arm" of that original original ginger root because in the process of growing and extending itself, that bud or branch has met with more favourable  surrounding environment e.g more nutrients, more water or more regular supply of water or nutrients or better soil such that that original bud or branch is now much stronger and much bigger than its original stem or that "mother" root. A concrete example of one such scenario happening is what happened last night.

I started out reading a book on Deleuze. In a break, my eyes fell upon a book by Camus. An idea flashed across my mind: some of the stuffs that Deleuze was writing about on the relations between one idea and another and on the importance of looking out not for similarities between one idea or concept and another but on their differences and hence on "creativity" of a thinker seem to have a remarkable "resonance" with what Camus was doing. Camus wrote shortly after the second world war when France was ready for change. Deleuze was writing in the mid-1960s, when France has had enough of right wing Gaulism and Deleuze came out in support of the Events of May 1968 in the same way that Camus came out  in support of the independence of Algeria, quite against mainstream French opinion then. Both wrote about how the internal development of one idea pushed to its limit may generate new ideas which may reverse or at least modify the direction in which the original idea was developing and how even embedded within the body of the "new" idea, one may still find "traces" or "shadows" of certain components of the the old idea or concept. That "new" idea prompted me to pick up a book by Camus upon which my eyes fell entirely by random chance. I picked up that book and flipped through it. That changed entirely the direction on which my thoughts were developing yesterday morning. I began reading Camus instead of Deleuze and in no time, I was writing a another blog not on Deleuze but on some of Camus's ideas! And this has continued today!

Camus says that the whole art of Kafka consists in forcing the reader to re-read and that his endings or more precisely, his absence of endings suggest explanations which are not revealed in clear language and which requires that the story be re-read from another point of view and that sometimes it may require two readings. But I would say that they require more than just two readings. Many of Kafka's stories may be read in at least five ways:
1: on the surface, literally, when we just take him at his word "as if" it were all that the author "meant" to say;
2. as Kafka's "allegory" (some say "parable") for describing man's existential condition, how he finds himself in a world he hasn't chosen to be in, a world he doesn't know or understands but which nonetheless imposes certain duties and obligations upon him and how his "heroes", normally, little people just living "ordinary" lives, find themselves in dilemmas which they rationally, doggedly, quietly and calmly but with underlying anxiety try to fathom but never quite succeeding.
3. as Kafka's allegory for describing contemporary man's struggle against secular government authorities which purport to make certain demands of him without explanations, without giving him sufficient clues on what exactly it is that they want and how he can fulfill them and how they would do their best and use all kinds of delaying tactics to avoid having to confront him in person
4. as Kafka's allegory of his personal predicament as an "outsider" in a land which although his home is never quite a home, Kafka' being a Jew in Czechoslavkia, which itself was only an outsider to the central government of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Vienna, speaking and writing in a language which is not really his own, his own being Yiddish or how he is an outsider in his own home, a loner who faced a stern father who is supposed to love him but who never quite understood him and never did but from whom he could not be separated because they were linked by blood and how he could never find sufficient courage to marry Felice Bauer, the girl with whom he corresponded for a number of years and whom he obviously loved and thus remained forever estranged from her and perhaps even as an allegory of how one part of himself was an outsider to another part of himself, how his reason instead of being a partner of his emotion, did nothing but sabotaged his emotional life by imaging all kinds of fearful consequence if he were fully and unreservedly to throw himself into a firm commitment and how even  the thing with which he had the most intimate relationships, viz. his writings,which he described as his "nightly scribblings" estranged him from himself by replicating and reminding him of how alienated he was from everything and which were in a sense his "double" in the world of personal isolation and loneliness he found
5. as a religious or spiritual allegory in which man suffers from a congenital guilt in respect of a crime the true nature of which he never succeeds in finding out, and for which he is accused, undergoes a trial, from a book of law used by a judge on which there is nothing but some doodles, a guilt from which he could never completely extricate himself, a guilt whose origins he could never fathom and for which he is condemned to suffer all kinds of most excruciating suffering, as in the Trial, the Castle and the Penal Colony( in which there is a machine which inscribes the punishment the prisoner is to suffer upon his skin, word by word until he dies from such pain), all in the calmest, most civilized ways for which no one expresses any surprises at all!

