The All-Important Present Moment

by

Carina Chocano

1. Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film “Stalker” may be the slowest movie ever made. At 163 perversely action-sapped minutes, it makes shifting tectonic plates look positively sprightly by comparison.

To the extent that it’s about anything, “Stalker” is about two men, known only as the Writer and the Professor, who hire a guide (the Stalker) to lead them through a post-apocalyptic wasteland called the Zone to a mystical place called the Room, where their deepest desires will be fulfilled.

The payoff is paltry. When the three men arrive at the entrance to the Room, the Professor reveals his plan to blow it up. His plan is thwarted, nobody goes inside and no desires are granted. “In any case, the whole idea of the Room is a joke,” writes Geoff Dyer in “Zona,” his book on the film. “Perhaps our deepest wish in life is that there could be a place like this, a Room where our deepest wish comes true. Extrapolating from that, we don’t want to get to the point where we discover that we actually don’t want this room to exist. . . . One’s deepest desire changes from day to day, moment to moment.”

Dyer has likened the Zone to the cinema — a place “where ultimate truths are revealed.” And perhaps the truth can thrive there, Dyer writes jokingly, because the Zone “is one of the few territories left — possibly the only one — where the rights to ‘Top Gear’ have not been sold.” And it’s true. There really aren’t many places left on Earth — real, fictional, imaginary or otherwise — where we’re not being told exactly what to long for, and where to get it, all the time.

2. Tarkovsky wrote a book about cinema called “Sculpting in Time.” At least this was the English title. It can be translated more literally as “Depicted Time” or “Written Time,” which sound less poetic but feel more accurate. A devotee of eternal takes and glacial tracking shots, Tarkovsky was a sworn nemesis of rapid-cut editing and other filmic conventions that alter our perception of time, which we, the audience, often expect and demand. For Tarkovsky, the cinematic image was “essentially the observation of a phenomenon passing through time,” and an image became “authentically cinematic when (amongst other things) not only does it live within time, but time also lives within it.”

3. If you’re looking for a brief definition of exactly what Hollywood movies are not at this moment, you could do a lot worse than this characterization.

4. The other day I passed a billboard for “Man of Steel,” the new Superman movie, and for a second I imagined what would happen if it were instead marketed as something like “This Again.” Of course that would never happen, because the culture is now locked in an infinite, recursive feedback loop that can never be officially acknowledged lest it short-circuit and cease to self-perpetuate.

Our experience of time and space has radically shifted as technology has collapsed, compressed, chopped, flipped and scrambled it, teppanyaki-style. As Douglas Rushkoff writes in “Present Shock,” his new book about technology and time: “Our society has reoriented itself to the present moment.” As a result, our experience has become, he notes, “an entropic, static hum of everybody trying to capture the slipping moment. . . . What we are doing at any given moment becomes all-important — which is behavioristically doomed.”

Most mainstream movies are less interested in observing phenomena passing through time than they are in observing objects flying through space (teppanyaki-style) and less concerned with revealing ultimate truths than selling infinite tickets. This has always been so, only more so lately. It seems as if the more a movie promises to manipulate, negate, ignore or just plain refuse to acknowledge or engage with the passage of time, the more entertaining and therefore commercial it’s perceived to be. Which is behavioristically doomed.

Credits:  This articles was originally published in 2013 in The New York Times.

Big Wind

by

Theodore Roethke

Charles Burchfield

Where were the greenhouses going,
Lunging into the lashing
Wind driving water
So far down the river
All the faucets stopped?—
So we drained the manure-machine
For the steam plant,
Pumping the stale mixture
Into the rusty boilers,
Watching the pressure gauge
Waver over to red,
As the seams hissed
And the live steam
Drove to the far
End of the rose-house,
Where the worst wind was,
Creaking the cypress window-frames,
Cracking so much thin glass
We stayed all night,
Stuffing the holes with burlap;
But she rode it out,
That old rose-house,
She hove into the teeth of it,
The core and pith of that ugly storm,
Ploughing with her stiff prow,
Bucking into the wind-waves
That broke over the whole of her,
Flailing her sides with spray,
Flinging long strings of wet across the roof-top,
Finally veering, wearing themselves out, merely
Whistling thinly under the wind-vents;
She sailed until the calm morning,
Carrying her full cargo of roses.

