It is taking far too long for me to get out of this jet lag. By 7 pm, I’m fading. My eyes want to shut down and I slip into effortless sleep. Except that I’m up by midnight and then wide awake for the next few hours. So I forced myself, two nights before, to stay awake till about 10 pm and took a sleeping pill I bought at the local pharmacy, Donormyl, so I wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night. The sleeping pill caused a new problem: it made me want to sleep all the time, even during the day. I lay in bed working in the morning yesterday and by 11 am, had dozed off to sleep and didn’t wake up till 2 pm. The same thing has happened today. I woke up feeling bright and energetic but shortly after coffee and a slice of toast, I wanted to do nothing but doze off to sleep.
Yesterday, during the few hours when I felt awake- and hungry – I took the no. 7 to the 10th arrondisement to an area known as Little Jaffna. There I ate idlis at Saravana Bhavan, where it was a marvel to see Tamil waiters conversing in Tamil, Indian English and (presumably French) French. Little Pondicherry, a restaurant, enticed customers to try standard Indian fare as well. One of the passages on Rue du Faubourg St-Denis comprised, almost entirely, Indian restaurants (with a North Indian man screaming matherchod at someone else walking away) and barber shops. An elderly gentleman at Saravana Bhavan ate idlis, ordered filter coffee and gleefully swiped at his smartphone, telling the waiter in Tamil that he could now read The Hindu sitting in Paris.
I ate, took the train back and barely made it awake.
I’m in Paris and jet-lagged, but well, I’m jet-lagged in Paris. The whole day has been gray, rainy and cold but comparably brighter than in Seattle for similar weather. In a week, I begin teaching. But I also need to finish my manuscript and start working on other articles by early next year. I expect to spend considerable time fretting and stressing myself out over the writing deadlines I have set myself. But hopefully this will not deter my desire to explore this famous – and by all accounts – exceptional, city. I’m staying in a colleague’s wonderful apartment in the 5th arrondissement.
Immigration at the airport took a long time just by dint of the number of windows open – two. (What was that saying that the French work to live, and don’t live to work?) Past customs, I had 90-odd minutes to kill for my shuttle. In the meantime, a homeless man asked me for money and when I said I don’t have any, he looked at me with a challenge in his eyes and said, “I know you have money”. Sure.
My shuttle driver was of South Asian descent- a Tamil from Sri Lanka. He asked me if I was Tamil too, looking at my last name on his list. I said yes. But we spoke in French (mine just enough to get through a conversation). I should have spoken in Tamil with him. But here I was in France, encountering a fellow Tamilian but unable to speak in our mutual language, inhibited. Aimé Césaire, get your pad out. (I’m in France; I’m going to practice my French not Tamil!) I just recalled that the first day I arrived in the United States, in New York in August 1997, my first visit to an eating establishment was to Pizza Mercato on 8th and Broadway. There too, the first South Asians I saw were Tamilians working with Italians.
For lunch, I ate a “panini-kebab”. For dinner, I ate gnocchi after doing some grocery shopping. I haven’t yet mustered the courage to sit in some pretty brasserie alone.
I’m severely jet-lagged. My wife thinks I’ve left her to her own devices in California to savor Paris. My father in Southern India wishes I were in India looking after him. My mother in Eastern India wishes she could live in the U.S. My sister in New Jersey has wished I lived closer so parental care were easier. I wish I could have a life that makes everyone happy. I wish I were my cats and I hope they wish I were with them. (I’m not sure I would wish them to wish they were me).
Re-reading Kracauer’s Calico-World essay in The Mass Ornament, after almost a decade, I think. Kracauer reflects on the UFA studios in Neubabelsberg, ca. 1930. Such an evocative and exhausting description, first and foremost, of material objects. The world is “cut to pieces” in the film studio and transformed into objects: Japanese cherry trees, churches, empty coffins, painted landscapes, skyscrapers, furniture. Kracauer’s stance is hardly celebratory – very early in the essay he describes the props of a film studio as “a bad dream about objects that has been forced into the corporeal realm”. The masters of this universe “lack any sense of history”. And “nature, in body and soul, has been put out to pasture”, he writes damningly.
