Sympathy for the Devil

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

“Who told you there was no such thing as real, true, eternal love? Cut out his lying tongue!”

On a bench in Patriarchs’ Pond Park, two literary types discussing the Christian religion are accosted by a mocking figure. The boorish editor, Berlioz (an incidental figure, and the uncoincidental namesake of the composer of La damnation de Faust) has his death prophesized by the stranger, a prophecy which wastes no time in being realized due to the demonically inevitable conjunction of sunflower oil, a turnstile, and an all-too-punctual streetcar. Thus, another latter-day John the Baptist is beheaded.

With this prologue, The Master and Margarita begins a dual narrative which commences in the midst of Holy Week and reaches its culmination on Easter Sunday. The primary narrative (1920s Moscow) is satiric and brutally funny, while the story within the story, the Master’s retelling of Christ’s Trial and Passion is serious and delicately written. As the primary story unfolds, the identity of the stranger and his retinue (which includes a harlequin figure and a huge black tomcat with a gourmand’s appetite) becomes increasingly apparent, an identity which would be unmistakable even without the various hat-tips to the Faust legend. For the “magician” Woland, time and reality are pliable, lending a surreal quality to the story that is both hilarious and disconcerting (see the - literally - empty suit diligently catching up on its paperwork). The tendency of the narrative is more along the lines of a trickster cycle than a morality play, although the Pontius Pilate storyline is a study in existential dilemma worthy of Dostoyevsky or Kafka.

The prohibitions and paranoia of Soviet Russia (“Never Speak to Strangers” is one chapter title) are slyly satirized to the degree that Bulgakov’s novel was suppressed for decades before its first publication in 1966/67. The paranoia, the empty suits, the xenophobia, and the use of the asylum as a means of control are some of Bulgakov’s touchstones, yet even in Stalinist Russia, he managed to tell a tale of love and final redemption, courtesy of that scapegoat of humanity who is “Part of that Power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.”

Darconville's Cat by Alexander Theroux

Lexicographic madness and Rabelaisian excess characterize this long novel of love, hate, madness, revenge and - perhaps - grace. Some chapters (particularly those pertaining to academia) are among the most hilariously misanthropic I’ve ever read. The latter portion (after the two black pages) are quite assuredly the most misogynistic pages ever written, and the lampoon of Southern culture is devastating, if unfair. Famously, Theroux wrote this after having been jilted, and having the gauntlet thrown before him - as he vowed revenge - in the words “Do your worst.” Foolish words, for Theroux is best at doing his worst. In fact, he attains here the supreme paradox of being stupefyingly brilliant. While you could skip entire chapters and not miss a beat of the narrative, you would miss out on the full force of Theroux’s treasure chest of obscure knowledge, inventive wordplay, and puns which are groaningly corny despite their sophisticated execution.

Darconville is an archetype as old as the hills - the sensitive soul undone by an unworthy woman (I think of Maugham’s clubfooted innocent in Of Human Bondage). The vituperation, the bile, is not his (he seems to remain innocent, if misguided, until the end), but rather is that of the sardonic narrator, and later given over to the Satanic eunuch Crucifer, who lives a shadowy existence in an opulent Harvard attic and pisses through a little silver tube (Theroux, the Catholic apologist, may commit many sins, but skimping on the details is not one of them).

Darconville is the object of undergraduate desire at an obscure girl’s college in the inbred heart of Virginia, but as fate would have it, he is instantaneously smitten by a mousy self-effacing girl with golden locks named Isabel Rawsthorne, a hick chick from the sticks. She constantly frets that he is too good for her, and after a false start, they are on the road to matrimony. But when Darconville publishes a respected novel and is offered a professorship at Harvard, Isabel becomes distant and uncommunicative, and then the the revelation that precedes the aforementioned black pages confirm his worst fears. Being jilted by a fat-legged girl for a jug-eared sailor does not sit well with Darconville: he falls into madness, and falls prey to the woman-hating eunuch, whose interest in Darconville seems mainly to revolve around his esteemed bloodline. True to form, the eunuch is both servant and master to the blue-blood, and leads him down unholy paths to the infernal regions of the soul, inspiring a Jacobean lust for revenge.

