The Enduring Value of Linguistic Play: Thomas Fink and Maya Mason's Collaboration: A Pageant for Every Addiction

 It’s a remarkably cold and windy New Year’s Day, and I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than to sit with a small stack of Thomas Fink and Maya Mason’s playful and intelligent poems and let them take my mind wherever it wants to go.

I love the way their poems are an invitation to a dance: they spur a conversation with the future, the past, and the present.  I enjoy seeing how the anxieties of antecedents play out: one visual allusion leads to another, one set of topics and tropes leads to thinking of other authors, and so on. 

Sometimes this approach leads to specious connections and I wonder which corners of my mind produced them, which is something akin to finding YouTube has created “My Mix” that contains principally opera from Henry Purcell and Mexican rancheras performed by mariachi bands from the 1950s.  

Thomas Fink and Maya Mason. A Pageant for Every Addiction. East Rockaway, NY: Marsh Hawk Press. 2020. 77 pages.  ISBN: 978-0996991209

The cover art is what captivates first: It’s compelling, especially on a cold New Year’s Day when one is obliged to trot out one’s New Year’s Resolutions, even if they constitute little more than cleaning out a closet and ordering vegan protein supplements and Vitamin D on Amazon and “Favoriting” a morale-boosting podcast on YouTube. A man holds elongate objects in his hands (lumpy anise treats?) and a woman holds what appear to be $100 bills between her hands.  Multi-colored dots give the painting an effervescent, playful feel.

The first poem made me smile. “First Date Questions” – I could not even imagine anyone asking me such questions, but if some did, I would immediately pay attention. The questions move from the concrete to ones that are clearly playing with cultural assumptions, asking you to look at things in new ways:

… Don’t

you just hate when you reach the zoo,

          

and the zebras have been sent

out for cleaning?

I love the whimsy and way they ask one to consider the basis for our underlying mindsets:

I hate to think of

worms eating my

dog’s eyes; is that love?

The questions are a perfect form for a collaboration, and an ideal way to start a collection since they embody a kind of conversation.

Addictions are judgments. They are condemnations of sorts, and impugn the character of the addict, even if the addiction is to something as innocuous as hoarding blank journals. So, it is only fitting to see a poem entitled “You’re Morally Inferior If” and to see that each 4-line stanza contains at least one criterion upon which to judge and condemn a person.  They also made me smile.  Here are a few:

 

               you keep

               your fingernails long –

               rendering hands useless

 

or

 

               …. you

 

               buy two of the same

               necklace, you’re too

               sentimental to kill

               mere mouse.

As a geologist with a soft spot for paleontology, I was drawn to “Substitute Fossil,” wondering first, how fossils relate to addictions although I can easily envision a Fossil Pageant in the A Pageant for Every Addiction.

Fossils are fairly meaningless unless they are classified; fossils are not only remnants of the past, they are used to time-stamp a layer of the earth (formation), since many fossilized organisms lived in very defined spans of time.  Fossils then, invoke classification systems, and as such, naming and identity.

If you substitute fossils, it’s possible to completely subvert the entire classification system, and suddenly the system will have no connection to a stable time frame, orientation, or even meaning.

That’s exactly what is going on in “Substitute Fossil,” and it’s up to the reader to create a new set of relationships of time, meaning, connection.  If fossils are indicators, they can be both the alphabet and the syntax of meaning. If we substitute, we have the arbitrariness of classification laid bare:

… convict

our glad workhorses into gold

 

deficits – to

a new alphabet for potpourri to assum

maneaters of grammar castrate

the chairmen of prattle …

The final minimalist long poem, “A Few Promises” makes the reader smile with whimsy, sometimes schadenfreude:

“A staircase for

every stiletto”

…

“A straightjacket

for

every extrovert”

The verses incorporate professions, physical phenomena, and life forms. They also relate back to the realities of uncertainty, unpredictability, and gambling, including market plunges. They are not only promises to fulfill dreams, but also to solve problems (or even create them – “a shark for every bathtub”). 

In the end, the collection touches the experiences of readers and triggers one’s own “conversation” in a Bakhtinian, carnivalesque manner, while showing ways to restructure assumptions and gently subvert generic expectations.

 

Converging earth, body, and spirit in Mozambique: The work of Rudencio Morais

Off the coast of Mozambique, the Indian Ocean is a vast expanse of ultramarine blue and the sand hot enough to burn the bottoms of your feet if you are walking barefoot. There are rusted-out shipwrecks on some of the beaches, and white birds and white sails make spotless, bright patterns on the horizon.  The coastal towns parade their Portuguese cathedrals and schools for digital postcards for vagabonds with blogs when it was easy to travel, and the markets burgeon with fruit, shiny metal household items, and tables piled with whatever the vendor thinks people will buy. 

And through it all is a powerful, animating presence that is, in some places, so palpably present that it almost takes one’s breath away, especially as one hears in the strains of the kizomba and indistinguishable voices that float in on the ocean breezes. 

Further, the spirit blends with the spirits of the recent and distant historical past, impels people and objects in a way that breeches the interface between the material world of phenomena and the spiritual world of urge, drive, spirit, and dreams. The mystical meets the mysteries of the multiplicities of interpretive possibilities of geological processes. Simply put, the earth and the body converge.

Rudencio Morais, geologist and poet, works in Mozambique - the geographical location and the literary space - and creates bold texts that span genres and disciplines. 

Rudencio Morais, Mozambique

It is in this context that Morais constructs a powerful liminal space, exhaling and inhaling on the boundary between “what was” and “what is next.”  

O Murmurar dos Búzios & As Miudezas da Alma by Rudencio Morais

The magic of Quelimane. The first prose poem of Rudencio Morais’s magnificent collection of prose poems begins with the piece entitled “Quelimandando,” a verb that roughly translates to “Quelimaning” which was constructed from the name of the gorgeous coastal city, Qualimane.  I have never visited Quelimane, which provides a point of geographical reference in for the collection, which explore spirit, language, and material reality. My travels in Mozambique did not take me all the way to the northeast expanses of the country. I did, however, spend time in Beira, where the sea shells wash up onto the beaches, and the markets resemble the ones that Morais describes in his poems. 

