Ken’s Blog

Today, for reasons that cannot be revealed here, turns out to be an astonishingly auspicious day to post the complete version of The Heleniad.

I sing this to the young lady in the front row. You others all may listen.

     THE HELENIAD

Canto the first

   And so Miss Helenius
   Feeling most curious
   Not quite anonymous
   Yet not yet eponymous
   Intent on the spurious
   Though nothing injurious
   In a moment unserious
   Set out on a lark

   Like brazen young Theseus
   Or better, Prometheus
   Whose tales still fire us
   And often inspire us
   To passions erroneous
   If not quite felonious
   But somewhat delirious
   And never too dark


§  The heart can bedazzle us
   And this may be perilous
   For the heart is perfidious
   And somewhat insidious
   Those moments that capture us
   Can make us feel rapturous
   Till hopes grow innumerous
   Quite out of the blue

   The place was commodious
   The music melodious
   The night serendipitous
   For adventure precipitous
   As the Gods like to play with us
   And so have their way with us
   So he, feeling humorous,
   Did pick up her cue


§  The girl was vivacious
   And somewhat voracious
   The liquor contagious
   The boy felt outrageous
   Their mood grew gregarious
   Till, feeling hilarious,
   They descended the palace
   And took to the street

   In this vast megalopolis
   Our winter metropolis
   What is our true purpose?
   Do our moments usurp us?
   For when things become amorous
   Then our hearts, feeling glamorous,
   May drink from the Chalice
   And so be complete


Canto the second

   Their talk was far-ranging, the rhythm was changing
   And rhyme rearranging out there in the night
   Their thoughts began drifting, for something was shifting
   A curtain was lifting, a song taking flight

   And so then she kissed him, and yes she did bind him
   The wall was behind him and yes yes they said
   This flower of the mountain, like the girls Andalusian
   Perhaps an illusion, her lips were so red

   Her arms were around him, her body imploring
   The boy, now adoring, returned her caress
   Say yes mountain flower and the wind somewhere blowing
   Their hearts madly going and yes I will Yes.


§  Moments may sway us, but kisses betray us,
   For fate won't obey us, and oft goes astray
   Twas fateful that meeting, two hearts fiercely beating
   But alas, joy is fleeting when stolen away

   In a turn most appalling the darkness came calling
   For a curse was befalling, a thing of their fears
   And a figure demonic - it was almost iconic -
   In voice monotonic said: "Seventeen years!"

   It was all rather vexing, and sorely perplexing,
   This grim specter hexing their love most sublime
   "What be you?" they wondered, then the night air was sundered
   As the dark figure thundered: "The demon - of Time!"


§  "Je parlerai en français
   C'est la langue de la vérité
   Pour vous dire ce que je sais"
   Ainsi le démon a dit

   "Il est temps pour vous d'entendre
   C'est le moment de comprendre
   Vos rêves que je veux prendre"
   Alors le démon a ri

   La jeune fille a pensée
   "Dix-sept ans" a-t-elle répété
   "Cela fait beaucoup d'années
   Et la vie est brève"

   Le garçon a dit "Mon amour
   Je te parle de tout mon coeur
   Tu sais que je t'adore
   Est ce que tout était un rêve?"

   En un jour une vie peut changer
   Tout est ré-arrangé
   Un rêve est dérangé
   Et l'amour s'est dissout

   Le nuit était très sombre
   Le monde était dans l'ombre
   Qu'est ce qui est dans un nombre?
   Tristement, peut-être tout.


Epilogue

   There's a room in my soul where the old shattered dreams
   Lie in pieces all over the floor
   Where the stillness of time shades the windows, it seems
   And a demon stands guard at the door

   But sometimes a memory lights in my mind
   And it shines in the soft attic air
   And a strange kind of music plays sweetly and kind
   That I let myself hear, if I dare

   This flower of the mountain, this girl Andalusion,
   This force I could not understand
   Yes your touch Miss Helenius was, in conclusion
   The caress of a Theremin hand

   But like delicate fragrance of madeleines dipped
   Into lime-flowers long gone away
   Your succulent kiss so deliciously sipped
   Beguiles me even today

Have you ever had the experience of realizing that you’ve been dealing with some traumatic experience in your past – perhaps your distant past – by shutting off some parts of your thinking or feeling? I guess we all do that – one of the ways we deal pain is by shutting down, staying in the safe places. Sometimes you don’t just refrain from touching the hot stove which once burned you. Instead you stay away from stoves in general.