I will spare you the plot details. Honestly, if you like straightforward narrative, this probably isn’t for you. But if you like to savor the words and are willing to stretch your reading experience out to indeterminate lengths, and if you have a tolerance for mean-spiritedness in the service of art, you might consider looking into this philosophically rich and entertaining work.

Leonard Cohen at the Dodge Theatre, 4/5/09

Here's a toast to the inspiring and sartorially magnificent Leonard Cohen. At the invigorated age of 75, he played the crowd through an impeccable 3.5 hour set at Phoenix's Dodge Theatre last night. A once in a lifetime event, an odyssey through a remarkable career, and quite simply, a true delight.

Plus, I got to share it with a beautiful woman.

Blanquerna by Ramon Lull

The Catalan novel Blanquerna, described as “the first novel to be written in any Romance language” is less a novel than an extended work of religious instruction in narrative form. Written in 1283 by the Majorcan mystic, heretic, and martyr Ramon Lull - a neglected figure in the western mystical tradition - the work is severe, with an almost morbid religiosity and an emphasis on extreme piety and deprivation, rejection of the world and absolute submission to the (supposed) will of God.

Blanquerna is the eponymous hero of the tale, the son of the fanatically devoted Evast and Aloma, a noble couple who have forsaken all worldly goods to live in poverty. They attempt to arrange a marriage for their son, so that as a husband and householder he may manage their wealth in service to God while they retreat into a live of austere deprivation. To the consternation of her mother, Natana, the woman they have chosen for their son, decides after a few minutes interview with Blanquerna to retreat to a convent for the remainder of her life. The following section of the book is an extended description of the mortifications she introduces into the convent.

Meanwhile, Blanquerna sojourns into the forest to live as a hermit. He encounters a castle occupied by the personifications of the Ten Commandments, wailing bitterly over the fact that they have been forgotten in this wicked, wicked world. All our hero really wants to do is squirrel himself away in the woods to live a life of quiet deprivation. The problem is that the woods are chock full of knights, shepherds, merchants, and others to whom he can’t resist giving a detailed assessment of the wickedness of their ways. In no time, this killjoy has gained a reputation as a wise exemplar of godly living. (Be warned, the “action” in this story is thinly sandwiched between extended dissertations on various holy topics). Because of his wise counsel and pious example, Blanquerna (as always, against his will) is called upon to live in a monastery, where he becomes first sacristan (whatever that is), then abbott. He eventually rises to the bishopric, and is ultimately elevated to the papacy. Introduced into the story is a wise fool, Ramon, who assists the pope by citing the example of various pious works of reason and devotion (works which happen to be identical to those written by one Ramon Lull). As Pope, Blanquerna oversees the realization of one of Lull’s own pet projects, the establishment of linguistic academies in order to facilitate the conversion of foreign and ungodly souls, particularly the Saracens (Lull himself achieved martyrdom after being stoned by an angry mob in North Africa, presumably following one of his habitual anti-Islamic rants - see illustration). In the end, Blanquerna renounces the papacy in favor of the life of a simple hermit, the role he has fervently coveted throughout all his peregrinations.

Much of Blanquerna is taken up with crashingly dull expositions of the religious life, with a few anti-semitic talking points thrown in for good measure. Incorporated into the end of the narrative are two short works of mystical devotion, “The Book of the Lover and the Beloved” and “The Art of Contemplation”. Coming at the end of a rather tedious read, the former is a particularly refreshing, rich, and surprisingly vibrant work of mysticism, inspired by Sufi devotional books and in the tradition of the Song of Solomon and the works of San Juan de la Cruz. This edition, published by Dedalus Books under the guidance of the medievalist Robert Irwin, is a reprint of a ca. 1920’s translation by Edgar Allison Peers.

The Five-and-Twenty Tales of the Genie by Sivadasa

Despite the overall darkness of the frame story - the acrid stench of the cremation grounds, an ascetic who brutally murders a child he has had with a courtesan, a necromancer seeking mastery over the world, and a decaying corpse inhabited by a genie, telling tales to an emperor - the stories in this volume are court tales of romantic love and crossed destinies, magical yogis and fairy brides, wise kings and wiley tricksters. These tales haved a real charm about them, and reflect a rich oral tradition masterfully compiled by the medieval poet Sivadasa.