The “buzios” in the title refer not only to the sea shells, but also the very popular method of divination referred to also as “buzios.” In this practice, four cowrie shells are cast, and the pattern they make is what indicates the answer to the question being asked. The shells themselves do not have any particular innate ability to foretell the future; they move in response to energy and vital forces.  In “Quelimane,” the vital forces emanate from the place itself, and Morais describes the sights, sounds, and feeling in a way that brings the invitation to open up portals to inner dimensions, and the place where language breaks down, and a new way of perceiving and creating meaning is forged. 

Eduardo Costley White (1963 – 2014). Born in Quelimane, Mozambique, Eduardo Costley White was awarded the Literary Figure of the Year award in 2001 by the Mozambican Press Association. A passage of his work appears, and in it White speaks directly to the spirits and invokes a divine possession, a passionate experience with primordial energy. Part divination and part mysticism, the poet brings to life the shells of words as he succumbs to the dark forces he has just invoked. One might think of the “poetes maudits” of fin-de-siecle France (Baudelaire comes to mind), or magical realism of the witch doctor scene in Mia Couto’s The Last Flight of the Flamingo.  But these are not allusions to altered states of mind or veiled political commentaries.  Instead, White equates the cowrie shell divination pieces to words, and in a powerful conflation of language, material reality (the cowrie shells).  Morais takes this as the divine portal through which he enters and then descends into a maelstrom of energy of creation and recreation. Here, the poet’s words have the power to not only shape meaning, but also to steer the course of destiny as decisions are made through the buzios, through the power of a throw of the spirit-guided shells and the shell/words.

Descending into the place from which buzios energy burns.  The first poems in the collection squarely confront the idea of a “physics of time” and they mull over how memories, the body, the passions, loves, and loss relate to each other.  The overall feeling is that of pain but also of wonderment, as memories and nostalgia compete with each other for the poet’s sense of reality. The struggle is to assign meaning – what did it mean? Why did it happen?  The love and its loss are still in a state of transition, and to capture exactly that state of being constitutes the essence of “buzios” energy. 

The teaching of the dead.  The power behind the casting of buzios is explored. The poet enters a hut where they invoke the energy for the buzios divination.  The shells give shape to the spirits of the dead that walk with us.  But, who and what are the “dead”?  The dead are those who left life behind, and the poem explores how they want to teach us about pain and the serious consequences of silence. In this poem, the dead also teach us how to wipe away our tears.

The Buzios. In this amazing poem, the poet participates in a Buzios ritual, first by entering into a spell, and then taking a terrifying journey with drum beats and messages from the dead. It is hot in the hut, with its burning wood, and there is a liquid to drink. Perhaps this is all a dream, but whether dream, vision, or lived reality, it represents transition, and also the fearful, physical effects that accompany a tearing off of the veil, the ripping away of the scales that may have covered one’s eyes and kept reality at bay. Reality is no longer the docile pet you play with when you’re feeling lonely. Reality is fire in the belly.

Seeing the people we have missed. In truly brilliant words, Morais writes that reality is a mosaic, and memories create wires that hold the pieces together and create the thoroughfares for emotion and love. Morais describes eating traditional sweets while the shells are thrown. The ancestors are present, and they fill the room with love. “Love never goes away,” states the poet. “It reinvents itself, and then simply regroups us and outfits us with the people in our lives.”

From hot to cold. The buzios – the cowrie shells thrown in divination – expand the possibilities of the world and meanings. The rituals take place in hot huts, with a poet on the verge of losing consciousness, or at least passing into a light faint. This is not sustainable. The poet needs the cold nights in which meanings shrink, the atmosphere is quiet, and hands turn whitish suggesting death, or at least cool, strange pause in the journey. 

The spirit is powerful in Mozambique, where the Indian Ocean takes its powerful offshore currents and either builds the hot sand beaches or transports away the sediments of the highly flood-prone rivers. 

The poems take the spirit of love and ask it why pain as instructive as the intense joy of union. The buzios spirit is that of ancestral love, and also the primordial love that is nature and creation; the very definition of life.  Morais, in each of his intense prose poems, describes states of being, and then the mechanisms to perceive and then reperceive; the mechanisms that poetry uses to infuse with language. The philosopher of language Ferdinand Saussure suggested that parole – the word – merges into langue – the language -- in a way that takes little building blocks of concepts and allows them to create a great river where communication takes place. In Buzios, Morais takes us into that river of divine communication, not only with the spirits of those who loved, but also for those who can and will love. 

Thoughts on Elements in Rochelle Owens’s Poem Series, Part 4, “Patterns of Animus”

Rochelle Owens is writing a multi-part poem, “Patterns of Animus,” which may, at the end of the day, be long enough for a book.  Owens, who has been a part of the poetry vanguard since the 1950s, is still producing innovative, philosophical, subversive work. 

Susan Nash and Rochelle Owens, November 2021

Part IV takes quotes from Dostoyevsky and the presence of a cosmic-level tapeworm as points of departure; together they posit an alternative mechanism for the functions of the universe. Instead of constantly expanding and growing, Owens introduces the notion of the tapeworm.  It’s interesting to think of the universe dominated by a tapeworm mechanism: parasitically feeding off the energy of its host, and ultimately killing the host (and thus, that part of the cosmos, or perhaps all of it) a postulated end of time, end of the universe. The tapeworm is greedy, eternally hungry, and ultimately grows to enormous size and length in the gut of its host. 

