Author: White Whale

Sure enough, the king’s wish was fulfilled, and he immediately sent soldiers on to the highway to bring in the first three people whom they could find.

These three were, as it happened, a scholar, a Sayed (descendant of Muhammad the Prophet) and a prostitute.

Having them thrown down before his idol, the unbalanced king told them of his vow, and ordered them to all bow down in front of the image.

The scholar said: “This situation undoubtedly comes within the doctrine of ‘force majeure’. There are numerous precedents allowing anyone to appear to conform with custom if compelled, without real legal or moral culpability being in any way involved.”

So he made a deep obeisance to the idol.

The Sayed, when it was his turn, said: “As a specially protected person, having in my veins the blood of the Holy Prophet, my actions themselves purify anything which is done, and therefore there is no bar to my acting as this man demands.”

And he bowed down before the idol.

The prostitute said: “Alas, I have neither intellectual training nor special prerogatives, so I am afraid that, whatever you do to me, I cannot worship this idol, even in appearance.”

The mad king’s malady was immediately banished by this remark.  As if by magic he saw the deceit of the two worshippers of the image.  He at once had the scholar and the Sayed decapitated, and set the prostitute free.

Idries Shah, Wisdom of the Idiots. 45-46

But I was also drawing an interesting, to me, analogy, between the failure–the near universal failure, outside of one sidelined “fuck up”–to speak out about abuses that were widely known, and the failure of Christ’s followers to admit who they were.  Peter famously denied knowing him three times.

Later, the martyrdom which followed refusing to repudiate their faith created many Christian saints.  Regrettably, Christians are STILL being martyred in the Middle East, in many cases by people Obama actively supported.

But if you BELIEVE something, really believe it, really feel it from your toes to the top of your head, IT SHOWS.  Meryl Streep, Oprah, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck: they don’t REALLY believe in the rights of women.   Not when it is inconvenient.  And nobody was going to die if they told the full truth publicly.  They weren’t going to die.  It might not have even hurt their careers, which is to say their bank accounts and their vanity.

By their fruits ye shall know them applies equally to people who spout off about egalitarian virtue and human rights as Christians, who at least knowingly accept a standard of accountability.

Here is the thing: I do not feel hate in my heart for people who are different.  I myself am different, and always have been.  What I feel hate for is the people who want to destroy EVERYTHING.

It might be that, say, conservative Christians sometimes make homosexuals feel unwelcome.  This is bad, in some ways.  I continue to believe that exclusive homosexuality–versus bisexuality–is psychologically driven, but whether true or not, some people find this the most congenial, best way to live, and I don’t fault them for it.  It is none of my business, so I would back them in opposing any laws restricting their freedom of behavior, at least until it came to adopting children.

But all that convoluted thinking aside–and this was not the point of this post–NIHILISM HURTS EVERYONE EQUALLY.  It makes life a horror for all human beings.  It makes it impossible to figure out where you are, who you are, where you are going, where it is worth going to, how to connect with others, and how to derive any enjoyment from life at all.

If I believed that believing nothing was the prerequisite for accepting homosexuality–I don’t, to be clear–then I would reject homosexuality.  This would be better for everyone but homosexuals, and if I were a Christian, it would still be my duty to love them even though–and perhaps particularly because–they were sinners.

I take homosexuality as perhaps a bad example out of many.  The choice is not between nothing and bigotry.  This is the point I am making.  There is always space for creative negotiation, reconciliation of difference, and the finding of common humanity WITHIN the domain of principle and belief.  This is the whole point of the Enlightenment.

 Non-denominational, the term could be variously interpreted. Positive Christianity allayed fears among Germany’s Christian majority as expressed through their hostility towards the established churches of large sections of the Nazi movement.^[2] In 1937, Hans Kerrl, the Nazi Minister for Church Affairs, explained that “Positive Christianity” was not “dependent upon the Apostle’s Creed“, nor was it dependent on “faith in Christ as the son of God“, upon which Christianity relied, rather, it was represented by the Nazi Party: “The Fuehrer is the herald of a new revelation”, he said.^[3] To accord with Nazi antisemitism, Positive Christianity advocates also sought to deny the Semitic origins of Christ and the Bible. In such elements Positive Christianity separated itself from Nicene Christianity and is considered apostate by all of the historical Trinitarian Christian churches, whether Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant.
Hitler was supportive of Christianity in public, but he was hostile to it in private. Hitler identified himself as a Christian in an April 12, 1922 speech.^[4] Hitler also identified himself as a Christian in Mein Kampf. However, historians, including Ian Kershaw and Laurence Rees, characterize his acceptance of the term “Positive Christianity” and his involvement in religious policy as being driven by opportunism, and by a pragmatic recognition of the political importance of the Christian Churches in Germany.^[2]Nevertheless, efforts by the regime to impose a Nazified “positive Christianity” on a state controlled Protestant Reich Church essentially failed, and it resulted in the formation of the dissident Confessing Church which saw great danger to Germany from the “new religion”.^[5] The Catholic Church also denounced the creed’s pagan myth of “blood and soil” in the 1937 papal encyclical Mit brennender Sorge.

