Photo taken March 27th, 2010 on the flank of Table Mountain, not far from my cabin. While there is not much snow at the lower elevations, higher elevations of the Catskills, as you can see above, still have more than four feet of snow on the ground. The snow is solid, too – you can walk across it without snowshoes.
“For over five years this man has been chasing around Europe like a madman in search of something he could set on fire. Unfortunately he again and again finds hirelings who open the gates of their country to this international incendiary.” – Adolf Hitler, describing Winston Churchill in 1941.
Do we need any further proof of the psychic phenomenon of projection? From the Jung book I was reading last night: “Rather than face our defects as revealed by the shadow, we project them onto others – for instance, onto our political enemies.”
While it’s certainly likely that we’ll have a bit more snow – and I see 20 degree temperatures in the forecast – the snow is now almost all gone. Yesterday it rained all day, and I watched it eagerly, thinking – “It’s rain! Water! From the sky! Not snow! What a miracle!” I would look out the window, and conjure at the fields of white, “Melt! Melt!” And sure enough, now the crocuses I planted last fall are poking through the mud, along with the top half-inches of a few daffodils.
It was a mild winter temperaturewise, and most of my plants – even some I left in pots – seem to have survived. There are sticky little leaves all over – aquilegia, monarda, sambucus, iris, rudbeckia – the sticky little Schillery leaves, back once again. And we are here once more to see them!
“The railroad is to travel what the whore is to love. Just as comfortable, and just as horribly mechanical and fatally monotonous.” – Tolstoy, in a letter to Turgenev.
! This man’s capacity to shock and horrify me – while being ever-so-civilized – never seems to end. Calling whores “monotonous”!
We are having weather which is more usual to April, in March; it has been so warm and pleasant, it feels like a great gift. Everyone is in a good mood. On my way down here my neighbors were sitting on deck chairs on their lawn – and raised their hands to me in complacent acknowledgement. Fabulous.
Nature is not deceived, however, and is not terribly active. The deer are prowling around, looking unhappy, but no other large animals have been around. The ground is brown and will not green up for many weeks. There are a few more birds in the area – I heard their song when I stepped out of my house this morning – but the real uptick in activity is among the insects. Last night a moth flew to my window, and I almost cried when I saw him – a herald of spring! “How beautiful upon the mountain-airs are the wings of him who brings good news.” Yet another seeker after the Flame. But most noticeable are the flies – we’ve had a good hatch of flies, common house-fly flies, musca domestica. They’ve learned that the nicest place to warm up in the morning is on the siding of my cabin. They’ve sunbathed quite satisfactorily by the time I step out, and it sounds like a beehive when I open the door. I hear that the latest home-ecology is to nourish the insects, as the indispensable foundation of the food-pyramid. So I tell the flies to be fruitful and be multiplied.
“They played Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata,” he continued. “Do you know the first presto? You do?” he cried. “Ugh! Ugh! It is a terrible thing, that sonata. And especially that part. And in general music is a dreadful thing. What is it? I don’t understand it. What is music? What does it do? And why does it do what it does? They say music exalts the soul. Nonsense, it is not true! It has an effect, an awful effect – I am speaking of myself – but not of an exalting kind. It has neither an exalting nor a debasing effect but it produces agitation. How can I put it? Music makes me forget myself, my real position; it transports me to some other position not my own. Under the influence of music it seems to me that I feel what I do not really feel, that I understand what I do not understand, that I can do what I cannot do. I explain it by the fact that music acts like yawning, like laughter: I am not sleepy, but I yawn when I see someone yawning; there is nothing for me to laugh at, but I laugh when I hear people laughing.
“Music carries me immediately and directly into the mental condition in which the man was who composed it. My soul merges with his and together with him I pass from one condition into another, but why this happens I don’t know. You see, he who wrote, let us say, the Kreutzer Sonata – Beethoven – knew of course why he was in that condition; that condition caused him to do certain actions and therefore that condition had a meaning for him, but for me – none at all. That is why music only agitates and doesn’t lead to a conclusion. Well, when a military march is played the soldiers march to the music and the music has achieved its object. A dance is played, I dance and the music has achieved its object. Mass has been sung, I receive communion, and that music too has reached a conclusion. Otherwise it is only agitating, and what ought to be done in that agitation is lacking. That is why music sometimes acts so dreadfully, so terribly. In China, music is a State affair. And that is as it should be. How can one allow anyone who pleases to hypnotize another, or many others, and do what he likes with them? And especially that this hypnotist should be the first immoral man who turns up? It is a terrible instrument in the hands of any chance user! Take that Kreutzer Sonata, for instance, how can that first presto be played in a drawing room among ladies in low-necked dresses?” (219-220)
As I came up here I saw one thing which told me almost everything I needed to know about conditions on the ground in the Catskills: I passed the Neversink Reservoir and saw that it was not yet overflowing. That meant the river was not flooding, which meant the snow had not melted yet.
That was precisely what I found. Despite weather almost exactly as warm as conditions in the City – sixty degrees day after day – there’s simply too much snow here to be melted by mid-March. In clearings there’s about ten inches on the ground still, of a compacted, icy stuff that can sit a whole day in the sun and look unchanged. For a reason I cannot quite grasp there is less snow under treecover – perhaps reflected heat from the treetrunks and branches? – and the ground is opening up in the woods, but slowly.
The most striking sign of the season is the fact that the river, 600′ below the cabin, is quite audible. It’s beautiful. That said, the river is high only, and not flooding, and still running clear.
“Go round the shops in any big town. There are goods worth millions and you cannot estimate the human labor expended on them, and look whether in nine-tenths of these shops there is anything for the use of men. All the luxuries of life are demanded and maintained by women.
“Count all the factories. An enormous proportion of them produce useless ornaments, carriages, furniture, and trinkets, for women. Millions of people, generations of slaves, perish at hard labor in factories merely to satisfy women’s caprice. Women, like queens, keep nine-tenths of mankind in bondage to heavy labor. And all because they have been debased and deprived of equal rights with men. And they revenge themselves by acting on our sensuality and catch us in their nets. Yes, it all comes of that.
“Women have made of themselves such an instrument for acting upon our sensuality that a man cannot quietly consort with a woman. As soon as a man approaches a woman he succumbs to her stupefying influence and becomes intoxicated and crazy. I used formerly to feel uncomfortable and uneasy when I saw a lady dressed up for a ball, but now I am simply frightened and plainly see her as something dangerous and illicit. I want to call a policeman and ask for protection from the peril, and demand that the dangerous object be removed and put away.”
From The Kreutzer Sonata. It’s a work of fiction, of course, but no one can write with the kind of passionate hatred this man can. This goes on for nearly 80 pages, with stops to cast loathing upon marriage, infidelity, music (especially Beethoven), doctors, children, sex, birth control, and meateating.
Tolstoy is a figure I have always kept at arm’s length; beyond reading Anna Karenina (easily the greatest novel ever written; really no other deserves to be put in the same paragraph with it; I hated it) and the most famous short stories, I have mostly avoided him. That he was full of hatred and channeled the hatred into artistic and religious superiority is obvious to anyone with any insight; and those who know me will know why I have found such an example very dangerous.
But he has always fascinated me as well, as all the things we take care to avoid. He wrote sentences that I speak to myself from time to time just to experience their concentrated lifehating horror: “Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.” (Of marriage): “Our relations reached the stage where it was not disagreement that caused hostility but hostility that caused disagreement.” Many of his details I think of again and again – such as the creaking pouffe at Ivan Ilych’s wake – as perfect emblems of the absolute horror of us “eternal” creatures the prey of such unending and insuppressible superficiality.
There comes a time in life, of course, to turn around and take a look at the things you have been running from. So I have been recently taking a further look at Tolstoy, beginning with the light, pleasant movie that has just been made of his death, called The Last Station. A friend, on hearing I had seen the movie, said, “When I saw the trailer, it reminded me of you, so I’m glad you decided to see it.”
The movie is a kind of version of the Daumier drawing of “The Battle of the Schools,” with Count and Countess Tolstoy representing Idealism and Realism. Idealism, being naturally a close ally of hypocrisy, as always suffers in representation. Tolstoy has been attempting to lead an anti-private-property movement from his 4,000-acre estate Yasnaya Polyana; his practice of Gospel Poverty is wearing vintage clothes and spending a lot of time in the basement. This must to some extent be unfair; Tolstoy could not have been that hypocritical. Some of his deeds like setting up schools on his estate, personally teaching his former serfs, and establishing a kind of kibbutz for freethinkers are presented in the movie as not much more than your average 1960s fruitiness. The undercurrent of Russian unrest and millenarianism – indicated by the fact that only seven years later the country would experience the most complete revolution in human history – is not visible in the movie at all.