Camus says that Kafka uses his novels as symbols which is always general for which there is no word for word translation and that however precise its translation, the artist can restore to it only its movement but it is hard to speak of a symbol in a tale the most obvious quality of which is its "naturalness". A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing, says Camus. Therefore the proper way to approach the drama of Kafka's novel is to approach it through its externals and its form.

In the above, we find a chain illustrating the kind of proliferation of concepts that Deleuze is talking about viz.  reading Deleuze~ a certain similarity of point of view on one matter (one of the components on the global Deleuze) viz. character (a component of the personality of each), branching off by chance to reading Camus (another author) and by a further chance (a component within the first chance ) ~ one particular essay in a particular book (the essay being "folded" into the larger context of the book ) talking about a third author ( a third and completely new concept joined to the second through a common interest (absurdity) ~leading to a further reading by one of its reader ( viz. me) and this reader's opinion on one component of what the second author is talking about. The chain of connections  shows the proliferation of concepts from one of their components and yet joining all is their common plane (the problems of humanity). Thus concepts may be linked by similarity, chance to further concepts but all folded in the larger plane of common concern of humanity. A concrete illustration of Deleuze's philosophy in action!

A Magnificent Rebel Still

It's been a week now since I have had some problems uploading photos from my computer. The problem is still there although I've been told it's been "fixed". So if there are no more photos, it's not for lack of trying. Fortunately, in the past week, I've been busy preparing for a talk on Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), an enigmatic loner whose thoughts have been creating some pretty big reverberations in the intellectual world of Europe for several decades by now.He's the type who is never content to sit quietly on the floor of an academic hall listening bemurely to disquisitions upon the philosophic giants of the past. He is always on the lookout for something new on whatever topics which happen to take his fancy at the moment whether it be linguistics, psychology, mathematics, biology, geology, cosmology, painting, poetry, novels, drama, cinema or philosophy. In his life, not too long but not too short either, he has produced either alone or with others more than 30 books! He is a model of intellectual productivity. But above all, he is a rebel. In that regard, he reminds me of another French thinker and artist I admire, Albert Camus (1913-1960), whose work I first read more than 30 years ago. Camus is famous for his novels, L'Etranger variously translated as The Stranger or the Outsider (1942) but he also wrote 4 others:La Peste (The Plague) (1947), La Chute (The Fall) (1956), La Mort Heureuse (A Happy Death) (1971) published posthumously and also a number of plays Caligula (1938), Requiem pour une nonne (Requiem for a Nun) (1956), Le Malentendu (The Miunderstanding (1944), L'Etat de Siege (The State of Siege) (1948), Les Justes (The Just) (1949) and Les Possédés (The Possessed) (1959). He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. I haven't read all his works, just a few. But I like all that I have read. This morning, as so often, my eyes wandered around my book shelf. They fell upon a book which I haven't touched for ages. It was The Myth of Sisyphus and other Essays by Camus. I opened it. I could not put it down. My eyes were glued after I read a few sentences. My eyes first chanced upon a part of the essay entitled "An Absurd Reasoning" . I had to finish it. I was hooked. One part led to another and one book to another...The following are some of the things I found.

He says that there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. All the rest--whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories--comes afterwards. I don't want to discuss here whether he is right or wrong. I only want to affirm here something which I hold dearly, the way he seizes upon life and what it has to offer: the imperious joys of the senses and the splendour of human emotions, indeterminate vague and simultaneously definite, remote and present, as Camus says, "as furnished us by beauty or aroused by absurdity". To him, deep feelings, like great works, always mean more than they are conscious of saying but "The mind's first step is to distinguish what is true from what is false. However, as soon as thought reflects on itself, what it first discovers is a contradiction": the absurdity of life itself. The heart within which we can feel, the world which we can touch. These are the only things we can know and there ends all our knowledge because to him, all the rest are "constructions". He gives an example. "if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.Socrates' "Know thyself" has as much value as the "Be virtuous" of our confessionals. They reveal a nostalgia at the same time as an ignorance. They are sterile exercises on great subjects. They are legitimate only in precisely so far as they are approximate."