Rebecca West: This Time, Let's Listen

by

Larry Wolff

In a hotel in Belgrade in 1937, Rebecca West watched businessmen at the bar lifting their glasses and slapping each other on the back. "That I might have seen in London or Paris or New York. But in none of those great cities have I seen hotel doors slowly swing open to admit, unhurried and at ease, a peasant holding a black lamb in his arms." There he stood, waiting, "still as a Byzantine king in a fresco, while the black lamb twisted and writhed in the firm cradle of his arms." Rebecca West recorded the image with reverence.

In that same hotel there was a Slovene chambermaid, "the gentlest and sweetest of women," who believed herself terribly sensitive to the scent of foreigners. She "staggered from room to room on her round of duties, almost in need of a gas-mask when she came to making the beds." The German guests smelled bad in 1937, and the French smelled "wicked and puzzling," but she fully refreshed her suffering olfactory sense in the exquisite fragrance "which hung about the rooms occupied by Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes." This susceptible servant, who might make beds in the magical fictional worlds of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Salman Rushdie or Patrick Suskind, was, in fact, in the historical Yugoslavia of Rebecca West. She cherished the chambermaid, because she wanted to believe that Eastern Europe was different from Western Europe, even perhaps magically different. For she had come to Yugoslavia, in a decade of deepening political nightmare, believing that civilization was at stake in Europe (and it was), seeking to enlarge her understanding of that civilization. When "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" was published in 1941, Hitler had made himself the master of Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia had been bombed and abolished, and Rebecca West found that she had been a visitor to a now lost world. At that moment in history, Rebecca West's book challenged Britain and America to cherish an image of Europe in its full moral and political dimensions, to recognize unequivocally that Eastern Europe was a necessary part of Europe.

"I know you did not really want to come to Yugoslavia at all," she said to her husband, the banker Henry Andrews, in their sleeper on the train, as related on the first page of the book. "But when you get there you will see why it was so important that we should make this journey." This injunction was directed at the reader as well, about to embark upon a work of more than a thousand pages, bafflingly resistant to classification by genre: travel memoir, historical meditation, philosophical encyclopedia, political prophecy. Yet it was recognized immediately in 1941 as a weird masterpiece and it has since become the supreme literary monument of one of the most brilliant writers of the 20th century.

If Rebecca West's journey was important 50 years ago, it is no less so today, when all of Eastern Europe has undergone a revolution and waits on the threshold of an uncertain future, while its cultural relation to Europe as a whole remains a matter of evasion and uncertainty. The Iron Curtain of the cold war so emphatically defined Eastern Europe on all of our mental maps that it was almost impossible to see that curtains of less solid stuff had been drawn across the continent for two centuries. The idea of Eastern Europe as the continent's backward half was invented in Western Europe, to illuminate by contrast the greater glory of "Western" civilization. Rebecca West was a journalist on the trail of that dishonest, self-serving appropriation of Eastern Europe, seeking to invert a tradition of condescension and to redefine the mapping of civilization in Europe.

After first visiting Mozart's birthplace in Salzburg, she boarded a train to Zagreb, in Croatia, that was coming from Hitler's Berlin. She found the German passengers "hideous." Zagreb, however, was not escape enough, for in Croatia she felt the shadow of past Austrian rule and German influence, somehow ruining even the patterns of regional embroidery. In the intensely bitter rivalry between Serbs and Croats that was tearing apart Yugoslavia in 1937, as it is today, Rebecca West was a partisan of the civilization of Serbia and the unity of Yugoslavia.

The Yugoslavia created after World War I was a union of lands with dramatically different cultural and political histories: of the Ottoman, Hapsburg or Venetian empires, of the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic or Muslim religions. Royal authority in Belgrade met resistance to centralized administration throughout the interwar period, and after World War II Communist Yugoslavia assumed its contemporary form as a union of federated republics: Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Rebecca West in 1937 was politically committed to one unified Kingdom of Yugoslavia, but the literary structure of her travel narrative recognized the historically diverse lands as she journeyed from Croatia and Dalmatia to Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia and Macedonia.

