The Wild Palms (If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem); William Faulkner, 1939

Two stories separated by time and characters, but sharing similar themes and locale, including the legendary Parchman State Prison in Mississippi. The first, with Old Testament and more ‘earthly’ overtones, takes place during the Mississippi floods of 1927 when levees broke along the swollen Mississippi River and flooded the countryside. Prisoners of Parchman had to be relocated to dry ground, including an inmate of American Indian origins doing 15 for an attempted bank robbery modeled after the pulp books and comics he had read during his youth. During the relocation he was asked to take a rowboat to rescue a stranded man and pregnant women, which resulted in his being swept up in the wild currents with the woman as his passenger. Through the descriptions of their journey Faulkner demonstrates the inevitability of the natural and social forces, to which the prisoner exhibits a stoic, quiet acceptance towards, keeping himself in agreement to his personal fate. While he does return to prison in the end, his story includes the delivery of the pregnant woman's baby.

The second story occurs about 10 years later and contains nuances of the New Testament and explores the more ‘cerebral’ qualities of our existence. A young man, Harry, with fairly upstanding social and intellectual gifts, falls in love with a married woman, Charlotte, when finishing up his residency to become a physician. Charlotte reciprocates the love equally and leaves her husband and children to be with Harry, but by doing so they form a relationship which the rest of society would consider ‘illicit’, thereby removing them from society‘s privileges. However, each considers their love to be so strong that it is all they need in life, all else being capable of going to the wayside provided that they have their love for one another, and by choosing a life of the immaterial, they also reject the more prevalent values of materialism and prestige. In doing so, Harry displays his free will (last name Willbourne), believing that he is in charge of his own fate, and in contrast to the first, his story results not in birth, but an aborted pregnancy which he personally performs. When arrested for his actions, he’s presented with the opportunity to flee, but, as with the prisoner, resigns and accepts the charges against him. In the end, as with the first, an acceptance of his fate is made.

The comparisons and contrasts of the two stories are so abundant, they become an endless source of rumination: the balance of freewill and fate, birth and death, natural forces, social constructs, individuality, moral choice versus societal demands. In fact, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton was noted to indicate that he and fellows monks would use Faulkner’s novel to meditate upon the human condition. Not that The Wild Palms could be considered religious allegory, but its themes contain the eternal truths of humankind which make for the non-faith substance within religious thought.

If the depth of themes don’t appeal, the book is as equally immense in its artistic merits. I have not read a lot of Faulkner, but of that which I have read (primarily some of his short stories and As I Lay Dying) I don’t remember his writing being as ornate and stylized as it is, which tells me I need to read a lot more Faulkner. The stream of consciousness reaches a descriptiveness that will ever change the way you see a shopping mall in Chicago, or conceptualize the muddy waters of an over flown Mississippi, and it makes for a reading that’s powerful in both its vividness and immediacy.

When thinking about Edward Hopper's paintings, the incorporation of the natural world has never been a subject matter that comes to mind. And maybe its because his 1940 Gas says about all that needs to be said about nature within his artistic vision. The rich green of the forest recedes both in definition and color, as well as placement upon the canvas. A world that's disappearing and becoming lost in the oncoming night. In opposition, the clear form and substance of the petrol pumps creates a forward momentum towards the viewer, demarcating the scene between the man made world from that of nature. But then even the station robbed of its potential quaintness of human activity with the commercial sign of "Mobilgas" being the most clearly lit object, as though all else within the setting is under its raised glory and the man must now attend, possibly even bow, to its new commercial rituals. If you look at other Hopper paintings, you'll notice a similar use of light, shining on and into the faces of his subjects to emphasize and draw attention to the isolation that modern life has brought them.

The Tarbox Ramblers

As much as the steam train in American music can call to mind the passing by of idyllic countrysides, sleepy stations, plunky banjos and the spit of mouth-harps wiped clean on faded blue jeans, so to are there dark shadows in the back of the cars with shifty, guilty eyes looking for high hell or forgiving redemption, clouds of choking black dust and soot from mountains of coal, now fed into the molten blaze of the black locomotive with lead shovels, it's riders inside smelling of sweat and blisters, running with tempers and hands waxed with cold deeds, carrying bags of jobless sorrows where the taste of rust is more familiar than the meager copper penny, their hearts housed in desolation and the rot of the cars they ride in, crying over the lost flirtation of the cuckoos and the loneliness of a wippoorwill. Such is the atmosphere of the Tarbox Ramblers, who I had the great privilege of seeing again earlier this month when they rolled into town.

Drawing from traditions of hillbilly, gospel and blues, the stylings of Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar, but the soul of Morphine, PJ Harvey and early Smashing Pumpkins, the guitar player worked his heavy distorted guitar riffs in a small bar called Jukes on a hot as a black phoenix August night. We drank dirty wine while the bass player slapped his standup bass or pounded primitive rhythms on a two piece drum set that provided the thunder for the silent crackle of heat lightning that made violence across the crowded night sky. When things really got rolling, the concrete walls lost their weight, turned crickety, and the mist of a dank fog rose from beneath the cracks that ran along the edges of the floor, not knowing where the music might take us, what might be around the hidden bend.

They're from Boston, and primarily tour the Great Lakes and East coast, but not to be missed when stopping nearby. And if they don't quite make it to your town, each of their two albums are also well worth your time, the most recent, A Fix Back East, produced down in Memphis by the legendary Jim Dickinson, brings together the often fitting combination of the simplicity and boldness of punk with traditional roots music: i need a world that's turning, i need a world that's burning, i need a world not fade away.....