I have been reading the history of the Spanish Civil War and that of Franco, and Franco strongly disliked Hitler’s de facto rejection of Christianity.

There is a, to me, interesting point here, which is that Franco alone, as far as I know, called himself “right wing”.  I read Spanish historians do not call him “fascist”.  They call him authoritarian.  He was a monarchist, and cultural traditionalist.  Hitler and Mussolini supported him, as I understand it, in effect because they liked his style, and because he specifically opposed Communism, with Fascism and National Socialism having both been formed in large measure to oppose Communism, while keeping many of its elements.

Thus, there is a cultural and political divide here which is not insignificant.  Franco was not Hitler.  He WAS “right wing”, on his own account, but this meant that he believed in an authoritarian government based on God and Country, which he specifically did NOT equate with Fascism, which he considered not quite godless, but close enough to spark dislike on his part.

For Western intellectuals, the Spanish Civil War was a major event.  I am surprised at myself that I have never taken the time until now to learn more about it.  I knew the very rough outline, but have not read any books on it.

I do think, though, that Franco “rescued” Spain from what likely would have become a Soviet aligned abusive dictatorship.  He killed a lot of people in the process, which is awful, but no Communist can say they oppose that in principle.

So often in life, when we become extreme in one thing, we conjure into being the very opposite.  In important respects, then, we fight in the other what we cannot own in ourselves.  The Communists, in my view, created Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini.  And collectively they killed VASTLY more people than Hitler ever dreamed of. It may well be that in the Spanish Civil War Franco was the more prolific murderer, but no one can say what would have happened if the misnamed “Republicans” had won.  The history of other Communist victories does not give one much reason to believe it would have ushered in an era of peace and goodwill, to put it mildly.

This murmur lies over our political landscape even now.  Burning down the world can feel exciting.  This is why war has been so common in human history, and war is what they  are waging.

And again, obviously I am in an unusually contemplative mood.  I had some odd stuff come up this morning I won’t talk about, and have had some very odd nights I also won’t talk about, other than they include things like being forced to do long ruck marches in the middle of the night, and succeeding.

But it seems to me the hippies pursued a thousand dead end roads, if the goal was reforming American culture.  True, they have created a tenuous mass of lies buttressed by an obsessive moral certitude, extraordinarily aggressive energy, and a very organized system of signals designed to support the GroupThink they have developed over the past 4-5 decades.

But what they were seeking they did not find.  As Paul Johnson asked of the Communists: if you ‘need to break a few eggs to make an omelet’, where is the omelet?  One can ask of the hippies: if your goal was to create something new and better, where is it?  Craft beer and good coffee don’t qualify.  Yoga classes on every corner don’t qualify.  Where is the culture in your “counter-culture”?  We had a culture.  You did your best to destroy it, and are continuing that process.  What, now, do you want to replace it with other than a repressive tyranny you will call liberating because lying is simply what you do?

No honest conservative ever need apologize for what they believe.  We can and have made mistakes, but it is quite possible, on our side of the aisle, to discuss errors, and figure out ways to do better.  That is all anyone can ask.  The political Left, on the other hand, has vastly more to answer for, including perhaps most saliently and pressingly its inability to EVER admit fundamental error, or to admit that–like the austistic savants I keep speaking of–it does not understand humanity in the first place at all.

Dissociated people have trouble connecting with others for the simple reason that that part of their brain was short-circuited at some point.  How could any child trust a mother like that?  But if the psychologist was a hippy too, as they likely were at that time in Portland, how could they tell the mother “You need to fucking grow up and create a stable home for this child.”?

I see bullshit everywhere.  It is my blessing and my curse.

What prompts this was reading up on Courtney Love.  She was in two Milos Forman movies, and I realized I didn’t know much about her, so I looked her up.  This is what Wikipedia has to say about her childhood:

Love resided in Northwest Portland, Oregon in the early 1980s, supporting herself illegally as a topless dancer

The movie itself, of course, encourages a wide range of interpretations, and indeed is so recondite it was initially booed by some Spanish audiences.

I had to sleep on it, but I think I have reached some conclusions that work for me.

First, though, I wanted to comment on how I am realizing what a deep psychological hunger I feel for symbols which are authentic for me, which I can “eat” and “digest”, and make a part of me.  This hunger, which I think we all feel, is nearly entirely unsated in our modern world.  Where once we had Honest Abe, a problem-free respect for Columbus, a near universal Christianity, and an abiding respect for American democracy, now all the constructed symbols of our political, and largely our religious world, are gone, and this matters.  I won’t say any more on that for now.

I feel all the scenes have a place and a purpose.  First, we see the movie imported into the village.  It comes from somewhere else.  Then we see the father, caring for his bees, and looking at his watch, sadly, it seems to me.  Then we see the wife–who we don’t find out for sure is his wife for some time, writing a letter to her lover, who went off to fight the war, and who may or may not even be alive, then we see her riding to the train to send off her letter.  The father comes home, looks for her, can’t find her, and then asks if there is food.  His house-keeper tells him yes, but he should keep regular hours like everybody else.