In Bosnia, at Sarajevo, she meditated upon the assassination of the Austrian Archduke in 1914, her sympathies with the Serb assassin. She watched peasant women at the Sarajevo market, guessed that they were illiterate, but found that their behavior reminded her of a natural aristocracy: one woman demonstrating an unpolished elegance of manners, another exhibiting a sharp and ready wit. In Macedonia, at Skoplje, Rebecca West celebrated Easter in a moonlight procession and marveled at the magic of the Orthodox ritual, the beauty of Byzantium, "the sweetness spilled from the overturned cup of Constantinople" that consoled Eastern Europe during its terrible historical convulsions.

In the 1930's Rebecca West was already celebrated in Britain and America for her fiction and criticism; she was "the incomparable Rebecca" to Alexander Woollcott, who also commented on her extraordinary beauty. Born Cicely Isabel Fairfield, she assumed the pen name Rebecca West in 1912, writing as a feminist and suffragette; she sometimes employed the complementary pseudonym of Rachel East. As Rebecca West she published her first novel, "The Return of the Soldier," in 1918, and in 1928 a controversial book of literary criticism, "The Strange Necessity," which began by making fun of the poetry of James Joyce. She was an increasingly important British voice in American journalism, writing reviews and articles for The New York Herald Tribune, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. When Clifton Fadiman reviewed "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" in The New Yorker in 1941, praising its brilliance, he invoked precisely the perspective that she sought to efface: "Why should this highly cultivated Englishwoman make pilgrimage after pilgrimage to these dark lands and these violent and often primitive peoples?" Her husband asked too, for she had been there once before without him. "Was it so wonderful there?" She replied: "Well there is everything there. Except what we have. But that seems very little." The appetite for life, the still vital traditions, the unswerving religious faith Rebecca West found in her travels seemed to her to present a profound contrast with the insecurity and exhaustion that characterized Western Europe in the 1930's.

The figure of the cultivated traveler to the dark lands of Eastern Europe was as old as the idea of Eastern Europe itself. The Italian Renaissance confidently preserved the classical perspective on Europe, the civilization of the South disdaining the barbarism of the North; this was Europe viewed from Rome, Florence or Venice. In the 17th century, however, new centers of culture and commerce -- Paris, London, Amsterdam -- began to suggest a different perspective on the map of Europe, and in the 18th century the Enlightenment accomplished a conceptual reorientation: a civilized Western Europe in contrast to a backward Eastern Europe.

In Russia, in 1765, Casanova purchased a 13-year-old girl as a sexual slave for 100 rubles and set about improving his property by teaching her to speak Italian and to wear French clothes. The Italian Abbe de Fortis, in 1770, felt that he was leaving "the polite parts of Europe" in crossing the Adriatic to Dalmatia. Yet the Count de Segur, traveling east in 1784, declared that "when one enters Poland, one believes one has left Europe entirely." By the beginning of the 19th century such observations were becoming fixed and formulaic. Mme. de Stael defined Russia as a "melange of European civilization and Asiatic character." Balzac applied the same formula more broadly: "The inhabitants of the Ukraine, Russia, the plains of the Danube, in short, the Slav peoples, are a link between Europe and Asia, between civilization and barbarism."

Rebecca West was conscious of these condescending categories of analysis and wrestled with them as she traveled. She might relish intimations of the Orient, but she refused to cast Yugoslavia as a missing link between civilization and barbarism. Among the Muslim Slavs of Sarajevo, she saw a veiled woman in lilac silk, then caught a glimpse behind the veil of a face "completely un-Oriental, as luminously fair as any Scandinavian." Indeed, the lesson Rebecca West learned from Yugoslavia, and preached to Britain and America in "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon," was that Eastern Europe, in defiance of the formulas, emphatically belonged to Europe, that Europe was incomplete without it, that Western Europe alone was poor and sick without the complement of Eastern Europe's health and wealth. "We are Europeans," she might have cried on behalf of the Slavs in 1937, but in fact that affirmation was made by Mikhail Gorbachev 50 years later, denouncing the still pervasive equation of Europe with Western Europe. In a peculiarly seamless historical fit, the cliches of the cold war have followed and reinforced the formulas of the Enlightenment, dramatizing the distinction between Western Europe and Eastern Europe. Rebecca West saw the error in that equation 50 years ago.