To him, only the world of the senses feel "real". "Here are the trees and I know their knarled surface, water, and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night certain evenings when the heart relaxes--how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine....that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of the evening teach me much more....A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is the condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults? To will is to stir up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal renunciations." To him Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Karl Jaspers, Husserl, Heidegger,, Chestov vie with one another in proclaiming that nothing is clear and that "All is chaos, that all man has is his lucidity and his definite knowledge of the walls surrounding him."  and man stands face to face with the irrational: he "feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason, The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world....The absurd is not in man...nor in the world, but in their confrontation.".

Confronted with death and certain that there is no future, the absurd man can derive a lesson from the mystics. Mystics according to Camus, find freedom by giving themselves away: " By losing themselves in their god, by accepting his rules, they become secretly free. In spontaneously accepted slavery, they recover a deeper independence...they feel free with regard to themselves and not so much free as liberated." In the same way, "completely turned toward death,...the absurd man feels released from everything outside that passionate attention crystallizing in him. He enjoys a freedom with regard to common rules. ...In the same way...the slaves of antiquity did not belong to themselves. But they knew that freedom which consists in not feeling responsible. Death too, has patrician hands which, while crushing, also liberate." He calls this the "divine availability of the condemned man before whom the prison doors open in a certain early dawn, that unbelievable disinterestedness with regard to everything except for the pure flame of life." This too is a kind of freedom. Indeed, this is the only feasible kind of freedom which is available to the absurd man. He says, "it is clear that death and the absurd are here the principles of the only reasonable freedom: that which a human heart can experience and live...The absurd man thus catches sight of a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given, and beyond which all is collapse and nothingness." He can then decide to accept such a universe and draw from it his strength:," his refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation." He asks: "But what does life mean in such a universe?" He answers: "Nothing else for the moment but indifference to the future and a desire to use up everything that is given. He offers a suggested solution: "It is up to us to be conscious" of the absurdity of the human condition: "Being aware of one's life, one's revolt, one's freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum." He draws from the absurd three consequences: revolt, freedom and passion, by the mere activity of consciousness. He concludes with a reference to something which Nietzsche says may make it worth the trouble of continuing to live: "virtue, art, music, the dance, reason, the mind--something that transfigures, something delicate, mad, or divine." It may not not always be easy: "Obeying the flame is both the easiest and the hardest thing to do". But he says that it is good for man to judge himself occasionally. He has no other choice: "He is alone in being able to do so." He is not dogmatic. He says that all he is doing is to define a way of thinking, But "the point is to live".! 

And of course, even though it's the second time I read his "myth of Sisyphus", I could not fail to be touched by the nobility of his tragic hero, endlessly toiling to push up a rock to the summit of the hill only to see it tumbling down again so that he will have to repeat it all over again and again for all eternity as part of his punishment by the gods. As he says, there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. He is the absurd hero, "as much through his passions, as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth."  In the myth, "one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one see the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain."

Camus says that it is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests him. He says, "A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour of breathing space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock." To Camus, "Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent." But according to the author, "The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory" because "there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn". He thinks that "if the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy...When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness become too insistent, it happens that melancholy rises in man's heart: this is the rock's victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged". But Camus doesn't want to exaggerate.Although he says that "Happiness and the absurd are the two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.", he adds that it would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. In the same way, Oedipus says at the end of his travails, "Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well" To Camus, that remark is "sacred" as it "echoes in the wild and limited universe of man" because it teaches that "all is not, has not been exhausted. it drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile sufferings. It makes fate a human matter, which must be settled among men."  Sisyphus may have a silent joy in his heart because "his fate belongs to him". It may not have started with his consent but he has adopted it as his very own.His rock has become his thing, the instrument of torture has become his weapon against the fate cast upon him by the gods. When he contemplates his fate and makes it his own, he silences all the gods.

Of course, Sisyphus knows that there is no sun without shadow and that it is essential to know the night. But he also knows that he is the master of his days.Camus says (and this is the part I like most:) " At that subtle moment, when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see, who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling. I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. The universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that nigh-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy". What tragedy, what spirit! And I think Camus lives the way he thinks, if we may judge by the way he writes. An example? The Nuptials at Tipasa!