More of a focus of the movie is the Tolstoyan principle of celibacy. I say Tolstoyan because the movie attempts to put some daylight between Tolstoy himself and the idea; and certainly Tolstoy hit on the celibacy model very late in life (after sleeping with hundreds of women, most of them serfs and prostitutes, and fathering thirteen children). Tolstoy’s actual, overpowering hatred of human sexuality, which he saw as utterly beastly and horrid, is not touched (for that read The Kreutzer Sonata, which caused a sensation during Tolstoy’s life and really should be read by every human being; I think it is wrongminded like Tolstoy’s entire life’s work, but it would be most interesting in conversation to figure out why). The movie’s conclusion, helped along by a sexy subplot which is almost the main plot, is that at the very least you should try to get your wisdom about sex the way Tolstoy did, by trying it (the movie is given the epigraph from Tolstoy, “Everything that I understand I understand only because I love.”). This is not a surprise for a Hollywood movie, but not entirely horrid either.
The movie emphasizes this with its lushness; the saturation level is pumped up for all the greens, which give the movie a hypnotic, not-quite-Avatar-but-certainly-more-than-earthly beauty. That this is an artistic choice is made more obvious by the fact that Tolstoy actually died in November (and according to the legend I am familiar with, walked off in the midst of a snowstorm to his death), not in the middle of a June without rain.
The main conflict in the movie is between Tolstoy, who wishes to relinquish copyright to his works upon his death, and his wife, who wishes to keep the copyright for herself and her children. The principles involved are not much discussed. The focus is on the personal relation between husband and wife, or indeed one might say on providing a stage for two superior veterans of the screen, Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren. Their performance is so consistently interesting that it makes up for all the philosophical deficiencies of the film. Plummer looks like Tolstoy brought back to life, without the ugliness and hatred; and there is always appeal in seeing a man resurrected out of history. What is more, Plummer’s voice is unendingly beautiful, and he is effortlessly expressive.
The agelessly beautiful Mirren is superior as Countess Tolstoy. Some have accused her of overacting – she uses every mode of manipulation, from yelling to begging to seducing to suicide – but in fact she gives the Countess perhaps even more dignity than the real-life woman had. What little I had heard of her made her something of a buffoon and Xanthippe, an implacable spirit of puelline hostility and pettiness lodged in the philosopher’s own home like the thorn in Paul’s flesh. When Mirren is on her knees, crying that her husband must respect her dignity – “I bore you thirteen children” – you feel the wife’s claim on her husband as not trivial at all, indeed something so powerful no principle could ever trump it. Tolstoy, however, does a pretty good job resisting her entreaties when he needs to: “You don’t need a husband. You need a GREEK CHORUS.”
The writing is good, the acting is excellent, the cinematography is lush and the peasants always look clean: everything you require in a period piece. Could the writers have taken the opportunity afforded by Plummer and Mirren to make a great movie, a historical biopic with biographical and philosophic depth like Lawrence of Arabia? Of course. (I had a moment where I thought that was going to happen: after a sex-scene in the subplot the man returns to find the woman cold; I thought they might take the opportunity to explore Tolstoy’s belief that “love” is nothing more than “animal sensuality,” which dominates the thoughts at periodic intervals and leaves coldness and hostility in between. Nothing of the sort happened: love triumphed after all). But The Last Station is good enough for a few hours’ beguilement, and perhaps it may inspire some deeper pursuit of the strange Tolstoy. How can you not be interested in the man whose life inspired this quotation (from his biographer A.N. Wilson):
It is possible to read his last thirty years as an extraordinary demonstration of the fact that the Sermon on the Mount is an unlivable ethic, a counsel of craziness which, if followed to its relentless conclusion as Tolstoy tried to follow it, will lead to the reverse of peace and harmony and spiritual calm which are normally thought of as the concomitants of the religious quest. Tolstoy’s religion is ultimately the most searching criticism of Christianity which there is. He shows that it does not work.
Wouldn’t it be good for us all to know if this is because Tolstoy did not understand the Sermon on the Mount – or if it really is no guide for life?
Life Without Principle.
23-Mar-10Caught my eye:
Besides the obvious inapplicability of the historical analogy – such as the fact that it was Republicans who supported and lobbied for Civil Rights legislation, and Johnson was crossing Dixiecrat party line – this is an astonishing use of history. The morality of Civil Rights legislation was and is utterly, utterly, unimpeachable – given that, what type of beast cares about the political consequences?