When Lady Mary Wortley Montagu visited Belgrade in 1717, that highly cultivated Englishwoman found it an Ottoman fortress, entirely of the Orient. She described in her "Turkish Embassy Letters" how her host in Belgrade, Achmet-Beg, introduced her to Arabic love poetry, and she appeared oblivious to Serbia as a Slavic land: "I really believe I should learn to read Arabic if I was to stay here a few months." For Rebecca West in 1937, Serbia was a land triumphantly reclaimed from Ottoman oppression, if not yet enthusiastically embraced by Western Europe. Her host in Belgrade was a Serbian poet and Yugoslav official of Polish Jewish descent, called Constantine in the book; he was in love with Rebecca West, as the reader may guess. Her hostess was Constantine's German wife, called Gerda, whom Rebecca West hated from the moment they met at the Belgrade station, Gerda's "grey eyes so light and clear that they looked almost blind." She is the mesmerizing villain of "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon," a German villain for the 1930's, despising Yugoslavia and the Slavs, enraging Rebecca West. The narrative acquires the quality of a nightmarish novel when the English couple find themselves accompanied not only by Constantine but also by Gerda as they entrain for Macedonia. The train trip through the Balkans was a literary device of the 1930's in England, used in Graham Greene's "Stamboul Train" of 1932 and in Agatha Christie's "Murder on the Orient Express" of 1934. In 1937 Rebecca West offered her enemy the window seat, perhaps politely, perhaps provocatively. "That would be interesting, no doubt," said Gerda, "if one had the slightest intention of looking out of the window."

In refusing to look at Yugoslavia, Gerda spat upon Rebecca West's pilgrimage of visions and revelations. "When I see these people I feel I am not in Europe," said Gerda in Macedonia. There was, she maintained, "no order here, no culture, but only a mish-mash of different peoples who are all quite primitive and low." In 1937 this was also the language of scholarship about Eastern Europe in Nazi Germany: a geographer at Gottingen was writing in that year about Lithuania and its "primitive settlements without inner order." Gerda was there at the war memorial to the German soldiers who died fighting against Serbia in World War I, and watching her Rebecca West was certain that they "intend to come back and do it all over again as soon as they are given a chance." Gerda was also there at the French war memorial, to comment by the graves, "Think of all these people dying for a lot of Slavs."

Rebecca West cherished the Slavs, and described them as remarkably handsome: "This man was a Slav. The fair hair, the high cheekbones, the sea-blue eyes showed it." Her recurring attention to physiognomy was in strange and defiant counterpoint to contemporary anthropology in Nazi Germany, where the prominence of cheekbones, among other measurements of the skull, was studied as racial science, and construed to establish the inferiority of Jews and Slavs in Eastern Europe. Rebecca West laughed at the ideal of the Aryan German, comparing it to the reality of the "pear-shaped" German tourists in Yugoslavia. She and her husband took Nazism seriously though, and recognized Gerda as its voice. Europe would have to brace itself for "Gerda's assault on those who are not Gerda," and perhaps endure the establishment of "Gerda's empire."

The black lamb in the hotel bar in Belgrade was only an intimation. The black lamb of the title awaited the travelers in Macedonia, where it was sacrificed upon a huge rock, amid cocks' heads and candles, in a bloody fertility rite. Rebecca West was revolted, but she did not see the sacrifice as evidence of barbarism in Eastern Europe. On the contrary: "I knew this rock well. I had lived under the shadow of it all my life. All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing." To express her own rejection of that pretense she invoked the spirit of Mozart while standing at the rock in Macedonia, Mozart whose music conceded nothing to the sordid indulgence of pain and sacrifice.

Rebecca West was solemn in her passion for Yugoslavia, never more so than at the battlefield of Kosovo. It was there in 1389 that Serbia fell to the Ottoman empire. Contemplating Kosovo, she imagined imperial rule as "the night of evil," five centuries long, compelling subject peoples to a life of "sheer nonsense, the malignant nonsense of cancerous growth." She hated the idea of empire, the Ottoman empire that shadowed Serbia, the Hapsburg empire that shadowed Croatia; she hated and dreaded Gerda's empire that was yet to come.