Well, I started this blog in order to try to make sense of an unexpected emotional encounter which told me that I had been operating too much in this “safe” mode. I didn’t quite have a handle on it, but I knew, through what I now perceive as a lucky accident of fate, that there were some doors and windows in the old psyche that I had been keeping shut, that had grown maybe one or two coats of cobwebs too many, and which I had allowed to stay that way out of some sense that it might be dangerous to pry them open.

A blog is a good way to start taking those steps – to start to angle up sideways to asking some hard questions. People who know you and like you are around, and supportive, and you can take weeks or even months to gradually work a question around to where you are staring it square in the face. And by the time you do, maybe it’s not so scary or difficult anymore.

And along the way, the opportunities for creative expression are simply awesome. Stories, discussions, epic poetry, drawings and animations, maybe an opera or two – the things you can create are utterly limitless. Of course they are anyway, but we have so many ways of stopping ourselves from achieving those possibilities, that something to force us to open up those windows and fling open some doors is a good start.

I just finished reading, for the first time, Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle. The initial premise is completely wild in a good way (I won’t spoil it for you), but as I read it I found myself wondering “where can he go with this?” It seemed as though he was writing himself into a corner.

Then, in the very last scene, there was a revelation that was so unexpected, so utterly brilliant in its perfectly logical nuttiness, that it took my breath away. A simple line of dialog spoken by one character to another, and the book I was holding in my hands, that I had just spent several amused and curious hours reading, suddenly took on a completely new and far more interesting meaning.

The experience of encountering such a completely unexpected ending calls into question the implied contract between author and reader. What are the rules when we pick up a novel, meet some characters, start to care about them? What does the author owe to our relationship with these characters? And what does it mean when the author suddenly pulls the rug out from under that relationship?

I have had some bad experiences with sudden literary revelations that shift reality and therefore my relationship to characters, such as the ambitious but misfired film Identity. On the other hand, I have had very positive experiences. Among the films I have seen, Christopher Nolan’s Memento, Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation, and several works of Hitchcock come to mind.

But I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything like the quietly monumental jolt I got in the last scene of The Man in the High Castle. If you have not yet read it, you are in for a treat.

This evening I went to see Ben Katchor’s The SlugBearers of Kayrol Island or The Friends of Dr. Rushower, a theatre piece in which live actors are completely integrated with animation projected onto huge movable flat panels that constitute the walls of the stage.

I’ve seen things before that try to do things like that, but what struck me about this production is that finally somebody got it right. From the opening image, in which the audience sees a huge hand drawn animation of a telephone, and then notices a real-life telephone. As the actress playing a main character walks onto the stage to pick up the real phone, we see a cartoon hand reach for the animated phone.

And suddenly, in one moment, we realize that the animated phone is actually about the young woman’s state of mind, her sense of anticipation at the mystery and possibility of a fateful phone call from a stranger.

In that one simple gesture at the start of the play, it is established to the audience that the animated walls will be showing a kind of internal reflection of the thoughts of the characters, and always in a subtle and somewhat indirect way.

This approach leads to a kind of new medium, where live action is subliminally underscored and commented upon by animation. There are similarities to the work that Bob Sabiston did for the Richard Linklater film Waking Life, but with some crucial differences.

One of those crucial differences is that this is a live performance. There is always the possiblity of some level of improvisation, of the unexpected performative moment, and so we get the best of both worlds – the abstraction and compression of animation, together with the immediacy and excitement of live acting.

Seeing things like this makes me very happy.

The other day I went with a friend to see a movie in a fairly large movie theatre. Just as my friend and I were getting up to leave we happened to see, mounted high up on the back wall, just below the projection booth, a big bright display that was streaming text messages in red LED lights. And all the text was backwards, reversed left to right. We could make out a message that was saying something like “Thank you for using the reflection message system” (I can’t remember the exact words).

After about ten seconds I suddenly realized what I was looking at, and why it was there, and that I was seeing something incredibly clever. I asked my friend if she could figure out what it was for. To my surprise she could not, so I told her. Shortly after that I met up with some other friends – really smart friends – and told them what we had seen, and asked them if they could figure out why it was there. And they couldn’t either.

So today I posed the same question to an entire room full of really smart computer science graduate students. To my amazement not one of them could figure out the purpose of the thing I was describing, no matter how long I gave them to work it out.

So I guess I must have been in some sort of unusual space in my head, that I was able to realize right away what I was seeing in that movie theatre. Or, far more likely, I just got lucky.

Can you figure it out?

I spent today with my parents, and my father gave me a bound copy of his recently completed memoirs, which for the last few years our family has been happily watching him write, and sometimes pitching in to help him copy-edit. Dad spent a good chunk of his boyhood on the upstate New York farm of his Russian Jewish immigrant grandparents, and these memoirs form a kind of a window into that exotic time and place.