It's not unusual to see an ouroboros in literature, especially Medieval and Renaissance literature, where the snake swallowing its tail causes the snake to metamorphose into another snake with completely different patterns and aspect. The ouroboros had symbolic significance in Ancient Egypt and denoted the transmigration of souls.  For medieval and Renaissance writers who delved into topics of alchemy and mystical practices, the ouroboros represented the transformation of worthless substances into gold. The tapeworm is a kind of anti-ouroboros, capable of sucking in, but instead of entering a sheltering, warm womb, nothing grows, and nothing transforms itself into something else. The tapeworm devours without producing anything except an insatiable hunger. The tapeworm eventually kills the host by completely coopting the digestive system. Anything eaten feeds the tapeworm. Nothing is left over for the pitiful and pitiable host. The image that comes to mind is of a cow in a field, ribs and hipbones protruding, looking like a skeleton draped with hide. The cow is eating grass, chewing, chewing, and chewing, trying to curb her hunger – ultimately a lethal hunger, because the more she eats, the more she feeds the tapeworm. The tapeworm would be a comfortable metaphor for consumer culture, but in Rochelle’s hands, its vaster, horror-inducing, and perfectly sublime (as described by Edmund Burke). 

As an essential cosmological mechanism and unseen presence in the universe, Owens’s construction of the tapeworm opens the mind up to really intriguing (and horrific) ideas and images. First, one might say that the mechanism is appropriate – after all, we have detected the presence of black holes.  What if they are simply mouths of the multiple tapeworms that riddle the universe? They suck up the energy. We have mathematically explained it with models in astrophysics that suggest that stars expand but only to a point, and then they implode. I don’t understand how the extreme gravitational pull is explained by physics. I thought one had to have a tremendous amount of mass in order to have a gravitational pull. Perhaps the mass is there, but is in a long-term process of compression and collapse, and perhaps that is what drags in the nearby “nutrients” (light, moving objects, etc.).  How would that process relate to a tapeworm? A tapeworm has two orifices: the gaping mouth that ushers nutrients into its “filthy maw” (to quote Spenser in The Faerie Queene), and its back orifice, its anus.  Perhaps there are eruptions in the cosmos that correlate to the tapeworm mechanism’s outpourings of waste products. I don’t know. It’s a fascinating, mind-expanding mental exercise to envision it. 

In Owen’s study, next to the computer where she works on her poems, there is a window that provides a view of a corner and a lovely little tree, which Rochelle has observed with concern and outpourings of well wishes for its health.  She also has a Merck’s manual which contains a lengthy entry on tapeworms. 

There is an essential horror in the concept of a massive cosmic tapeworm. It makes the Dune sandworms look like Silly String. Intrusive thought -  Do you remember Silly String?  I don’t know if it is still being manufactured – it was something you would spray from a can, and it would come out as thin strings of plastic.  I’m not sure what the entertainment value really was, but I remember being in a Silly String war. It was fun to spray over plants as a kind of decoration. It was probably toxic and highly flammable.  I am just guessing, though. 

I can imagine Owens’s cosmic tapeworm as a fundamental, thumpingly insistent expression of a rap song, with its dark chord progressions and even darker lyrics. The yawning, filthy mouth, the devourer of its host is actually a pretty good metaphor for the dark songs of classic 1990s group Tool as well. I don’t know what that genre of rock is called, but it definitely fills one with existential gloom, and at times, horror. 

 

Still Life: Rochelle Owens

A brilliantly clear day in Philadelphia

Susan Smith Nash, photo by Rochelle Owens

Interview with Edward Cavazos, LingoLet -- Technology Innovations in E-Learning Series

Artificial intelligence is transforming many aspects of elearning as edge computing, cloud access, and speed dramatically improve. Welcome to an interview with Edward Cavazos, LingoLet, and learn how real-time translation and remote simultaneous interpretation are expanding capabilities in elearning and training. 

What is your name and your background? 

Edward Cavazos, VP Sales Operations

32 years within the language industry, focused on technology delivery platforms for communication in spoken language, Sign Language, content creation, multilingual staffing, supporting e-learning companies with translations, interpreters, translators, instructors, monitors, and facilitators.

Edward Cavazos

What is your history with artificial intelligence?

It is only over the last 5 years AI has evolved to be called intelligence and today seen as Artificial Intelligence. The Ai has evolved from speech to text, text to speech, AI transcription of documents, AI of audio files, AI interpreter a two-way communication of one spoken language to another transcribed or spoken. AI is used today in events where attendees in a language or multiple languages can access their language video channel and see the spoken word texted in their language.

What is your experience with elearning platforms? 

Our involvement is to partner and engage with elearning companies who have platform where we provide the necessary language resources and capabilities needed for the project.

How is AI used in e-learning now?  what are the advantages?

AI is not for all projects, but where the training may be general and where the communication is at 93% as acceptable then it can be of value to the client and to those embracing AI to deliver the information in language. 

The advantage is cost savings and the turnaround time of having what is needed in place when there is a short window to complete the project, or where no interpreter(s) are available to support the project.

What do you think will happen in the short and medium-term in e-learning, especially as it relates to AI?

Here is what my crystal ball states. Embrace it, learn what exist, and see how it can be part of the solution for your client and potential clients. Enterprise organization want to work with companies who lead with technology and support with human components as needed. Business is changing and those in the elearning or any business working with organizations needs to educate themselves on AI technology as a solution.

What is Lingolet? 

We are a technology software company focused in the language industry supporting companies needing technology to deliver, communicate, and to access language communication for their markets, clients, customers. Where technology is the vehicle that drives the services needed to meet client’s communication needs in language.

How does LingoLet work, and how does it relate to elearning? 

Lingolet developed the AI features not to replace linguists, interpreters, translators, they will ALWAYS be needed. Lingolet made a decision to lead the way by giving companies options of using and integrating AI technology as part of their immediate communication needs, to become  more efficient and responsive, streamlining process, versus waiting for a human(s) to facilitate the communication to move things forward

How does this relate to elearning? 

In the traditional way, we still provide the human resources needed to support the project, provide the translation of content, provide linguist via the web or in person. 

In the Artificial Intelligence way, I’m not sure if elearning companies are ready to embrace and present this as part of the capabilities?  Let’s give the audience and opportunity to speak to this question.

Please recommend a book or two. 

Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim – Renee Mauborgne

You, Inc. by Burke Hedges “Discover the CEO within you.