At the same time the author herself was implicated: "I was born a citizen of one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen." Rebecca West even had a weakness for beautiful empresses, and in the opening pages of the book, meditating upon the assassination of the Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1898, she imagined Elizabeth saying to her subject peoples: "Look, I am the Empress, but I am not evil." The plea was perhaps appropriate to Rebecca West herself, traveling from Western Europe to Eastern Europe, sensitive to the inevitability of being reviewed as "this highly cultivated Englishwoman" in "dark lands" among "primitive peoples," reviewed in the fraught language of past travelers, which was now too the language of Gerda.

It was at Kosovo that Rebecca West heard the poem of the gray falcon, recited by Dragutin, the handsome chauffeur. A gray falcon came to the Serbian czar on the eve of the battle and offered him the choice between an earthly kingdom in victory or a heavenly kingdom in defeat. So he chose defeat. Rebecca West hated his choice. "I do not believe that any man can procure his own salvation by refusing to save millions of people from miserable slavery." For it was evident to her in 1937 that "the whole world is a vast Kossovo," that the black lamb and gray falcon worked together to betray the virtuous, offered in sacrifice "to Gerda's knife." Rebecca West did not spare herself: "I had sinned in the same way, I and my kind, the liberals of Western Europe," who could not "cast off this infatuation with sacrifice." In 1938 the black lamb was Czechoslovakia. Neville Chamberlain was high priest in the cult of the black lamb and the gray falcon, and when he went to Munich Rebecca West thought, "I have been here before" and remembered Kosovo.

When she was finally finishing her enormous manuscript, the Battle of Britain had begun. "Now we in England stood alone. Now we, who had been unchallenged masters of the world, were poor and beset like the South Slavs." She took pride and inspiration from Yugoslavia's defiant resistance to Hitler. She thought of the bombing of Belgrade as German bombs still fell on London, and prayed for courage: "Let me behave like a Serb." Or else she would put a record on the gramophone, the chambermaid Susanna's aria from the last act of "The Marriage of Figaro," "Deh, vieni, non tardar" ("O come, do not delay"). An explosion overwhelmed the aria, but then the song continued, testifying to art, to civilization. It was in the mountains of Montenegro in 1937, where both the landscapes and the features of the inhabitants appeared utterly alien and unnaturally beautiful, that Rebecca West said to herself, "My civilization must not die." Her pilgrimage to Yugoslavia taught her to believe in her civilization, and just in time.

One day in Yugoslavia, Rebecca West met "a good-looking young man who was stripped to the waist." There are so many good-looking young men in "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" that the reader may at first be no more aware than the author that this one was special. "You may wonder why I approached you when my torso is nude," he said, "but I did so in full confidence for I am sure that you are people who have swept all unwholesome prejudices out of your minds, and are open-minded and receptive to such healthful ideas as sun-bathing." He said he was a Communist. The bemused report of his conversation suggests that Rebecca West did not appreciate the significance of this encounter with the future of Yugoslavia. In fact, she was later outraged when Churchill supported Tito's partisans against the Nazis, instead of the royalist resistance to Hitler led by Draza Mihailovic. She remained loyal to the young King Peter of Yugoslavia, envisioning him in 1941 as another Byzantine king in a fresco, like the kings of medieval Serbia, "rigid in his kingliness, as the earlier dynasty in their jewelled tunics and colossal diadems."

Rebecca West was never reconciled to the postwar Yugoslav Government; Communism appeared less benign when fully clothed. Though she took pride in Yugoslavia's resistance to Hitler in 1941, she was unable to appreciate Tito's achievement when Yugoslavia became the first country in Eastern Europe to achieve independence from the Soviet bloc, in 1948. Rebecca West's passion for Yugoslavia conditioned her postwar anti-Communism, which, sadly, then alienated her from the Yugoslavia she loved; she never went back. She died in 1983, three years after Tito. The two of them, with their very different visions of Yugoslavia, were exact contemporaries, both born in 1892.

Our problem today is that for 50 years the single issue of Communism has completely colored all our conceptions of Eastern Europe, especially in defining its distinction from Western Europe. Our challenge will be to discover Eastern Europe anew, and recognize it without the ideological marks that have served for simple identification; our challenge will be to accept it as part of Europe, and not the lesser part. "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon," almost 50 years after its initial publication, astonishes us by the weight and depth of what Rebecca West knew about Yugoslavia, but above all it overwhelms us with the passionate urgency of her need to know, our need to know.

Credits:  This article was first published in The New York Times in 1991.

Write Up of Brasilian Novelist Moacry Sciliar by William Grimes

Moacyr Scliar, one of Brazil’s most celebrated novelists and short-story writers, whose existential allegories explored the complexities of Jewish identity in the Diaspora, died on Feb. 27, 2011 in Porto Alegre. He was 73.

The Brazilian Academy of Letters stated on its Web site (academia.org.br), that the cause was complications of a stroke.

Moacyr Scliar (pronounced Mwa-SEAR SKLEER) lived all his life in the city of Porto Alegre, the capital of Brazil’s southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul, to which many Eastern Europeans, like his parents, immigrated in the early 20th century.

The city and its Jewish quarter, Bom Fim, provided him with inexhaustible source material, as did his own preoccupation with the predicament of Jews in Brazil. The protagonist of his best-known novel, “The Centaur in the Garden” (1980), is a Jewish centaur born to Russian immigrant parents.

At home, you speak Yiddish, eat gefilte fish and celebrate Shabbat,” he told the Yiddish Book Center in 2003. “But in the streets, you have soccer, samba and Portuguese. After a while you feel like a centaur.”

“Max and the Cats,” about a Jewish youth who flees Nazi Germany on a ship carrying wild animals to a Brazilian zoo and, after a shipwreck, ends up sharing a lifeboat with a jaguar, achieved fame twice over. Critically praised on its publication in 1981, it touched off a literary storm in 2002 when the Canadian writer Yann Martel won the Man Booker Prize for “Life of Pi,” about an Indian youth trapped on a boat with a tiger.

Mr. Martel’s admission that he borrowed the idea led to an impassioned debate among writers and critics on the nature of literary invention and the ownership of words and images.

“In a certain way I feel flattered that another writer considered my idea to be so good, but on the other hand, he used that idea without consulting me or even informing me,” Mr. Scliar told The New York Times. “An idea is intellectual property.”

Moacyr Jaime Scliar was born in March 23, 1937, in Porto Alegre. His parents, who emigrated from Bessarabia in 1919, gave him a Brazilian Indian name in a nod to their new cultural surroundings. After attending both Yiddish and Roman Catholic schools, he obtained a medical degree in 1962 and practiced in the public health service until retiring in 1987.

He is survived by his wife, Judith, and a son, Roberto.

He came to public attention with his second collection of short stories, “The Carnival of the Animals,” whose intertwining of allegory, fable, fantasy and folklore and Borges-like excursions into metafiction, marked him as a distinctive new fictional voice.

“The Collected Stories of Moacyr Scliar,” rendered into English by his longtime translator Eloah F. Giacomelli, was published by the University of New Mexico Press in 1999.

In many of his novels, Mr. Scliar places a Jewish Brazilian protagonist in a dangerous, bewildering world whose external complexities reverberate in the hero’s interior journey of self-discovery. “The War in Bom Fim” (1972), for example, describes the coming of age of a young Jew in Porto Alegre during World War II and the pull of Zionism.

The central character of “The Strange Nation of Rafael Mendes” (1983) discovers that he is Jewish after finding his late father’s mysterious notebooks, which trace the family’s history back to Jonah.

“I owe to my Jewish origins the permanent feeling of wonderment that is inherent to the immigrant and the cruel, bitter and sad humor that through the centuries has served to protect Jews against despair,” Mr. Scliar told the reference work World Authors in 1991. “It is at the level of language, however, that these impulses are able to produce their effects. It is in language that I have faith, as a vehicle for aesthetic expression and also — and above all else — as an instrument for changing the world in which we live.”

Credits:  This article first appeared in 2011 in The New York Times.  It has been edited slightly for clarity.