Rural New York back then was very different from the big city; many aspects of life that we associate with the 19th century were still firmly in place well into the mid-20th, and in his boyhood my father experienced much of that now lost world first-hand. You can read the finished work for yourself on-line. It’s called A Shtetl in America, and I think it’s a great read.

Here is just one excerpt – one of the stories his grandfather had told him from a time even before Dad was born. A lot of the stories are very serious, but somehow I like this one because, well, it isn’t:

My grandfather told me an interesting story about his neighbors Sam and Julia. Julia was an extrovert who loved to go to town and speak with the women there at a time before they owned a car. One day Sam and Julia had gone to town together. He wanted to go home in their horse and buggy, and she wanted to continue talking with a woman friend of hers. Finally Sam threatened that if she didn’t stop within five minutes, he would take his pants off right in the middle of town. She ignored him and continued to talk. At the end of five minutes he stood up in the buggy, unbuttoned his pants right there in the middle of town, and let his pants down. Everybody stopped to look and saw that when he pulled his pants down, he was wearing another pair of pants underneath.

By the way, in the picture – in case you were wondering – Dad’s the handsome young fellow on the left.

Three days in a row now I have gone with a different friend to see something that turns out to have a dark and despairing view of individual fates and the relationships between people. On Thursday it was Pinter’s The Homecoming, last night was No Country for Old Men, and then this afternoon was a European puppet show Fabrik about a nice Jewish guy who ends up exterminated by the Nazis. At least the puppet show had singing and dancing.

So this evening I cleanse my palette. I am off now to see Definitely, Maybe, because sometimes you just have to get off your cultural high horse and take in a good romantic comedy.

Know what I mean?

There's a room in my soul where the old shattered dreams
Lie in pieces all over the floor
Where the stillness of time shades the windows, it seems
And a demon stands guard at the door

But sometimes a memory lights in my mind
And it shines in the soft attic air
And a strange kind of music plays sweetly and kind
That I let myself hear, if I dare

This flower of the mountain, this girl Andalusion,
This force I could not understand
Yes your touch Miss Helenius was, in conclusion
The caress of a Theremin hand

But like delicate fragrance of madeleines dipped
Into lime-flowers long gone away
Your succulent kiss so deliciously sipped
Beguiles me even today

Of course you can say it backwards… oh never mind.

This morning I became curious to discover the ancient roots of Valentine’s Day. A Google search led to the following historical precedent (it’s on the internet, so we know it has to be true):

In ancient Rome, February 15 was Lupercalia, the festival of Lupercus (or Faunus), the god of fertility. As part of the purification ritual, the priests of Lupercus would sacrifice goats and a dog to the god, and after drinking wine, they would run through the streets of Rome striking anyone they met with pieces of the goat skin. Young women would come forth voluntarily for the occasion, believing that being touched by the goat skin would render them fertile.

Not at all pleasant for the goats and dogs, but so much more interesting than sending a Hallmark Card.

Speaking of V.D., an intriguing question came up in a conversation with a friend today. Suppose you are unattached on Valentine’s Day, and so you are planning to pamper yourself, to treat yourself to a film. One film only, old or new. Which film would you pick? I had asserted in my conversation with my friend that it probably wouldn’t be The Pawnbroker, but that doesn’t really narrow things down very much.

And once I had recognized
the taste of the crumb of madeleine
soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers
which my aunt used to give me
(although I did not yet know and must long postpone
the discovery of why this memory made me so happy)
immediately the old grey house
upon the street, where her room was,
rose up like the scenery of a theatre
to attach itself to the little pavilion,
opening on to the garden,
which had been built out behind it for my parents
(the isolated panel which until that moment
had been all that I could see);
and with the house the town,
from morning to night and in all weathers,
the Square where I was sent before luncheon,
the streets along which I used to run errands,
the country roads we took when it was fine.
And just as the Japanese amuse themselves
by filling a porcelain bowl with water
and steeping in it little crumbs of paper
which until then are without character or form,
but,
the moment they become wet,
stretch themselves and bend,
take on colour and distinctive shape,
become flowers or houses or people,
permanent and recognisable,
so in that moment all the flowers in our garden
and in M. Swann's park,
and the water-lilies on the Vivonne
and the good folk of the village
and their little dwellings
and the parish church
and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings,
taking their proper shapes and growing solid,
sprang into being,
town and gardens alike,
from my cup of tea.

– Marcel Proust (translated by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff)