'Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age'...

The snow falling faintly outside this afternoon has brought back memories of one of my favourite films ever, one that I always watch with deep emotion.

John Huston's final work, a faithful adaptation of James Joyce's short story 'The Dead', from the collection Dubliners, is an elegiac tale about the inexorable passing of time, the perception of ageing and mortality, and the ways in which the memory of loss impinges on our relationship with the present.

http://www.videodetective.com/movies/trailers/the-dead-trailer/698

The backdrop of the story is a Christmas family reunion in the Dublin of the early 1900s, but its appeal is universal, beautiful, shattering, particularly the final scene in which Gabriel Conroy muses on his wife's revelation of her long-deceased lover and is overwhelmed by self-doubt, by regret at his own emotional paralysis and lack of passion, which make him suddenly aware of his own frailty, of the fading and passing of everything, as he contemplates the blank snowy landscape outside:



One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.


Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.


A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.


--from 'The Dead', by James Joyce.

the woman you cannot unmeet (2)

(cont.)

       The following day, after the green-curtain day, he was back. They ate cold spaghetti out of paper cups on the stoop. He said, I just don't know if I want to marry you. She snorted. What? He said, I'm sorry but I'm just not certain that you are my future wife. She spit some spaghetti out on the stoop in a little red clump and he thought it was gross and she was laughing again, not with, definitely at. He said, I always thought the woman I'd marry would hit me easy, in a bolt of lightning, and there is no lightning there is not even thunder there is not even rain. It all feels, well, foggy, he said. And she said, What makes you sure I want to marry you? and he said, Oh, hmmm, and she said, Why would I consider marrying a man whose brain is so bossy? I need a man with some calm, she said. He looked at her nose, thin and long and her eyes thin and long the other direction and her hair was straight and long and shone. He had a bite of spaghetti off her fork. They sat for a while on the stoop and watched the lizards skit and scat until the mailman came by and delivered some letters - two bills and a postcard from her cousin on an island. She made faces at the bills and laughed at the postcard and scrutinized the little type in the upper left-hand corner telling her where it was and then looked at the picture on the front for longer than he had ever looked at all the postcards of his entire life.

       When they made love that day it was one step closer to making sense and she brought them some wine afterward and they sat and watched the sunset through the green curtains, naked, with deep-bellied glasses of wine. The green darkened into black. He let his hand trace each of her vertebrae and she did not say, That tickles, stop, like he thought she might. She just looked out the muted curtain and her hair swished at an angle. He moved his fingers down her whole spine, one by one, and during the time it took to do that, his brain remained absolutely quiet.

       It is these empty spaces you have to watch out for, as they floodup with feeling before you even realize what's happened; before you find yourself, at the base of her spine, different.

Aimee Bender, 'The Meeting' in Willful Creatures (NY: Anchor, 2005), pp. 54-55.

the woman you cannot unmeet (1)

Work piles up on my desk at an alarming rate at this time of the year, but I can't resist the urge. The reading frenzy began with Robert Walser - eagerly awaiting a massive package from Amazon... - and in the meantime has taken me elsewhere.

One of the things that draws me to a writer's world is the capacity to render life's manifold absurdities and unexpectedness in the most down-to-earth register. At once funny and unsettling, playful and gloomy, a harsh light stubbornly illuminating your depths.

When reading Walser's tales 'The Man with the Pumpkin Head' or 'Nothing at All', I couldn't help thinking of Aimee Bender's wonderfully weird stories from Willful Creatures. And lo, I pick up a dog-eared copy from the shelf, and open it randomly only to find this absolute delight - which I leave here with an implicit dedication to kindred willful souls.

*       *       *

The Meeting

The woman he met. He met a woman. This woman was the woman he met. She was not the woman he expected to meet or planned to meet or had carved into his head in full dress with a particular nose and eyes and lips and a very particular brain. No, this was a different woman, the one he met. When he met her he could hardly stand her because she did not fit the shape in his brain of the woman he had planned so vigourously and extensively to meet. And the non-fit was uncomfortable and made his brain hurt. Go away, woman, he said, and the woman laughed, which helped for a second. He trailed the woman for a few days saying it was because he had nothing else to do, but in truth he did have plenty to do and he did not know why he was trailing her. His brain made a lot of shouts and static about his own brain's idea of color and sense of humor and what animals the woman he met would like (mammals) and his brain's own idea of how to be a member of the world, and everything that was sort of like him and yet different enough and still: this woman he met was the woman he met and however you try, you cannot unmeet.

       His brain was in utter panic at changing. His brain was very pleased with its current shape and did not want to shift, not one bit. This woman liked reptiles and fish. What sort of decent human being could possibly like reptiles and fish?

       He said, Go away, woman. You go away, she said, shooing him with her hand. You're the one following me around all the time.

       They went on a walk - or rather she went on a walk and he asked if he could join her - together over the small bridge which ran over a dry stream and looked down at rocks which jutted up like teeth. She talked significantly more than he expected the woman he met to talk and so while she was talking he thought she is surely, and clearly, not the woman for me. Blabbermouth, he thought. She paused at an oak tree and said, Did you stop listening? and so he started listening again and said some stuff himself, about this, about that. He liked talking to her. The woman said she did not know why she liked him, as he was being something of an irritation with all this static in his head and he said he was sorry, he liked her too, but his brain kept rejecting her and he did not know what to do about that. The woman said, Please, would you shut your brain down for five seconds and let the world participate a bit? No, said the man, I control the world. The woman's laughter bounced off the rocks below. The man laughed too but inside he still meant it.

       The woman said goodbye and went to her cottage and made some spaghetti and the next day guess who was at her door. Good afternoon. How are you, how are you. The spaghetti was fine-tuned and she was beautiful in the filtered sunlight and they made love that afternoon with the green sunlight through her green curtains. Her body was new to him and he did not like the way her shoulders were so broad and he very much liked the slope of her hips and he was scared because he did not know how to navigate the curves they made together. Later, when he would become a ship's captain on the waves of the water of their bodies, it turned out that those broad shoulders were the thing he would think of with the most lust and the most tenderness. Those broad shoulders would be what he would recognize in a crowd if they all had paper bags on their heads. Those broad shoulders he could spot across an ocean.

[cont.]

Aimee Bender, 'The Meeting' in Willful Creatures (NY: Anchor, 2005), pp. 51-53.