Please visit the E-Learn Chat interview with Ed Cavazos here: 

https://youtu.be/3jYLVqXlKB4

What Is Art? Bob Ross and Mary Cassatt

I was listening to a discussion of the recent documentary on the life and work of Bob Ross. He is the painter who painted all the "happy little trees" and liked it when a slip of the brush or paint drippings created "happy accidents." He was a practitioner of the "wet on wet" technique of oil painting that would allow a person to complete a painting in around 30 minutes. He was not an academically trained painter; he learned to paint through a television series after he retired from the Air Force, where he spent much of his time in Alaska.  Alaska gave him a deep appreciation of mountains and other bucolic, tranquil scenes. 

Bob Ross

Critics routinely savage Bob Ross. They attack him for being sentimental and formulaic, and that there are no deep ideas behind his paintings, just a shallow, uninteresting set of visual cliches designed to make people feel that all is good in the world, and there is no reason to examine, interrogate, or question life. His work is not subversive, at least not overtly so. 

It's interesting about how and when critics attack artists for being too "commercial" or sentimental. I think that the early Impressionists were not universally admired or embraced, especially those who painted in "plein aire" -- taking their oils out into the outdoors and painting quickly. I think it's similar to what Bob Ross did, except the brush techniques, the color palette, and the subjects were different. Mary Cassatt comes to mind. Many of her paintings were done in "plein aire" -- "Poppies in a Field (1880)" comes to mind. It's not a landscape per se - it has children in it, but it has bright colors and to look at it gives one a happy feeling (to quote Bob Ross).

Mary Cassatt - Poppies in a Field (1880)

Is Mary Cassatt controversial or subversive?  She was classically and academically trained, and from a wealthy family. She moved to France to pursue painting -- so, her formation alone differentiate her from the way that Bob Ross learned how to paint. She was quite literate, where as Bob Ross dropped out of high school at age 14, but presumably had a GED given that he was in the Air Force.

But, how might Mary Cassatt be considered great and Bob Ross considered kitsch?  We can say that Bob Ross is making a visual commentary on the Hudson River school such as Thomas Cole and the landscape artists such as Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt who painted the American West -- with the sense of romantic vastness. 

Thomas Cole - The Oxbow (1836)

The answer might be not just in the technique, but in the philosophical underpinnings that inform the paintings. Bob Ross paints to elicit an emotion (happiness) while painters such as Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt painted from the Romantic spirit of the day; Romanticism as a philosophical construct that seeks extremes of emotion (awe, the sublime), a sense of the vast, unknowable states of being and universal order (or chaos), and finally, the concept of human liberty. That said, would a painter who seeks to evoke tranquility be automatically relegated to "kitsch"? Sometimes the differentiator is a commercial motive: Bob Ross worked to sell his books and art supplies. But, how many Romantic painters worked on commission? Here we can see one differentiator - Kitsch is intended for mass markets; Romantics painted for a more rarified audience, seeking the seal of approval by various academies or institutions.

Bob Ross - Stream

But, to return to the idea of a visual "conversation" with an artistic forebear, it's interesting to compare the choice of colors - the palette - of Bob Ross versus that of the 19th century landscape artists. Bob Ross's paintings are often considered "pretty" or even "beautiful," while aspects of the Romantics could be considered "stunning" or even terrifying. He is making a commentary of sorts. The same be said of Mary Cassatt -- she is making a visual commentary on paintings such as Jean-Francois Millet's The Gleaners (1857).

Jean-Francois Manet - The Gleaners (1857)

Manet subverted generic expectations by including the poor and working class. She subverted yet again generic expectations by incorporating children of the upper middle class, playing in poppies. The children are not cherubs or angels, as in religious paintings, nor are they the infant Jesus or saints as infants. That in itself makes them rather unique -- plein aire -- spontaneous depictions of every day life, and a heightened kind of realism that makes experience, or the recollection of one's experience, more glorious and joyous each time one recollects it.

Bob Ross - Mountain at Sunset

The Smithsonian's American History Museum accepted the donation of four Bob Ross paintings, along with memorabilia. One of those paintings was displayed, after the Smithsonian even hosted a Bob Ross painting class featuring one of the Bob Ross, Inc. instructors. The concept of having a school of painting and many practitioners is oddly evocative of the Italian Renaissance, and more specifically, of Michelangelo, Titian, and Donatello, except that the painters paint to achieve a mood rather than to produce a mood (thinking of religious awe or later, the Romantics' "blessed mood" (Wordsworth) or the "sublime" (Edmund Burke). But, more on that later!

Thoughts on Rochelle Owens: Patterns of Animus, Part 3, The Ludwig Skulls

Rochelle Owens's latest work, Part 3: The Ludwig Skulls, is a part of a larger work, Patterns of Animus, which has been published online in Poems and Poetics edited by Jerome Rothenberg, and Jacket. The overall work, Patterns of Animus, can be said to constitute a neural network of patterns related to the creative process, which is also a practice of intentional destruction on signifiers and the meaning-making mechanisms in all their manifestations. In "Part 3, The Ludwig Skulls," the incantation-like repetitions and the horror that the Patterns of Animus images evoke suddenly takes a dark turn into deep sadness, loss, and a sense of shock on contemplating what happens after death. She focuses on the skulls of Ludwig von Beethoven and Ludwig Wittgenstein, pulling them together as revolutionary geniuses, the first whose skull was studied after his death in order to posit a connection between nature (the skull you were born with) and genius.

Male Skull, Male Genius

Owens's primary emphasis is on the deep questioning of society’s tendency to place male genius on a pedestal and then make the criterion of excellence something that only highly charismatic and hyperbolically dramatic males can achieve.

The act of disarticulating a skeleton in order to study the skull is a metonymy for fragmentation. In this case it is a systematic dismantling that gives rise to the existence of multiple meanings, multiple interpretations. The process constitutes a persistent and grotesque “memento mori,” and, like the memento mori of Renaissance art, it serves as a reminder of death that is supposed to make one’s appreciation of life the most keen. Nevertheless, such a memento mori also posits a kind of living horror, a waking nightmare of life in which the haunting presence of death is inescapable and even joy can only be maximized by smashing it together with death.

It’s very much a Renaissance motif, which one sees not only in paintings but also in poetry and drama. “Alas, poor Yorick” is perhaps the most famous reference, when Hamlet gazes onto the skull of the famous actor, Yorick, whose reputation has faded, and all that is left is the skull.   The idea is expressed in the line from “The Ludwig Skulls” --“only death gives life meaning.”

Technologies of Revelation

When a body is dissected, it is taken apart to explore and uncover what lies hidden. In "The Ludwig Skulls," there is more than method used in this process of revealing patterns and other phenomena. Owens explores the technologies of revelation; namely cameras, projection, and light. She repeats the following passage:

      Camera zooming and panning

      projection screen

      solar light slashes (“Patterns of Animus” part 3)

(https://jacket2.org/commentary/rochelle-owens-2)

The juxtapositions of the frantic camera, the fragmentation of language via letters (as Wittgenstein broke apart language to expose the ultimate futility of using it to convey universal meaning), with the routine support work of a lab tech, and the energizing qualities of hot, black coffee, combine to shred and break apart the elitist carapace of knowledge and culture.

The process of disaggregation is more important to the process of revelation than one might think. The disarticulation of a skeleton is clearly a dismantling of the bodies (of authority, of knowledge) of the past. As one contemplates the fragmentations, one might think of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto from 1909. However, Marinetti was in large part simply reacting against aristocratic or bourgeois sensibilities. Owens, however, introduces a subversive humor. The memento mori of a Ludwigian skull  a response to the continued lionizing of the “great male skulls” that make it impossible to break free from old paradigms because both the beliefs and the countering subversions are held in the skulls of the Ludwigs, who represent dead, white European males and the mainstream European intellectual tradition.

The central irony that a deaf man can write some of the world’s most stirring music has been a paradox that haunts people who learn the history of Beethoven’s life. They do not realize what an iconoclast he was, and they forget the context of Romanticism and some of its most important terms: the ineffable and the sublime to express almost mystical or transcendental awareness.  He embraced revolution in the sense that it disrupted the order, and in the chaos seethed a cauldron of potential.

Wittgenstein writes about the ultimate impossibility of language to communicate meaning. How different is what Wittgenstein saying about language than what Beethoven did with music?  The musical notes he cannot hear are the words that float around, unmoored from their meanings.

Skulls and Puzzle Bones

Owens suggests that to truly create a work that breaks free from the strictures of dominant culture paradigms, it is necessary to identify the underpinnings (the “skulls”) and to interject light, nature, and natural processes (life as well as rot) and then to reconfigure both language (“cursing / howling / screaming”) and the essential order (the “puzzle bones”), and then to juxtapose decay with the vital fluids of life (spit, blood, gore).

As pointed out before, Wittgenstein stated, among other things, that language has a certain irreducibility, and that it is not capable of expressing the ineffable (“about which we cannot speak we must consign to silence”), or if it is, it is only by creating language that is the equivalent of silence, a kind of white noise of random juxtapositions.

Owens contends that to overcome the embedded patriarchy and hegemonic strictures of language, one must move to the visual (the “camera zooming and panning”) that triggers the parts of the brain that can admit new patterns and are not trapped in the pattern-recognition / meaning construction of language or music built within “old skulls.”

When construction and subversion (or deconstruction) are all constructed of the same materials and when the builders and the subversives are of the same group, there is no subversion at all. All that happens is a transfer of power, and the King accedes to a cousin, the Duke. In the end, the bastions of power are reinforced. The ten percent become the one percent. All they have done is create a smaller, and tighter elite by keeping the masses busy by going to war with themselves.

In the end, it is the essence of the human body itself that offers a pathway to illumination and the production of the kind of art that exposes the mysteries of life itself.

---Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D.

    Norman, Oklahoma

 

 

 

Two Monks (Juan Bustillo Oro, Dir., 1934): Why I love Mexican Cinema - 4

Dos Monjes (Two Monks) emerged in 1934 as one of the most innovative Expressionist films of the time. In the same genre as the work explored by the German Expressionist filmmakers, F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, Juan Bustillo Oro uses dramatic techniques to tell a story, but more importantly to probe the psychological state and the nature of reality of the protagonists.

The storyline of Dos Monjes is straight-forward, especially as Gothic fiction goes. Two monks, who clearly hate each other, are in the same monastery. One has a secret, and the other has a lacuna, a big gap in his memory, which is not as much like amnesia as something that might have had from a shock from which his mind has not yet recovered.

Dos Monjes (Two Monks) is a ground-breaking film of Mexican Expressionism. Although critically well received, it was followed by only one of the same Expressionist genre, primarily because the newly-elected president of Mexico, President Cardenas, gave financial support to work following Leninist notions that art was to be used for didactic purposes, and to inculcate socialist values. Thus, his presidency supported the films that were consonant with themes such as land reform, nationalization of national resources, separation of church and state, educational opportunities for indigenous, and more. Abstract, modernist, and expressionistic art forms clashed with his administration’s ideology. So, Bustillo Oro, along with other filmmakers, began to make more traditional films, although there is no doubt that Bustillo Oro’s aesthetic ideas infuse all his work, and even constitute a subversion of the dominant ideology of the day.

Bustillo Oro’s ability to manage the techniques and ideas of Expressionism is stunning, particularly considering he and his crew had to improvise and build for the first time the sets and the techniques in order to bring about the effects.  Specifically, there is a visual “conversation” with various antecedents, which include the German Expressionist cinematographers: F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang. From art, the conversations include the painters Edvard Munch, Ernst Kirchner, Pablo Picasso, and the sculptor, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.

The story is a basic one: a young woman is shot during an argument between two young men. What really happened? The only certain thing is that she is dead, and that the two men ended up at the same monastery. We learn what happened in the accident through flashbacks. The details of the accident are not as important as the psychological story being told by means of film technique, and also the destabilization of reality and all the ontological considerations attendant to it. Specifically, Bustillo Oro uses lighting, shadows, point of view and perspective to call into question what is real and what is a hallucination or flaw in memory.  

CHARACTERS

Javier                           A gifted composer, but psychologically unstable

Juan                             Javier’s boyhood friend, now a sailor

Ana                              Javier’s next door neighbor with whom he falls in love

Gertrudis:                     Javier’s mother

THEMES

Madness:                     The primary theme of the film is that of madness and how it shapes one’s perceptions of reality. In essence, it is about the victims of madness and how it takes their lives away from them. For Bustillo Oro, madness is depicted less in words and more in expressionistic images and lighting that show rather than describe the states of mind, the perceptions, and the unmoorings from rational thought.

Obsessive love:             Javier’s love for Ana verges on the obsessive. She does not reciprocate in the same way; she is mainly grateful to him and to Gertrudis (Javier’s mother) for having given her a place to stay when her parents expelled her from their home after she rejected a suitor. Unbeknownst to all, Ana rejected the suitor because she had promised herself to Juan before his latest long sea voyage.           

The nature of memory: Memory is not to be trusted in Dos Monjes. In fact, the film revolves around two competing narratives and ideas about how memory depends on the eye of the beholder, and that one’s own memory may be inaccurate.

Friendship:                   The friendship shared by Juan and Javier is one that dates back to childhood. However, it does not withstand the pressure of rivalry over a love interest. Nor does it withstand the pressure of psychological instability.

This is an excerpt of a longer article by Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D. To access the full version, you may click here. 

Meet Javier, a monk who is living the life of a self-abnegating monk, but we do not know why. Notice the light focused on his face, the candle and the dark background. 

This scene is absolutely brilliant: Javier is watching from his home, and observes the arrival of a suitor, the welcoming gestures of Ana’s mother, and Ana’s own resistance to the arrangement. The silhouette technique is quite striking. 

After Javier meets the newly admitted Juan in the monastery, he begins to play the organ again. But instead of the sweet, harmonious tones he created before, he is now mentally disorganized, and his performance reflects it. His music is discordant. The lighting reinforces the concept of madness, with a circle of light suggesting exaltedness. The monks are faceless, with their backs to the camera, a menacing presence.

Each Madman with his/her Theme (Dir. Juan Bustillo Oro, 1939): Why I Love Mexican Cinema: 3

Cada loco con su tema (Each Madman with his / her Own Theme) is a high-energy and highly intelligent farce from the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema (Cine de Oro). As a farce, it entertains the audience its use of exaggeration, absurdity, and over-the-top performances. However, as in most of Bustillo Oro’s work, Cada loco con su tema uses Expressionistic cinematography and themes from film noir to satirize a genre (pulp horror radio) and to pull in the tradition of the “carpas.” The carpas were Mexican (and also Mexican-American) traveling tent shows that traversed Mexico and the southwest United States from the time of the Mexican Revolution, 1910, through the 1940s. The high-energy theatrical spectacles were intended for working-class Spanish-speaking audiences and as such, they often mocked the wealthy classes and the mores of the rich, especially the elites descended from the Spanish who were granted land and privilege during the Spanish colonial times.  Thus, they could be, and generally were, anarchic and subversive. The brilliant comedian, Cantinflas, got his start in the carpas, where he perfected his “peladito” character, a cheerful and quick-witted street-smart character who finds himself in absurd situations, often deliberately defying conventions of the upper classes (who are indistinguishable from corrupt politicians and organized crime families).

In Cada loco con su tema, there are many levels of mistaken identity and misperceptions due to completely flawed assumptions. The main premise is that a horror-radio show writer with a comical name (Julio César Napoleón ) has driven himself into a state of extreme paranoia by being immersed in crime drama and horror all day, every day. After a nervous breakdown, he is advised to spend a month at a sanatorium operated by his doctor. To avoid possible career repercussions, he takes on an assumed name, Justiniano Conquián , which, coincidentally, is the same name as a mild-mannered and rather befuddled taxidermist who must endure one month in the ancestral family mansion, reputed to be haunted by spirits that drive one mad or to one’s death. Justiniano will inherit the full 6 million pesos. The catch is that he has to emerge from the month both alive and sane.  It won’t be easy. The real Justiniano has the bad luck of having greedy relatives who are eager to push Justiniano into madness or death so that they can have equal shares of the inheritance.

So, with such a premise, there are many opportunities for identity confusion, mix-ups, and comical misperceptions.  Most of the action takes place at the ancestral family castle, where Julio César  and his assistant, Serafin, end up after taking a wrong turn on their way to the mountain sanatorium. Justiniano’s scheming relatives are already installed there. Justiniano arrives a day late, having spent a night at the mountain sanatorium after also taking a wrong turn.

MAIN CHARACTERS

Julio César Napoleón                A successful, but very high-strung writer of horror shows for the radio          

Justiniano Conquián                  A mild-mannered taxidermist who may inherit 6 million pesos

Josefina Larios Conquián          Lovely younger sister of Justiniano

Serafin del Monte                      Julio César’s assistant

Dr. German Casca Conquián     Distant relative who devises a scheme to cheat Justiniano

Augusta                                    The butler’s wife who foretells doom and gloom

Severo                                     The butler, and also, secretly a contender to the inheritance

Lucrecia                                   The scheming wife of one of the contenders to the inheritance

Dr. Luis Jiménez                       Psychiatrist who runs a sanatorium based on his personal theories

THEMES

Grand Guignol-esque Naturalism:  The Grand-Guignol Theatre was a theatre in Paris that specialized in horrifying spectacles known to make people faint, become sick, and otherwise traumatized. In a way, they can be said to make a mockery of the Greek notion that the efficacy of theatre is in its purifying and emotionally clarifying catharsis. The Grand Guignol productions were extremely popular from the late 19^th century through 1962 and exercised a tremendous influence on radio, film, and expressionistic experimental theatre such as that of Antonin Artaud (The Theatre of Cruelty). The theatre was an outgrowth of literary naturalism as pioneered by Zola, Flaubert, and Proust. The spectacles were highly popular, and prided themselves on giving people extreme experiences – something that found its way into French philosophy as well; for example, in the case of Foucault’s quest for “limit experiences.”  Always a bit disreputable and willing to toy with the frontiers of life and death (they often boasted of having a doctor on call for people who needed medical attention due to the intense shock), the Grand-Guignol Theatre became a kind of “guilty secret.” The direct heirs of the horror spectacles were the popular genres in literature and film, which included pulp fiction, horror radio, sensation novels, and horror films. Cada loco con su tema is a parody of the Grand-Guignolesque productions, and in subverting the genre, it also calls into question the true impact of art, and the nature of catharsis in theatre.