"...all day long it had poked up and down cypress and gum-choked bayous and across cotton fields (where at times instead of swimming it waded) gathering its sorry cargo from the tops of houses and barns and even out of trees, and now it warped into that mushroom city of the forlorn and despairing where kerosene flares smoked in the drizzle and hurriedly strung electrics glared upon the bayonets of martial policemen and the red cross brassards of doctors and nurses and canteen-workers. The bluff overhead was almost solid with tents, yet still there were more people than shelter for them; they sat or lay, single and by whole families, under what shelter they could find or sometimes under the rain itself, in the little death of profound exhaustion while the doctors and the nurses and the soldiers stepped over and around and among them."

It was pure chance that I picked up William Faulkner's 1939 The Wild Palms [If I forget thee, Jerusalem] and came across this description of the The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 a week from Katrina's one year anniversary and on the same day as the release of Spike Lee's four part documentary about Hurricane Katrina on HBO. Whether the main reason for the problem is racial or class related, its hard to deny that not much has changed in the past 80 years. Equally as sad are the large number of people who still look at the catastrophe only in the economics of dollar and cents and whose understandings are limited to insurance reimbursements and the return of their personal privileges, oblivious to the real destruction and tragedies of the loss of life and entire communities and families forever displaced and separated, never having the opportunity to return to home. Hopefully Lee's work will help shift these attitudes outward for a more humane understanding, both for the continuing handling of the current crisis and for future events. If you can make the ballot holders care, the government will care.

Here’s a novel that has lived up entirely to its praise, one that I would not hesitate to recommend to anyone of any reading level. It involves a group of children being raised in an English boarding school where they are taught that they are ‘special’ from the rest of the population. However, they are actually medical clones and their sole purpose for being created is to harvest organs for medical donations.

The students are forced to live lives which are entirely planned out for them-- to eventually donate their organs and be dead by their mid 30’s. They remain segregated from the rest of the population, personal identities are almost non existent, and when they do form, are confined to themselves, they are without familial lineage, with no concept of where they are from, nor capable of bearing children (although sex is allowed) and are void of any sense of a future outside of their eventual donations and early deaths.

What they do have though, and only have, are each other. However, when each other is all they have, they become that much more dependent upon one another, thus intensifying the dire need for the relationships. They do fantasize and rumor about the possibility of escaping their clinical fates, such as opportunities to develop lives similar to the rest of the population, or to defer the time when they must become donors, but when such tragic flights of fancy hit the hard ground of reality, they are again faced with malnourished lives that are limited to the companionships of one another.

In many ways, Never Let Me Go does not romanticize relationships, but does the opposite, actually deemphasizes the importance of relationships. By experiencing vicariously through the characters what it would be like to live in a world where your entire existence is wrapped solely around two or three people, you begin to value all of the other forms of experience which make up life: our place in history, roles in society, the freedom to create identities, ability to find companionship with those that have lived lives different from our own, plus we have the dark and beautiful uncertainties of life with our not knowing our fates or our approximate time of death. All of these allow us to live in existences with ever broadening realms and spheres, while simultaneously learing to conscientiously value the days we are graced with, which may not be here tomorrow. Never Let Me Go teaches us not to grasp and cling, but to live in a world that keeps being filled with beauty and meaning when we are, unfortunately, let go.

Up Above the World; Paul Bowles, 1966

If malevolence and insidious motivations were what I was looking for in Tartt’s The Little Friend but didn’t find, such actions were rampant in Paul Bowle’s Up Above the World. A retired American physician who wears his shoelaces pragmatically tight and his younger wife who is happy with her easy slip-ons are enjoying some world travels in the doc’s later, golden years. While in Central America, after being invited up to a hilltop mansion that overlooks the city below, they become unknowingly involved in the scandalous scheming of a wealthy, good looking young man and his beautiful and young lover.

The actual details and actions of the plot are minimal and told with a detached voice, but the language use occasionally develops a poignancy to create a palpable understanding of how the characters are feeling through Bowles’ descriptions of the scenes, where we are informed of how the characters view and relate to their environment, as opposed to the narration explaining what they are thinking and feeling. This technique is also used to create the dramatic tension. Again, not a lot of specifics happens with the plot, but through the descriptions of the settings, something horrific is being built. The sentences are simple, where its easy to picture a neutral visual image of whatever building or landscape is brought to the page, but darkly descriptive adjectives are thrown in to create a forewarning of an ominous and dreadful resolution awaiting at the end.

This writing style, of informing the reader about the characters and their states of minds through poetic descriptions, is particularly fitting to Bowles’ existential subject matter. The only other book of Bowles’ that I have read is his well known The Sheltering Sky, but its clear that Bowles concerns himself with the subjective viewpoints people have with respect to understanding the world, whether it be with regards to their personal relationships or their positions within a economic/cultural contexts. In both The Sheltering Sky and Up Above the World the characters move towards greater isolation until they become hellishly captive within their own selves, incapable of fully connecting with another or life around them. But does Bowles offer a solution for his characters, or is this just his philosophical position towards life? I’m not sure and its something I’ll have to think about when reading more Bowles, but when thinking about the endings in The Sheltering Sky and Up Above the World, I can’t help but have one of Bob Dylan’s lines in the album, Blood on the Tracks run through my mind: "its doom alone that counts".

I had been thinking about contributing to Girish's Avant-Garde blog-a-thon, but my knowledge is a bit thin in that arena and I ran out of time to study up on a new filmmaker. While I don't consider this to be an official entry, I thought visitors to this blog who are working through the other posts might want to take a break and enjoy this excellent assemblage of Radiohead's Paranoid Android and the 1948 movie, The Red Shoes, based upon the Hans Christain Andersen story of the same name. This is very nicely done, so do please, enjoy.........