So much of this essay on what Kracauer sees inside a film set, depends on his references to the outside world. But that’s one side of the equation. Paradoxically, Kracauer’s wry commentary also seems at the same time to draw on the power of self-evidence exerted by fictive universes in the medium of film. There is no politics here, he writes at one point: “a Bolshevist guardroom turns into a peaceful Swedish railway station”. Is that the description of a fantastical scene in a movie? Or a commentary on it from the outside?
Kracauer seems eager to assert, albeit in the form of a coruscating critique, his belief that the cinema redeems physical reality. At one point, he reminds us that there is nothing false about the materials we see in the UFA lots: wood, metal, glass, clay.” One could also make real things out of them, but as objects in front of the lens, the deceptive ones work just as well. After all, the lens is objective.”
How to integrate humans with the objects of the film studio? Humans and objects are integrated in the cinema because “light melts them together”.
The essay ends with an echo of its early reference to the world cut into pieces. The “foreman” (director) of this factory or workroom now sits with the film, “sifted, spliced, cut up and labeled”, putting it together. The world is cut up and transformed into objects in the film set; the objects and humans are melted by light and turned into film; the film is finally cut up and reorganized into a drama.
“Most of the time the result is good: glass clouds brew and then scatter”.
“Love, by your unnamed power have mercy on me. You are the light of my day and my days are nights. Why? Why? To pursue you without end? Why run away from me? Being further and further away, you make me pay, Love, a price too high. Woe is me to be a human being.”
Céline in Bruno Dumont’s Hadewijch (2009)
My mind’s clacking mill grinds and grinds/Words confound, ward off peace/I stack wood, beat, mangle, peg clothes/I moisten dry clay, turn damp earth, tend beet, onion, turnip. Silence: my true nature/ where nothing confuses your language, holy Mary/ Mother of us all…
I watched Bruno Dumont’s Hadewijch (2009) last night. I loved La Vie de Jesus, his first movie as well as L’Humanité, his second film. Michael Koresky has a fine review of the movie and gets it mostly right. The main character Céline is modeled as a modern-day Hedewijch, the 13th century poet and mystic who expressed her love for god in the language of courtship, of passionate unrequited love.
The plot, when summarized as a bare-bones summary, is indeed about a deeply religious teenage Christian girl who falls in with the wrong set, in this case Muslims from the banlieues of Paris who convince Céline to participate in their plans to engage in acts of violence which are themselves not specified but shown in an image of one explosion, and that too, without a full view of consequence: the smoke obscures our access to the destruction that the blast may have caused.
“He chose me.”
When the anguished Céline, as devout as her Muslim friends, says in a conversation with them, “He chose me”, and this is followed by a blast in Paris, we assume the worst- that she may have blown herself up, an easy target for brain-washing by terrorists. This as it turns out is not the case. The movie’s conclusion is far more poignant. And it is not inscrutable: Koresky seems to think it is. More on the ending later.
Koresky wonders if the movie serves easy meat for a discussion of politically offensive stereotypes about Arabs – impressionable (white) French teenager falls in with the wrong set, in this case Arabs in France plotting acts of violence. He also observes correctly that the movie makes it difficult however to settle on this simplistic summary given Dumont’s characteristic reticence when it comes to character motivation, and causality – not that events don’t make sense, but that Dumont moves in broad near-episodic and elliptical strokes from one stage of the narrative to another. That said, it is also not clear to me at all that Dumont seeks to expose, as Koresky puts it, the “apparent equivalency…between Christianity and Islam by conjoining the two in one horrific act”, to draw our attention to “the universal dangers of blind faith”, as Koresky puts it, with some skepticism at his own thesis.
There seems to be something more at stake in the movie than solely a programmatic assertion about religion. Dumont’s preoccupations with theology threaten, in my opinion, the more pragmatic implications of its plot.
For one, the movie’s images frequently indicate a sensuous engagement with the natural world. Céline’s presence, stooped in faith, but also profoundly physical and often abject (tears flow freely from eyes that reveal anguish and torment) should clue us to a form of passion that is not just expressed in physical terms but seems to consume and saturate the body that merges the passionate and the devout. Her passage through the dark green forests, a tiny figure dwarfed by trees; her final descent into the water, Mouchette-like (she walks in, unlike Mouchette who rolls over after lying on her side), and the rain that drenches her and a fellow inhabitant of the convent, are part of a sparse style interested not so much in the real as in the metaphysical. Even her abstinence and fasting draw attention to her physical presence. The senior nuns in the convent confuse this palpable devotion to the body of Christ with an excessive and misplaced desire for martyrdom, and expel her from the convent. In other words, what Céline prefers is not transcendence but incorporation and absorption.
Likewise, Dumont’s long takes compel us to observe the movement of its main characters in space. If the camera does not shift its view for long periods of time, it has to do with a desire to convey inhabitation as essential and inescapable condition of this-worldly existence. The long takes of the film are not part of an immersion in duration or in the cinema’s ontological affinities with the temporal register (unlike say in Tarkovsky). Nor are they like the unfolding political statement that characterizes Godard’s long take of the traffic jam in Weekend, an unfolding live-action scroll-painting of dysfunction. And they are certainly unlike the intensified narrative function that characterizes the long take in Touch of Evil. One can’t place them as a formalist allegory of the repression of political atrocities, as in Haneke’s Caché, where the long take relies on offscreen space to expose a historical “elsewhere” (as Libby Saxton put it in her perceptive reading of Caché) impinging on the present.
And to make matters even more cryptic, as in La Vie de Jesus and L’Humanité, a character on the margins of the plot emerges gradually as the embodiment of – well, embodiment, the Christ Hadewijch has been searching for all along.
Emaciated, ribs and collar bones visible, seemingly under-nourished, this character, a construction worker working on renovations to the convent, is shown as a face that demands our response even as it responds to Céline’s presence quite early in the movie.
Is the construction worker the carpenter of this narrative? Early in the movie, he is in fact detained by authorities and spends a night in jail. As Céline witnesses the consequences of a bombing, the carpenter’s mother holds his hand and hopes he will be fine now that he is out of jail. Something of a weariness marks many of Dumont’s working class characters and this scene between mother and son is no exception. And when not in search for a metaphysics Dumont strives for a bland realism of setting in defining his working class characters that should alert us as well that in the Dumontian universe there is no such thing as a stereotype, only the typical that afflicts the devout, the worker, the reactionary, the radical.
In the film’s most dramatic scene, and one accompanied by moving – and rare by the movie’s standards – non-diegetic music, Céline weeps:
“Love, by your unnamed power have mercy on me. You are the light of my day and my days are nights. Why? Why? To pursue you without end? Why run away from me? Being further and further away, you make me pay, Love, a price too high. Woe is me to be a human being.”
Then she walks into the water, disappearing to the ripples on the surface till a hand reaches in and pulls her out. Pressed tightly against the shirtless emaciated body of the worker who has just rescued her, Céline’s weeping face rests against the nape of his neck. The reverse shot reveals Céline’s back, and the face of the worker. The embrace is so tight Céline risks pulling the worker into the water as he momentarily tries to regain his footing. But the proximity of view risks pulling us into that embrace. The screen is intensely haptic at this point, and its depicted body as a location for solace.
It is against this faith of the body that the movie poses a different kind of faith, that of Yassine, the elder brother of Nasser, the boy who has taken a liking for Céline. Yassine is hardly portrayed as a terrorist, even though he does introduce Céline to friends who we assume are radical and potentially dangerous. It is Yassine who expresses the answer to the question Celine will pose to her god at the end: “Why run away from me?”.. He invites Céline to his weekly discourses on the Koran. In speaking of the god of the Koran, he speaks of god as being at once more visible and more invisible, of a simultaneous absence and presence, of seeing and the unseen, of the known and the hidden.
What the movie subtly contrasts with Hadewijch’s desire for incorporation is not entirely a radicalism of violence and death, but a philosophy of the divine that is in fact perhaps too incorporeal, too (dangerously?) reasoning a mode of belief compared to the one Hadewijch desires (forward to 8:47 in following clip for relevant scene):
The lecherous man in Yassine’s Quran class, who is censured by Yassine and whose looks compel Céline to leave the room as she listens to Yassine expound on the Quran, seems less intended to undercut the legitimacy of Yassine’s words, than to underscore Céline’s desire to reinforce her faith. If the lecherous man is Dumont’s attempt to expose the hypocrisies of religion, then the fabulous wealth of Céline’s parents is an attempt to justify her rejection of her own upbringing. And neither interpretation can be entirely convincing given that the narration of the movie hardly offers us an indication of how we are to interpret these scenes symptomatically in relation to a broader politics of culture, religion and class. The subsequent meeting with representatives of radical forces arranged by Yassine strikes me therefore as a scene that is under-motivated. The ensuing violence and chaos too seems cursory, or unconvincing in light of what we have seen of Yassine. Whether these aspects constitute the movie’s shortcoming, is a different matter.