Reality is a Deconstruction.  In Cada loco con su tema reality is seriously and repeatedly called into question. Perhaps the most powerful message in Cada loco is the tacit suggestion that reality is a choice, and not something to be independently verified by empirical observation or sensory perceptions. Because they believe that they are in an asylum and that what they are seeing are simply theatrical productions designed to shock them into their senses, Julio César  and Serafin scrunch up their faces, close their eyes, and loudly chant: This is not real! This is not real! The comical aspect is that they are actually closing their eyes to something that is quite real.  When Julio César  chooses to assume the identity of Justiniano Conquián , he is also choosing his own reality. For the “real” Justiniano Conquián , his befuddlement and tenuous grasp on what is going on around him have the opposite effect. For Justiniano Conquián , reality is not a choice, but a slippery slope that slides just beyond his grasp. Taxidermy further illustrates the “reality dialectic” – the taxidermy specimens are real depictions of a life that is no longer a life. They are dead – except for the supposedly taxidermied gorilla, which turns out to be quite alive (albeit not a taxidermy specimen at all, but a man in a gorilla suit).

 This is a brief excerpt of a larger work by Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D.  You may access the article here. 

Julio César Napoleón, a horror radio show writer, arrives home to the sound of “hands up or I’ll shoot!” but does not realize it is his radio that has automatically turned on at the hour of his “Murder in the Madhouse.” Bustillo Oro uses the chiaroscuro of German Expressionism to emphasize the fact that this is a part of the horror genre (or a parody / subversion of it). 

Justiniano Conquián, a mild-mannered taxidermist, learns that he will inherit $6 million pesos if he can manage to survive a month in the Conquián Castle without going insane or dying. 

Dramatic backlighting gives Augusta an unearthly glow, and the light that illuminates her crucifix gives rise to the thought that one needs divine protection to survive a night in the castle

This is a dramatic point of view shot that reminds one of Bustillo Oro’s masterpiece, Dos Monjes. Dr. Conquián takes Julio César’s suggestion to start the evening meal with a prayer – a “Black Mass Prayer” to an absurd extreme. When Julio César enthusiastically joins in, Dr. Conquián impatiently chides him, “Stop blaspheming my blasphemy!”  While the Black Mass is an inversion of Christianity and Catholic rituals, the Julio César’s interruptions and farcical asides are inversions and subversions of the subversion. The result is comical chaos. 

When the loudly blaring radio program, “Murder in the Madhouse,” opens with “drop your gun!” it so startles everyone that they drop their guns. Julio César scoops it up and subdues the scoundrels, the scheming, greedy distant relatives. 

Arm in Arm Down the Street (Del brazo y por la calle) - (Juan Bustillo Oro, 1956) - Why I Love Mexican Cinema: 2

Juan Bustillo Oro’s film, Arm in Arm Down the Street  (Del brazo y por la calle) (1956) is the story of a young married couple, María and Alberto, who have great dreams, but who live in grinding poverty in the harsh, noisy, industrial neighborhood of Nonoalco / Tlatelolco, which is slowly robbing both of their human dignity and, in the case of María, her sanity. What makes this film unique is the fact that Bustillo Oro uses the Expressionistic techniques he employed in his earlier works of Mexican Expressionism and film noir, to create the sensory conditions of the experience of the living in an industrial part of Mexico City (Tlatelolco) near a huge train terminal and the Nonoalco bridge, and the psychological consequences. María, who hails from a family from the wealthy (and snobbish) Mexican elite, married the impecunious but ambitious artist, Alberto. They are intensely in love, and both have the best of intentions to make their marriage a success. However, the grinding monotony of poverty, the bill collectors, and the invasiveness of the city with its noise, heat, smoke and grime are pushing María into a state of anxiety, despair, and paranoia. 

Trapped at home, she comments that “Every day I must endure the only view I have: the terrible human misery that surrounds me: naked children, totally insensate women, men turned into beasts by alcohol, and in all, everyone is hungry” (from Del brazo y por la calle). Alberto’s pride and ambition push him to make rash and ultimately selfish decisions, and above all, make him blind to the consequences of his selfish point of view. The film is emotionally difficult to watch, but as opposed to the films based on plays by Eugene O’Neill or Tennessee Williams, Bustillo Oro’s film, like most of the great films from Mexico’s Epoca de Oro del Cinema Mexicano, has a life-affirming ending with a message of hope, strength, and salvation.

While many of Mexican Cinema’s Golden Age films are melodramas, comedies, film noir, or westerns, Arm in Arm Down the Street is an example of Naturalism.  In a literary sense, the film is in a direct line of descent from the novels and novellas of the naturalist writers, Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, and George Gissing in that it shows the inner workings, dreams, contradictions and vulnerabilities of people in a state of relative powerlessness.  In the case of George Gissing, his female protagonists are often ones driven by poverty to degrading behaviors; but it shows (as Jane Austen was at pains to always point out), that women had to muzzle themselves with respect to frankness and honesty in order to have any chance whatsoever at survival (aka, a “good match”).  Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s female characters also tend to fall to that level as well. Without a “good match,” there was essentially nothing to keep you from falling into a pit; a veritable hell on earth. In that sense, many of the naturalists and sensationalists (Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs. Ellen Wood), are in essence writing cautionary tales about what fate will be befall you if you marry badly.  Although they write to question and undermine the practice of “The Season,” there is a sense that they can’t change reality, and so the novels become normative in the sense that they simply equip people with knowledge and a cold-eyed stare at the practice to arm themselves to play the game to win.