The children, at night, light a candle, and Ana’s sister Isabel tells her nobody died in the Frankenstein movie, and that Frankenstein’s monster is a spirit she can conjure.  This, in response to her logical childlike question: why?  Why did the girl die, why did Frankenstein’s monster die?  It made no sense to her.

The father, staying up late, writes the following, from which we get the name of the movie:

Someone to whom I recently showed my glass beehive, with its movement like the main gear wheel of a clock…Someone who saw the constant agitation of the honeycomb, the mysterious maddened commotion of the nurse bees over the nests, the teeming bridges and stairways of wax, the invading spirals of the queen, the endlessly varied and repetitive labors of the swarm, the relentless yet ineffectual toil, the fevered comings and goings, the call to sleep always ignored, undermining the next day’s work, the final repose of death far from a place that tolerates neither sickness nor tombs…Someone who observed these things after the initial astonishment had passed, quickly looked away with an expression of indescribable sadness and horror.

Now, I want to move from description to interpretation, particularly since I can’t remember the precise sequence of events.

The first critical piece of information is that the father knows his younger wife is having or had an affair, that she is thinking about someone else.  We are told that.  He is tending his bees, wondering where she is.  Perhaps she even gave him that watch.  He comes home, looks for her, and she is gone.  This causes him emotional anguish, which causes him to be unable to sleep, and to write what is written above.  Note that he himself is not sleeping properly.  He falls asleep at his desk.  He himself is “undermining the next day’s work” and anticipating death.

So there is a dark secret in the family that both parents know but can’t speak.  The children can’t know this, but there is a fertile, latent underlayer for the creation of foreboding.  Children–even outwardly happy, playing children–feel when something is happening.

The scene with the anatomy lesson: what is the last thing they put on?  What have they forgotten?  The Eyes.  The ability to see.

The farmhouse in the distance becomes the setting for the appearance of Frankenstein’s monster’s avatar.

Let me back up.  The scene with the candle with the two children was, in my view, intended to evoke religion and the Christian Church, which teaches that no one ever dies, and that the spirits–and God himself–are there when we call.  This means that the monster, which did not die, can still be saved.

Logically, then, Ana tries to save the soldier.  What she had feared had happened was reversed.  He came back to life.  A new future was possible (the train symbolizes the future, I think, which she is nearly run over by, and which she was sort of trying to stand in the way of unconsciously).  And then the soldier is killed, and her father seems in her childish mind to have played a role.  Her father becomes a monster to her, first a mob, then the actual monster, and then SHE becomes the monster, perhaps after having in her dream eaten the poisonous mushroom.  She inherits Original Sin.  All the fate and weight of the world–and latently of the anxiety and pain in her home and her nation–falls on her.

This of course makes her sick.  It causes her mother to feel shame and regret.  She burns the letter.  She puts a coat on her husband, and puts away his glasses carefully, showing affection after months or years of having treated him coldly.  Ana looks for redemption in the darkness.  She tries to hope to herself that the monster is still alive somehow, but she fails.  She turns, and the last scene shows her silhouetted in darkness.  She feels like the monster, still.  The monster is not out there.  It is in her.  It is a tragic ending, in my view. And apparently making this movie messed that child actress up for many years.

If I might return to the Original Sin metaphor, perhaps the monster killing the girl–an act of innocence, since he did not know what would happen–is Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge.  Perhaps the monster being killed by a mob is Christ’s redemptive act.

But in this movie, there is no redemption.  There is no resurrection.  The dead remain dead.  This is where I think we should look for the war symbolism.  It is a latent critique of Christianity as a whole, as peddling lies.  And it is a latent critique of the war because the war, in this view, accomplished little or nothing.  Nothing living came of it.  A monster–not THE monster–was slain, but countless more remain, because that monster is in our souls.

And it is difficult, is it not, to separate the grotesque appearance of the monster, with its seeming capacity for murder, with its essential innocence?  It did not MEAN to kill that girl, but it did.  And it was slaughtered as if it had been truly blood-thirsty.

Stylistically, I will comment too how interesting it is that Erice was able to include another entire movie within his own movie, without showing more than a minute or two of the original.

This movie is a tragedy in my view about the loss of innocence, about the loss of faith.  The girl became terrified of her father, but large segments of a nation also became terrified of their new ruler.

I do think this is in the rough neighborhood of the director/author’s intention.  The beehive is life itself, seen from the perspective of someone who feels trapped and helpless.  You have to do your part, even when it feels like farce and horror.

Having said all this, though, it is still a beautiful movie, and one I will likely watch again.  This is the thing: so much of life is beautiful, even in the midst of horror.  We want “life” to give us one signal only, but it gives us many.  Much of the task of living is focusing our attention on the one’s which build us up and make us feel good.  We have that choice.