"IN THE
spring, Tipasa is inhabited by gods and the gods speak in the sun and the scent
of absinthe leaves, in the silver armor of the sea, in the raw blue sky, the
flower- covered ruins, and the great bubbles of light among the heaps of stone.
At certain hours of the day the countryside is black with sunlight. The eyes
try in vain to perceive anything but drops of light and colors trembling on the
lashes. The thick scent of aromatic plants tears at the throat and suffocates
in the vast heat. Far away, I can just make out the black bulk of the Chenoua,
rooted in the hills around the village, moving with a slow and heavy rhythm
until finally it crouches in the sea. 

The village we pass through to get there already opens on the bay. We enter a
blue and yellow world and Tipasa is a village on the Mediterranean coast, about fifty miles
from Algiers. We are welcomed by the pungent, odorous sigh of the Algerian summer earth.
Everywhere, pinkish bougainvillae hangs over villa walls; in the gardens the
hibiscus are still pale red, and there is a profusion of tea roses thick as
cream, with delicate borders of long, blue iris. All the stones are warm. As
we step off the buttercup yellow bus, butchers in their little red trucks are
making their morning rounds, calling to the villagers with their horns. 

To the left of the port, a dry stone stairway leads to the ruins, through the
mastic trees and broom. The path goes by a small lighthouse before plunging
into the open country. Already, at the foot of this lighthouse, large red,
yellow, and violet plants descend toward the first rocks, sucked at by the sea
with a kissing sound. As we stand in the slight breeze, with the sun warming
one side of our faces, we watch the light coming down from the sky, the smooth
sea and the smile of its glittering teeth. We are spectators for the last time
before we enter the kingdom of ruins. 

After a few steps, the smell of absinthe seizes one by the throat. The
wormwood's gray wool covers the ruins as far as the eye can see. Its oil
ferments in the heat, and the whole earth gives off a heady alcohol that makes
the sky flicker. We walk toward an encounter with love and desire. We are not
seeking lessons or the bitter philosophy one requires of greatness. Everything
seems futile here except the sun, our kisses, and the wild scents of the earth.
I do not seek solitude. I have often been here with those I loved and read on
their features the clear smile the face of love assumes. Here, I leave order
and moderation to others. The great free love of nature and the sea absorbs me
completely. In this marriage of ruins and springtime, the ruins have become
stones again, and losing the polish imposed on them by men, they have reverted
to nature. To celebrate the return of her prodigal daughters Nature has laid
out a profusion of flowers. The heliotrope pushes its red and white head
between the flagstones of the forum, red geraniums spill their blood over what
were houses, temples, and public squares. Like the men whom much knowledge
brings back to God, many years have brought these ruins back to their mother'1i
house. Today, their past has finally left them, and nothing distracts them from
the deep force pulling them back to the center of all that falls. 

How many hours have I spent crushing absinthe leaves, caressing ruins, trying
to match my breathing with the world's tumultuous sighs 1 Deep among wild
socents and concerts of somnolent insects, I open my eyes and heart to the
unbearable grandeur of this heat-soaked lily. It is not so easy to become what
one is, to rediscover one's deepest measure. But watching the solid backbone of
the Chenoua, my heart would grow calm with a strange certainty. I was learning
to breathe, I was fitting into things and fulfilling myself. As I climbed one
after another of the hills, each brought a reward, like the temple whose
columns measure the course of the sun and from which one can see the whole
village, its white and pink walls and green verandas. Like the basilica on the
East hill too, which still has its walls and is surrounded by a great circle of
uncovered ornamented coffins, most of them scarcely out of the earth, whose
nature they still'share. They used to contain corpses; now sage and wallflowers
grow in them. The Sainte-Salsa basilica is Christian, but each time we look out
through a gap in the walls we are greeted by the song of the world: hillsides
planted with pine and cypress trees, or the sea rolling its white horses twenty
yards away. The hill on which Sainte-Salsa is built has a flat top and the wind
blows more strongly through the portals. Under the morning sun, a great
happiness hovers in space. Those who need myths are indeed poor. Here the gods
serve as beds or resting places as the day races across the sky. I describe and
say: "This is red, this blue, this green. This is the sea, the mountain,
the flowers." Need I mention Dionysus to say that I love to crush mastic
bulbs under my nose? Is the old hymn that will later come to me quite
spontaneously even addressed to Demeter: "Happy is he alive who has seen
these things on earth"? How can we forget the lesson of sight and seeing
on this earth? All men had to do at the mysteries of Eleusis was watch. Yet
even here, I know that I shall never come close enough to the world. I must be
naked and dive into the sea, still scented with the perfumes of the earth, wash
them off in the sea, and consummate with my flesh the embrace for which sun and
sea, lips to lips, have so long been sighing. I feel the shock of the water, rise
up through a thick, cold glue, then dive back with my ears ringing, my nose
streaming, and the taste of salt in my mouth. As I swim, my arms shining with
water flash into gold in the sunlight, until I fold them in again with a twist
of all my muscles; the water streams along my body as my legs take tumultuous
possession of the waves-and the horizon disappears. On the beach, I flop down
on the sand, yield to the world, feel the weight of flesh and bones, again
dazed with sunlight, occasionally glancing at my arms where the water slides
off and patches of salt and soft blond hair appear on my skin. 