Each of the tales told by the genie are designed to test the wisdom of the legendary emperor Vikramaditya, who is called upon at the conclusion of each story to pass judgement regarding the actions of those within the story. As the tales progress, the emperor gains the trust and admiration of the genie, who ultimately reveals how Vikramaditya can vanquish the sorcerer and gain the Eight Powers which the sorcerer covets for himself.

The Five-and-Twenty Tales of the Genie (which saw an earlier bastardized version by the Victorian adventurer and rogue Sir Richard Burton called Vikram and the Vampire) is one of a recent series of Indian/Sanskrit classics translated and published by Penguin. This excellent series illustrates that the legacy of ancient Indian literature is not confined to the justifiably revered epics Mahabharata and Ramayana.

Hebdomeros by Giorgio de Chirico

Hebdomeros is an extended prose piece by the Surrealist artist Giorgio de Chirico, a painter best known for his dark and desolate paintings of sterile town squares devoid of human beings. This novel (for want of a better word) was written in 1929, several years after the muse of painting had abandoned de Chirico.

Writing in his introduction, the poet John Ashbery compares the mysterious protagonist to Maturin’s Melmoth or Lautremont’s Maldoror, characters which evoke the sense of a solitary superman, above and beyond ordinary human morality. While this characterization is not inaccurate, it should also be noted that there is a certain absurdist - comic, even – quality to Hebdomeros that is lacking in those brooding gothic antiheroes, and might even seem to be a parody of the idealized overman. (It should be noted that de Chirico was an admirer of Nietzsche.)

The difficulty in reading Hebdomeros lies in adjusting one’s expectations as to what one might expect in the way of narrative. Simply put, there really isn’t any narrative. To fall back on a cliché, de Chirico is painting pictures – sometimes wonderfully surreal pictures – with words. But there is also a similarity with the William Gibson story of several years back, which was marketed on a CD-ROM designed to melt into oblivion soon after it had been read. Hebdomeros is like this – the episodes, despite their beauty and humor, seem to fade almost immediately. Every time I picked up this short text, I had to reread the previous page or two, so quickly did they fade from memory. In this, the lyricism and strangeness of Hebdomeros resembles a dream which fades to oblivion upon awakening.

There is a cinematic feel to the text, as is appropriate for a visual artist. It helped for me to read this text while imagining (that crucial word!) it as one of those pioneering pieces of surreal cinema, as envisioned by Dulac or Bunuel. There is an undercurrent of anti-bourgeois sentiment through this piece, a certain savaging of middle-class norms and expectations, and the descriptions of the various personages encountered or described by Hebdomeros are quite in keeping with the conventions of the silent cinema, the bowler hat, walking stick, and waxed moustache of the mid-level clerk. Even so, anachronisms abound – savage Northmen are eternally poised to flood through those vacant town squares, leaving destruction in their wake, ancient Rome with its bestial gladiatorial combats, and Mediterranean coastal towns with their boorish tourists are evoked as well. Hebdomeros seems to stride across time and space, with his companions or disciples in tow, making Zarathustran pronouncements at once lofty and absurd. One has to be willing to approach surrealism, in any of its guises, with a sense of humor, or at least a sense of the ridiculousness of the common run of humanity. Hebdomeros is a minor work in the grand scheme of things, but it is a perfect period-piece for the surrealism of the early 20th century.

(Illustration: De Chirico’s “The Great Metaphysician”.)

Strange World by Frank Edwards

Truth be told, Erich von Daniken was a johnny-come-lately in the field of extraterrestrial visitation. Still, just about the time his "researches" were hitting the paperback racks of the nation's drugstores, I was a curious and impressionable 12 year old looking for some mental stimulation. I discovered some new editions of two books by a Mr. Frank Edwards that promised to be a wealth of knowledge on the odd and paranormal (what with their Chariot of the Gods typeface and all), and I begged my parents to snag them for me. Happily, they heard my plea and the paperbacks popped up in my Christmas stocking that year, along with a pair of Groucho Marx glasses.

Flash forward a couple of years. I was now living in Roswell, NM, the interplanetary ground zero for Planet Earth. As the greater Roswell Chamber of Commerce hadn't realized the income potential of this fact, I was blissfully unaware. Still, in a little junk shop I found, among the crystal candy dishes and doilies, several back issues of FATE, a little pulp magazine out of the fifties, dedicated to the weird, the paranormal , and the sale of advertising space to the Rosicrucians. And there was good old Frank, a chunky meat-and-potato kind of guy, with his BCG's and portly frame. It seems Frank had a regular column in FATE, from which most of the pieces in his books had been lifted.

So, I found this book recently, in a lovely 1964 edition complete with dust jacket, and all the old favorites were there: "UFO Explodes Over Nevada", "UFO Over Hawaii", "The Search for the Hairy Giants", "The Monster Apes of Oregon", "The Enigma of the Atomic Tornadoes", "The Ghost Was Right!", "Monster on the Beach", "Ramu the Wolf Boy", "Bobby the Wonder Boy", "The Coffins are Restless Tonight!", "The Runaway Coffin Comes Home", "Exploding Fish Bowl", and the viral classic "Our Martyred Presidents".

Some of these pieces have the whiff of possibility, some seem suspiciously like Mr. Edwards had a deadline, and most seem like sources of Roky Erickson lyrics. No matter. Don't believe everything you read in a book, but at least stay awake to the possibility that the world is stranger, much stranger, than the evidence of pedestrian reality might suggest.

The Dark Room by Junnosuke Yoshiyuki

Shuichi Nakata is a middle-aged writer living in 1960’s Tokyo. A widower, he has established a small network of available women with whom he meets for occasional sexual trysts, free of the concerns and constraints of commitment. Nakata maintains a chauvinistic attitude towards women, and, specifically, has a certain horror of the vagina, which he considers “has something very evil about it.” Still, he confesses in a magazine interview that he would “like to achieve a state where something evil looks like a rose.” It is this transformation, thorns and all, which gives this book its momentum.

In the course of the novel, most of the women in his network fall away for one reason or another, and he is left with Natsue, a woman in her early twenties. It gradually dawns on Nakata that he is beginning to form an attachment to this girl, a state which is abhorrent to him. Still, there is fascination in that Natsue is an outlet for his psychological aggression towards women. Like many young adult women, she has discovered The Story of O, and is fascinated by the themes of bondage and submission as a means of exploring sexuality. Nakata has little interest until he discovers that, by acting out, he can manifest in the flesh his ambivalent feelings towards Natsue. Envisioned perhaps as a means of maintaining distance from Natsue, the master/slave relationship ultimately pulls him emotionally closer to her, to the dark room of commitment.

In its essence a misogynistic novel, The Dark Room is interspersed with discussions of lesbianism, abortion (one of the female character states “I would love starting a kid and getting him [the doctor] to drag it out again"), prostitution and female sexuality, discussions which reflect, I assume, attitudes towards the increasing independence of women that may have been coming forth in 1960’s Japan. On the other side of it, it is a chronicle of a classic middle-age crisis, of a man sensing loss of vigor, physical stamina, and personal power, with the chill breath of decline and death on his neck. An interesting, if uncomfortable, novel of conflicted sexuality.

A Poem by Fitz-James O'Brien

The Demon of the Gibbet
by Fitz-James O'Brien

There was no west, there was no east,
No star abroad for eyes to see;
And Norman spurred his jaded beast
Hard by the terrible gallows-tree.

"O, Norman, haste across this waste,—
For something seems to follow me!"
"Cheer up, dear Maud, for, thanked be God,
We nigh have passed the gallows tree!"

He kissed her lip: then — spur and whip!
And fast they fled across the lea.
But vain the heel, the rowel steel,—
For something leaped from the gallows-tree!

"Give me your cloak, your knightly cloak,
That wrapped you oft beyond the sea!
The wind is bold, my bones are old,
And I am cold on the gallows-tree!"~

"O holy God! O dearest Maud,
Quick, quick, some prayers—the best that be!
A bony hand my neck has spanned,
And tears my knightly cloak from me!"

"Give me your wine,—the red, red wine,
That in a flask hangs by your knee!
Ten summers burst on me accurst,
And I am athirst on the gallows-tree!"~

"O Maud, my life, my loving wife!
Have you no prayer to set us free?
My belt unclasps,—a demon grasps,
And drags my wine-flask from my knee!"

"Give me your bride, your bonnie bride,
That left her nest with you to flee!
O she hath flown to be my own,
For I'm alone on the gallows-tree!"~

"Cling closer, Maud, and trust in God!
Cling close!—Ah, heaven, she slips from me!"
A prayer, a groan, and he alone
Rode on that night from the gallows-tree

The Fantastic Tales of Fitz-James O'Brien

Fitz-James O’Brien (1828-1862) was an Irishman who, after dissipating his inheritance, moved to the United States, where he became an author of fantasies of science and the supernatural. From the 1850’s to his death in the American Civil War, he wrote numerous pieces which garnered him a reputation as the “Celtic Poe”. The introduction to The Fantastic Tales of Fitz-James O’Brien makes it clear that, due to the need for ready cash to finance the style of living to which he had become accustomed, his output was largely confined to magazine work - stories churned out to meet deadlines and thus considered in some way “inferior”.

While he perhaps did not attain the stylistic reputation of a Hawthorne or a Poe, O’Brien was clearly a pioneer of fantastic literature, following in the footsteps of these personages and their antecedent, Charles Brockden Brown. It is difficult to assess, in retrospect, the inventiveness of a talent such as his, for his heirs build upon his groundwork, and thus almost make his writings seem pedestrian. Still, he wrote, in “What Was It?” the story of a malevolent, invisible being long before Bierce and Wells, and, to my mind, “The Diamond Lens” (in which a “microscopist” uses cutting edge technology to discover a lovely, almost sub-atomic, nymph in a drop of water) prefigures the scientific fantasy of Wells. “The Wondersmith” fuses gypsy magic with prefabricated homunculi to bring forth an army of tiny assassins, programmed to bring about the extinction of American Christianity by murdering its children, as they sleep and dream of Christmas joys.

The purely supernatural has its place in O’Brien’s stories as well. “The Pot of Tulips” effectively retells a story, as old as antiquity, of a miser who in death reveals through signs and symbols the location of his hidden fortune. “The Lost Room” is reminiscent of an inferior Hawthorne – a young man steps out for a cigar, and returns to find his room weirdly transformed and occupied by a orgiastic party of Venetian revelers who, after a wager, turn him out of his habitation to wander forever in madness and despair.

“Seeing The World” is almost something out of the imagination of Borges. There is a mysterious stranger, returned from the East, who can heal the sick and confer poetic genius, but the price is outrageous, for the gift of seeing – of seeing everything in the world, in depth and simultaneously – the gift that Jupiter bestowed on Semele, is yet another doorway to madness. Finally, the collection is rounded out by the Oriental tale of “The Dragon Fang Possessed by the Conjurer Piou-Lu”, another tale of power and magic.

O’Brien writes most of the stories in the persona, apparently well know to him, of the comfortable bachelor, ensconced in his cozy lodgings, be it a haunted boarding house or a decaying Dutch mansion in upper Manhattan. Late evenings with cigar or opium, discussing supernatural possibilities with companions set a cozy tone, which will be upended by a shift of reality as objects of speculation become all too real. It would be wrong to judge O’Brien’s themes as hoary simply because we have encountered them in more well known authors who followed him down these speculative paths. Taken as exemplars of early nineteenth-century speculative fiction, these stories are still worth a read on a chill winter’s night.

(The illustration is a contemporary caricature of O'Brien as a Union Army recruiter.)

The Stories of Paul Bowles

The author, composer, and translator Paul Bowles was raised on the stories of Poe and Hawthorne, and, like them, a not-so-subtle menace pervades his stories. Bowles exhibits no sentimentality in his writings but rather approaches the world as an outsider, an anthropologist of strangeness and cruelty. He is best in his stories of Morocco, which gives him an ideal stage for his dramas of fear and violence, the legitimate terror of the outsider in an inescapable downward spiral of detachment from identity. I think of the linguistics professor in one of Bowles’ most famous stories, “A Distant Episode”, whose western identity is severed when his tongue is violently (and needless to say, ironically) slashed from his mouth. Like Professor Unrat in the film “The Blue Angel”, his cultural persona flows from him like blood and he becomes less a man than a pathetic object of scorn and ridicule, wandering in incoherence, tin can lids jangling from his clothes for the amusement of ragged children. After many readings, the sudden and shocking violence of “The Delicate Prey” still gives rise to revulsion in the throat, and the deformed keeper of the underground pool in “By the Water” plays upon our age-old contempt for the grotesque. It is in the exploitation of the fearfully grotesque that Bowles found his métier.

A true expatriate, Bowles had the means to travel widely, and locales as diverse as Mexico and Sri Lanka show up in his stories. There are rare touches of humor, such as in “You Have Left Your Lotus Pods on the Bus”, but there are also instances of true American gothic, such as the madman of “If I Should Open My Mouth”, a 1954 tale of product tampering and the perverse “Pages from Cold Point”, an almost Nabokovian tale of seduction.

Bowles long had a reputation as a writer’s writer, and for many years his novels such as The Sheltering Sky, Up Above the World, and The Spider’s House languished in hard to find editions, until they were revived in the 1980’s. For the Beats, Bowles was a link to the past and a certain sort of respectability, and Burroughs and Ginsberg played out some of their most memorable antics in Bowles’ Tangier, the Interzone of Burroughs classic Naked Lunch. Later on, lured by his reputation as a composer and musicologist who pioneered recordings of the musicians of the Rif Mountains, Jagger and Jones sought him out (see Bowles’ notes for “Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Jajouka”). In truth, through recordings and translations, he did an invaluable service in attempting to preserve aspects of Moroccan culture before it became too contaminated by outside influences.

In documentary film and books such as Michelle Green’s The Dream at the End of the World, Bowles in old age became a pop icon, the dandy who traveled into the Sahara with a dozen trunks full of nappy suits and ties. The attention is deserved, but should not distract from the essence of Bowles: his novels, travel writings, memoirs, and short stories. Paul Bowles died in 1999.

Goethe's Tales for Transformation

It should come as no surprise that the author of Faust had a long and abiding interest in alchemy and the mythology of renewal and transformation. This collection brings together five stories and a short libretto (conceived as a continuation of Mozart's "The Magic Flute"), most of which touch directly upon themes corresponding to the Great Work.

Some of these pieces are heavily allegorical, particularly "Fairy Tale", a parable of metamorphosis which, as Alice Raphael convincingly illustrates in Goethe and the Philosopher's Stone, draws heavily on Egyptian mythology as understood by Masonic acolytes. Archetypes of Thoth (as Ferryman), the Lily or prima materia, the transforming serpent (which as the ouroboros embodies continuity or eternity, the Elder or lamp-bearer (who hold the key to the Great Work), and others act out a ceremony of transformation, the understanding of which is essential to the philosophical study of hermeticism and alchemy.

"The New Melusina" is the most enchanting tale of the lot, relating a young man's discovery of and betrothal to a beautiful and mysterious gnome princess. "The Counselor" and "The Good Women" (a kind of symposium) explore femininity and male/female duality, with an emphasis on female "constancy" which must have been a matter of discussion and importance to Goethe and his circle. "Nouvelle" is another allegory, this time pertaining to the taming of emotional passions, another significant step in spiritual transformation.

The collection is rounded out with Goethe's continuation of "The Magic Flute", in which the Queen of the Night imprisons Genius, the child of Pamina and Tamino, in a golden sarcophagus upon which a terrible curse has been lain, a curse which is finally overcome by trial and initiation.

The stories collected in this short anthology should appeal to anyone interested in Goethe's Masonic involvement, his lifelong interest in philosophical alchemy, and the aesthetic impact of these studies on his work.