Del brazo y por la calle is really no different. While its super-realism / naturalism engenders comprehension and sympathy (and perhaps even self-knowledge) in the viewer, in the end, most viewers will look at María and think, “Look what you could have avoided if you had not been dumb enough to marry an artist!” In terms of the clichés surrounding “artistic temperament,” one can argue that María is even more temperamental than Alberto. He is unflappable. However, that is primarily because he has learned to insulate himself a bit from reality. It is only when reality intrudes does he face his own part in the drama that resulted in such profound alienation and emotional agony for his wife. 

MAIN CHARACTERS

Maria                Beautiful young woman from a wealthy family in the Mexican elite

Alberto             Poor, idealistic painter who is passionately in love with María

Mexico City       Credited in the credits as the third main actor

SYNOPSIS

Del brazo y por la calle the story of María and Alberto, who marry in spite of María’s parents’ exhortations to the contrary.  Wealthy parents never want to see their daughters marry impecunious artists, and it is even more the case in highly stratified Mexico where social hierarchy has been so rigidly enforced it amounts to a caste system. But, love will be love, and all it takes is a little bit of Puck’s pansy juice in the eyes, and the beautiful society debutante falls in love with the penniless artist who lives in a noisy apartment that is falling apart at the seams and inhabited by carousing neighbors and sexual predators. The film is about the how the once utopian part of the city that housed the hub of President Porfirio Diaz’s immense railway network evolved into a dystopian, Hephaestian inferno around the Nonoalco Bridge, and how that environment slowly chipped away the sanity of the residents. In the end, the strength of their love prevails, but it is not without deep challenges and introspection. The clanging, shrieking, hoarse-throated city breaks down, but in doing so, it reveals the gold within.

THEMES

Naturalism in cinema.  As perhaps one of the most innovative and daring films of the entire Epoca de Oro del Cine Mexicano (Golden Age of Mexican Cinema), Del brazo y por la calle .  Its subtlety and relative obscurity have resulted in the fact that it seems to be an underappreciated film. And yet, there are aspects of the film that make it unique, not only for being an intensely innovative example of Naturalism in cinema that brings in the city itself as perhaps the main protagonist, but for functioning as a time capsule.  The film was shot in the Mexico City industrial areas of Nonoalco and Tlatelolco, which, at the time of the filming in 1955, was an industrial area criss-crossed by train tracks and busy elevated bridges and highways. It was an ugly agglomeration of Bauhaus-appearing multi-story stucco buildings, plazas with low-rent businesses (pool halls, etc.), cheap hotels, incessant construction, and pockets of grinding poverty where poor children did not get the nutrition or medical attention they needed.  There were also vestiges of the past – a small church dating back to colonial times, constructed over the old Tlatelolco city-state that once rivaled Tenochtitlán. There was also a charming lake, Lake Texcoco, which rivaled Xichimilco, but unlike Xochimilco, Lake Texcoco was drained.  It is interesting to note that Bustillo Oro filmed in Nonoalco, the same location as Buñuel’s classic (but immediately banned) film, Los Olvidados (1950) which incorporated the story of juvenile delinquents. The scenes of the trains and the tracks upon which María trips as she returns from the market are reminiscent of Juan Rulfo’s stunning photographs of the trains of Mexico City which he published in 1955. In Rulfo’s photographs, the trains simultaneously evoke the rapid leap to modernity of Porfirio Díaz’s presidency, along with a sense of its impact on people’s ways of surviving against all odds.

Costumbrismo urbano:  One can consider Bustillo Oro’s film an example of “costumbrismo urbano” (to coin a term), because the Tlatelolco of 1956 (as in the case of the pre-Conquest Tlatelolco) no longer exists. Much was demolished in order to make way for utopian urban projects – a utopia that never arrived, given that Tlatelolco was the site of a massacre of students by the military in 1968, and then the site of mass death in 1985 when the relatively new buildings collapsed during the 1985 massacre.

This is a brief excerpt of the full article by Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D.. Click here to read the article with additional details about plot elements, themes, character analysis, illustrative scenes, and review questions. 

In the opening scenes, the narrator takes the viewer on a tour of Mexico City and its wide and diverse array of neighborhoods and communities. This is a few of the Polanco district, renowned for its leafy trees, wide avenues, and prosperous businesses. 

As we progress through Mexico City, the camera angles become more pronounced and the views of Mexico City are askew, suggesting that the city itself can cause disorientation and alienation. 

Alberto and María kneel inside the small, colonial-era church located in the poor, industrial Tlotelolco District of Mexico City, where Alberto lives. 

Working by the light from below, María huddles near the skylight, still mending clothing.  She is still on the azotea (rooftop patio), and in the distance one can see the neon lights, demonstrating that artifice and human constructions have completely overwhelmed / negated nature. 

María observes poor children playing in the dirt and trash in her neighborhood of Nonoalco, just past the train tracks and under the elevated highway bridge. She notices one boy is disabled. All seem to be hungry. She leaves her paper bag containing bread for them. “Every day I must endure the only view I have: the terrible human misery that surrounds me: naked children, totally insensate women, men turned into beasts by alcohol, and in all, everyone is hungry.”

The bridge at Nonoalco where Alberto considers suicide. The chiaroscuro treatment by Bustillo Oro gives it a feeling of being in an inferno. 

María and Alberto recommit themselves to each other. Morning has broken, and the light of day is shining into their home and their hearts. Bustillo Oro uses light to represent calm optimism and a transformation. The cross-beams are clearly visible, also connoting stability

Alberto and María walk hand in hand down the street. They are together, and the sky is clear. There is very little traffic, and the weather is calm. The viewer has a sense of optimism and restored balance.