There is a third mode of inhabiting the world, of experience as bliss posited by the movie in contrast to both Hadewijch and Yassine: that of the sensuous experience of music, of an aesthetics of everyday life. Dumont refuses to condense musical performances, instead treating us to the entirety of the performance of a band of young men who play a version of Bach on their accordion and rock guitar; and the entirety of a Chamber music performance.
It is Nasser, the young Muslim man, who seems closest to this domain of experience.As the band plays and as Nasser and Céline dance to their music – one of the few moments when we see her for the teenager that she really is – Nasser tries to kiss Céline but is rebuffed. Prone to rebelliousness, an insouciance to authority and property, and in love with Hadewijch, Nasser is nevertheless intellectually mature enough to sense the gravity of her devotion and leads her to his brother, as if he has already absorbed and reconciled himself to the dead-ends of the faith of his elder brother and of the girl he likes. It is with Nasser, that we witness a lightness of experience, of living, of being in this world and in this moment, that is transient. Even Céline seems unable to always resist the allure of his young man’s attitude to his life.
To think of this movie then as a contrast between faith and politics, between Christianity and Islam, seems woefully misplaced. Dumont is after something else – through a kind of grounded realism he exposes us to the unresolved tensions between the many ways of inhabiting this world, and the equally numerous ways in which faith manifests itself as experience, intellection, in-habitation, as a mode of action and finally as incorporation.
An essay in the New York Times takes up the topic of “mental drift”, and distractedness without entirely buying into clinical terms like ADHD, or psychological ones such as “top-down processing deficit”. Instead, the essay’s author John Plotz suggests that while this kind of distraction may seem new, and germane only to the age of proliferating social media, in fact it is as old as the fourth and fifth centuries, when it particularly affected monks. And it was called Acedia or the “noonday demon”.
Who are the people prone to Acedia?
Acedia “afflicted those whose pursuits prefigured the routines of many workers in the postindustrial economy. Acedia’s sufferers were engaged in solitary, sedentary, cerebral effort toward a clear final goal — but a goal that could be reached only by crossing an open, empty field with few signposts. The empty field is the monk’s day of spiritual contemplation in a cell besieged by the demon acedia — or your afternoon in a coffee shop with tiptop Wi-Fi.”
Ask any tenured or tenure track academic, especially in the humanities, and they will say this describes their own work-lives. The solitary, cerebral and sedentary work of turning out publications pretty much describes the kind of work I am required to do. I would add the near-absence of routine outside of set teaching hours to this description. Then there is the clear final goal [tenure!] – that can only be reached by crossing an open, empty field with few signposts [your contract/university handbook for faculty, the occasional chat with a senior colleague or chair].
Plotz goes on to write:
“When I read [St. John] Cassian [a 4th century theologian] on “disgust with the cell,” I look around my own office and sigh deeply; and I greet like an old friend the monk whose gaze “rests obsessively on the window” while “with his fantasy he imagines the image of someone who comes to visit him.” Cassian’s description of acedia as mental drift, meanwhile, perfectly encapsulates the pointless and random detours that stop me from bearing down on a particular page: “The mind is constantly whirling from psalm to psalm, . . . tossed about fickle and aimless through the whole body of Scripture.””
So what is to be done? Plotz offers up a number of responses to this condition.
The monks figured out that collaborative work in convivial contexts might ward off distraction and drift. Scientists are one step ahead of humanists in this regard. But in our time, self-disciplining is also a crucial antidote: the failure of which says more about the person than the context. Then there is consolation to be drawn from the fact that like moths drawn to the fire, we keep courting the temptation of our solitary work-lives, including its attendant risks.
Plotz’s essay is worth reading. I don’t think it has solutions as much as consolations for being unable to “bear down the page” without being distracted. But at least I can bond with my 4th century theological desert father in common purpose.