Here I understand what is meant by glory: the right to love without limits.
There is only one love in this world. To clasp a woman's body is also to hold
in one's arms this strange joy that descends from sky to sea. In a moment, when
I throw myself down among the absinthe plants to bring their scent into my
body, I shall know,  appearances to the contrary, that I am fulfilling a
truth which is the sun's and which will also be my death's. In a sense, it
is indeed my life that I am staking here, a life that tastes of warm stone,
that is full of the sighs of the sea and the rising song of the crickets. The
breeze is cool and the sky blue. I love this life with abandon and wish to
speak of it boldly: it makes me proud of my human condition. Yet people have
often told me: there's nothiingto be proud of. Yes, there is: this sun, this
sea, my heart leaping with youth, the salt taste of my body and this vast
landscape in which tenderness and glory merge in blue and yellow. It is to
conquer this that I need my strength and my resources. Everything here leaves
me intact, I surrender nothing of myself, and don no mask: learning patiently
and arduously how to live is enough for me. well worth all their arts of
living. 

Shortly before noon, we would come back through the ruins to a little cafe by
the side of the port. How cool was the welcome of a tall glass of iced green
mint in the shady room, to heads ringing with colors and the cymbals of the
sun.l Outside were the sea and the road burning with dust. Seated at the table,
I would try to blink my eyelids so as to catch the multicolored dazzle of the
white-hot sky. Our faces damp with sweat, but our bodies cool in light
clothing, we would flaunt the happy weariness of a day of nuptials with the
world. 

The food is bad in this cafe, but there is plenty of fruit, especially peaches,
whose juice drips down your chin as you bite into them. Gazing avidly before
me, my teeth closing on a peach, I can hear the blood pounding in my ears. The
vast silence of noon hangs over the sea. Every beautiful thing has a natural
pride in its own beauty, and today the world is allowing its pride to seep from every pore. Why, in
its presence, should I deny the joy of living, as long as I know everything is
not included in this joy? There is no shame in being happy. But today-the fool
is king, and I call those who fear pleasure fools. They've told us so much
about pride: you know, Lucifer's sin. Beware, they used to cry, you will lose
your soul, and your vital powers. I have in fact learned since that a certain
pride . But at other times I cannot prevent myself from asserting the pride
in living that the whole world conspires to give me. At Tipasa, "I
see" equals "I believe," and I am not stubborn enough to deny
what my hands can touch and my lips caress. I don't feel the need to make it
into a work of art, but to describe it, which is different. Tipasa seems to me
like a character one describes in order to give indirect expression to a
certain view of the world. Like such characters, Tipasa testifies to something,
and does it like a man. Tipasa is the personage I'm describing today, and it
seems to me that the very act of caressing and describing my delight will
insure that it has no end. There is a time for living and a time for giving
expression to life. There is also a time for creating, which is less natural.
For me it is enough to live with my whole body and bear witness with my whole heart.
LiveTipasa, manifest its lessons, and the work of art will come later. Herein
lies a freedom. 

I never spent more than a day at Tipasa. A moment always comes when one has
looked too long at a landscape, just as it is a long time before one sees enough
of it. Mountains, the sky, the sea are like faces whose barrenness or splendor
we discover by looking rather than seeing. But in order to be eloquent every
face must be seen anew. One complains of growing tired too quickly, when one
ought to be surprised that the world seems new only because we have forgotten
it.

Toward evening I would return to a more formal section of the park, set out as
a garden, just off the main road. Leaving the tumult of scents and sunlight, in
the cool evening air, the mind would grow calm and the body relaxed, savoring
the inner silence born of satisfied love. I would sit on a bench, watching the
countryside expand with light. I was full. Above me drooped a pomegranate tree,
its flower buds closed and ribbed like small tight fists containing every hope
of spring. There was rosemary behind me, and I could smell only the scent of
its alcohol. The hills were framed with trees, and beyond them stretched a band
of sea on which the sky, like a sail becalmed, rested in all its tenderness. I
felt a strange joy in my heart, the special joy that stems from a clear
conscience. There is a feeling actors have when they know they've played their
part well, that is to say, when they have made their own gestures coincide with
those of the ideal character they embody, having entered somehow into a
prearranged design, bringing it to life with their own heartbeats. That was
exactly what I felt: I had played my part well. I had performed my task as a
man, and the fact that I had known joy for one entire day seemed to me not an
exceptional success but the intense fulfillment of a condition which, in
certain circumstances, makes it our duty to be happy. Then we are alone again,
but satisfied. 

Now the trees were filled with birds. The earth would give a long sigh before
sliding into darkness. In a moment, with the first star, night would fall on
the theater of the world. The dazzling gods of day would return to their daily death. But other gods would come. And, though they would be darker,
their ravaged faces too would come from deep within the earth. For the moment at least, the waves' endless crashing against the shore
came toward me through a space dancing with golden pollen. Sea, landscape,
silence, scents of this earth, I would drink my fill of a scent-laden life,
sinking my teeth into the world's fruit, golden already, overwhelmed by the
feeling of its strong, sweet juice flowing on my lips. No, it was neither I nor
the world that counted, but solely the harmony and silence that gave birth to
the love between us. A love I was not foolish enough to claim for myself alone,
proudly aware that I shared it with a whole race born in the sun and sea,
alive and spirited, drawing greatness from its simplicity, and upright on the
beaches, smiling in complicity at the brilliance of its skies."

The sight, the sound, the touch of the sea, the blue sky, the lights of the sun or of descending darkness, the absinthe leaves, the pomegranate trees, the irises, the sun-soaked lily, the geraniums, crickets, the cool breeze, the taste of iced mint tea, the relaxed atmosphere and the clasp of a woman's body .... all attest to Camus sensibility to all that Nature has to offer to man upon his short span of time here. And he lived to the hilt, not only with sensibility but with passion and honesty, having been underground French Resistance fighter, communist, anti-communist, pacifist, writer, director, dramatist, editor and journalist, husband, father and lover. He remains true to himself .

 

Evantail of Mademoiselle Mallarmé

Evantail de Mademoiselle Mallarmé     O reveuse, pour que je plonge    Au pur delice sans chemin,    Sache, par un subtil mensonge, Garder mon aile dans ta main.      Une fraicheur de crepuscule     Te vient a chaque battement   Dont le coup prisonnier recule    L'horizon delicatement. Vertige ! voici que frissonne   L'espace comme un grand baiser    Qui, fou de naitre pour personne, Ne peut jaillir ni s'apaiser.    Sens-tu le paradis farouche   Ainsi qu'un rire enseveli     Se couler du coin de ta bouche     Au fond de l'unanime pli !   Le sceptre des rivages roses    Stagnants sur les soirs d'or, ce l'est, Ce blanc vol ferme que tu poses    Contre le feu d'un bracelet.

Miss Mallarmé's Fan   O dreamer, that I might plunge Into the pathess pure delight Know, by a subtle lie how to keep my wing in your hand A dawn freshness comes to you with each beat wherewith the imprisoned blow pushes back delicately the horizon Vertigo! It's here that trembles Space like a big kiss which, mad to be born for no one Can neither fly nor keep still  You feel the paradise fierce such that from the corner of your mouth a veiled smile flows To the base of the unanimous fold  The scepter of the rosy shores Stagnant in the golden night, it's the east This white folded flight that you lay O'er the a bracelet's fire.

馬拉美小姐之扇  噢夢者，我欲躍下 那無門之純樂 你須懂如何以微妙之謊言 握我翼於你手 晨曦之清涼 隨你每一下跳動 將那被囚之拳 敏感地推開水平線   目眩！猶巨吻般 在空間顫震 這狂吻不為人而生 不能跳躍復不能靜下  你感到樂園之勇悍  從你咀角 一隱晦之笑容 流向那單一縐摺之底 那玫瑰河畔之權杖 滯在黄金夜內， 你放下在手鐲之火 這白色的傲翔，是東方

The Handmaid's Tale

School has restarted! For me, it means the time for reading some new novels has begun again. Every year, my daughters (now my daughter, the elder one having now entered college) will be given a new reading list. Shortly before the deadline for handing in their homework assignment, they will send me emails about the literature assignment given to them and then ask me through the MSN for ideas on how to tackle the problems and would later send their draft or revised assignment to me for comments, and all too often just one day before the assignment is due! But I always manage to give them some ideas or other although if they were to ask me at the last minute, that would mean that I got to work during my lunch hours. I'm not complaining though. That is one of most natural ways I can bond with them. But through helping them, I also help myself. Throughout the years, in this way, I have come to know of many new authors whose names I have never previously heard of. In so far as I have more experience about various kind of literature and may for that reason be able to see deeper into various aspects of what the authors are trying to do, I may have benefited from such reading even more than my daughters. This morning, my younger daughter MSNs me again. It's about a novel by Margaret Attwoood called "The Handmaid's Tale."

Margaret Attwood is a contemporary Canadian essayist, feminist, novelist and poet. The novel was was first published in 1985 and the same year won the Canadian Governor General's Award and two years later won the first Arthur C Clarke Award. The book has already been adapted for the radio, the stage, opera. In 1990, it was adapted by the famous English dramatist Harold Pinter into a film of the same name directed by Volker Schlöndorff and starring Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall. The film was released as a DVD in 1991. But I have neither seen nor heard any of its adaptations whether as film or otherwise. 

It was an interesting novel, set some time in 2195 or thereabouts about a prior time in the land which used to be America. The name of the country is Gilead. It is a kind of techno-theocratic society whose citizens are neatly divided into various classes according to their social and political functions. There are five classes of men: the "Eyes" are secret service agents and state detectives in charge of internal intelligence and surveillance and checking on any violations of the republic's laws and regulation by its citizens; the "Guardians of the Faithful" are policemen for routine maintenance of order and other menial functions, usually chosen for their stupidity, older or disabled or very young and impressionable. When the Guardians have done their work well, they may be promoted to be "Angels", professional soldiers who fight to defend or to expand the Republic's boundaries and who are permitted to marry and finally the "Commanders of the Faithful", a very privileged class who are given special rights to establish their own households, acquire a "Wife" and if necessary a "Handmaid" (a concubine for the express purpose of procreation if the Wife is infertile) so that the population may be maintained and "Marthas" (female domestic servants) and enjoy protection by the Guardians.  Then there is a non-class called "Gender Traitors". They are homosexual men and if found, are either executed or sent to the "Colonies" for hard labor to do either farm work or to clean toxic nuclear waste and eventually to die. 

The women in the Gilean Republic are divided into 7 classes which are further divided into two main sub-classes according to whether they enjoy official legitimate status or are treated as illegitimate or marginal to the mainstream of society or " Unwomen". "Wives" wear blue dresses and are permitted to marry the highest functionaries and after their husbands die, they become "Widows" and must wear black. "Daughters" wear white until marriage and are either the natural or adopted daughters of the ruling class and "Handmaids" wear red dress, shoes and gloves but white wings and are fertile women who have broken laws and who are permitted to reform themselves through education and their function is to produce children for the Commanders of the Faithful when their wives are infertile. Then there are "Aunts", whose social role is to train and monitor the Handmaids. Such roles are generally taken by single, infertile and often older women who wish to avoid being sent to the "Colonies". They are the only class of women permitted to listen to discs, no one in the Republic being permitted to read and write ( hints of Fahrenheit 451) and society has reverted to using merely photographs and pictures instead of words as language and the former university library has been turned into the headquarters of the "Eyes". Next follow the "Marthas" who wear green smocks, being infertile women who specialize in domestic work. Finally, there are "Econowives" who are women who marry lower class men, ie. any one who does not belong to the Commanders of the Faithfuls and they wear  multicolor dresses of red, blue and green to reflect their multiple social roles. In Gilead land, the women are not encouraged to sympathize with each other and the dominant feelings between the different classes is fear, suspicion, contempt and jealousy and "mind your own business" mentality. Then there is a class of marginal women like those who are sterile, widows, feminists, lesbians, nuns, political dissidents. If found, they are sent to the "Colonies". So are Handmaids who fail to produce a child after three 2-year terms for producing children for the Commanders. Then finally there are the "Jezebels", the professional prostitutes and artists, reserved only for entertaining the Commanders and their guests in special clubs where they are permitted to drink to smoke etc. They are women who refuse to integrate into any of the officially designated roles and are sterilized, something otherwise illegal in Gilead land. 

In the Gilead Republic, even babies are classified. Those who are born without any defects are permitted to live as "Keepers" and to grow up to become various class members. Then there are "Unbabies" otherwise called "Schredders". These are babies born with various birth defects. They will be killed or otherwise "vanish". Before their birth, no pre-natal checks are conducted and no abortions are permitted and doctors found to have done these are immediately executed and their bodies publicly displayed as warnings to the others.

The Gilead Republic began life by a military coup under the pretext of having to fight against some terrorists invading America and because of a need to restore order, after which they disbanded Congress and suspended the Constitution and siezed all the women's assets, expelled dissidents, operating through a popular movement called "Sons of Jacob", a sort of religiously right wing movement which smacks of the KKK and the Nazis. Once successful, the rulers re-organized society along the lines above described. The story recounts the life story of one of the Handmaids, called "Offred" (Of Fred) and is supposed to be pieced together from the records of some 30 cassette tapes later discovered concerning her life before and after the coup and forms the subject of a Symposium on Gileadean Studies in 2195. She used to be married, had a husband called Luke, a mother with whom she disagreed and a daughter who also differed from her and has since been re-trained as a Handmaid and when the story opened she was sent to serve a Commander called Fred . The tapes show her daily life as a handmaid, her relationship with her friends and her enemies, and show her to be a lady much given to reflection, sensitive to her physical environment, and also emotionally sensitive to how people feel, is nostalgic about the days before the military coup. The story ends when she was being escorted away in a black van but without any indication of its destination. 

It was a very imaginative tale. You can see how Attwood skilfully adapts techniques which she might have learned from the Scarlet Letter, The Brave New World, 1894, Canterbury Tales and perhaps some other literary masters too. Attwood calls the novel a "speculative novel" and dislikes the term "science fiction" when it was so described by some journalists. The novel is written in the first person. That gives it plenty of opportunities for stating directly what passed through the narrator-protagonist's mind: the thoughts and feelings that she had, the kind of choices she was faced with as and when various events happened. That gives it a kind a immediacy which it would otherwise be impossible to reproduce. Her way of writing is remarkably similar to the way Kafka writes, although in the case of Kafka, he writes in a kind of mock-third person narative perspective which is in fact first person because he writes as if he knew the most intimate thoughts of his character K as events unfolded. She has a very laconic style which I like. She writes in simple sentences, and often just ellipses. I can feel the influence of Hemingway and perhaps of Camus in her writing. She merely states the facts in various sensory modes: sights, sounds and also feelings implicit in the kind of questions she asks, the suppositions she makes and the possibilities she explores. In the novel, Attwood uses numerous words and images with complex allusions to biblical events, to Jewish history and to some recent contemporary events. Therefore the novel operates on two levels: the superficial "factual" level and then the level of an "allegory"" of a possible kind of society towards which religious fundamentalists appear to be  pushing America. The abundant use of puns serves both to cast an air of irony upon what is depicted and as an implied criticism of that which the narrator is relating. On the one hand, the criticism can be treated as the subjective thoughts of the narrator only but it can equally be treated as the voice of the author hiding behind that of the narrator. The nature of the humor suggested by the relevant puns is not the kind of slapstick humour one finds in some French mimes. It is humour of an altogether much darker hue. The whole novel can be treated as a kind of ominous foreboding of the coming of a new dark age when women are reduced to being either a kind of "holy" child-bearing "machines" valued only for their biologcal function for the survival of the society in which they are living or alternatively as pure "sex objects" to satisfy the animal urges of that society's dominant males.  It is well worth a read.