Sunday, April 10, 2022
5:10 a.m. Dreamed a long elaborate structure for a spy story, if you wanted one. The man is undoubtedly a spy – was a spy, rather. Whether he is still a spy is unknown, and whether as a spy he was faithful to one side or the other – or to either – is in doubt among the characters and to the reader. Perhaps the best way to write it would be for the writer to not decide either, until he absolutely had to, so as to hold the balance, somewhat in the way Ingrid Bergman had to play Ilse Lund, since the writers hadn’t decided whether she was in love with Rick or with Laslow. The point of such a story, of course, could be to look at the psychology of the spy while divorced from considerations of the “good” or “bad” of his cause or even of his character, as determined in your mind by whether he was or wasn’t faithful to this or that cause, or to either, or perhaps to both.
You are learning, Arjuna. You have come a way from your earlier condemnation of the American spies who sold secrets to Russia.
Walker, you mean? Ames? My opinion of them isn’t softened.
No, but that is your opinion of their character, not their (or anyone’s) ideology or lack of it.
I’ll get the coffee, and I’ll set my switches.
Proceed, then.
You were forgetting your earlier thoughts about certain Civil War figures, and your reading in various contexts.
Yes. Admirable characters have served abominable causes, and causes that have seemed abominable from one point of view haven’t seemed so from another. What cause is worse than the Stasi, the East German secret police? Then you read Man Without a Face, and you see “The Lives of Others,” and the process of putting it all into different contexts shows you all the shades of grey there are. John LeCarre did it first, for me, before I was 20 years old, with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and he kept doing it, sometimes irritatingly, in novel after novel, mostly centering on George Smiley and Smiley’s moral perplexities. Or, maybe better, The Little Drummer Girl, perhaps the most impartial dissection of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I have ever read.
And all that was approached from the point of view of the 3D world being the important thing. Anything beyond the 3D was debatable, or irrelevant, or even risible. This was taken for granted by the characters (mostly) and by the author and by the reader – even, one might say, by the genre itself, for how much tension remains in a spy story if the stakes disappear? If the cause isn’t compelling, and the characters are only transiently interacting, put it that way – what remains? It becomes a play of manners.
I take it you are saying, it’s hard to get too enmeshed in a game of life and death if life and death themselves are only somewhat real.
That is true at one level, but there are many more levels, equally important and interesting to be explored. The very cat-and-mouse game is of course real at the level it is played and experienced. The effect on the characters playing it – and the effect of the characters playing it – are real on their own level, and are real in a different way at other levels.
I am moved to mention the Irish struggle against the English, and then among themselves, as was the background for The Quiet Man, by Maurice Walsh.
Yes, more spying, more struggling, and former allies become enemies and former enemies become sincere allies, and individual friendships become stretched between affection and duty, all heavily laced with certainty and doubt and conviction and remorse. And Walsh holds your sympathy on the humans involved. But whisper! (as he or his characters would say), notice how he also holds you to sympathy with causes beyond individuals, and with currents that run far higher and far deeper than merely human matters.
When you come down to it, it is herds and outliers, of course.
But at any level you look at things, there are herds and outliers, and at any stage in a man’s life, he may be of the herd or may be cast out as an outlier by fate or character. Everybody participates in 3D life, even by abstaining from it or rebelling against it.
Always drawing from the well of unfinished business, and always adding more to it.
You could look at it that way. But life is not about emptying that well (nor refilling it, either). You might as well say your life is about the air your breathe or the water you drink or the food you eat.
You are portraying the 3D world as the stage and the shared subjectivity as the prop room, full of the things that fuel performances.
Perhaps. Take note of the two films you watched.
Yes. “Warlock” courtesy of Amazon and “The Petrified Forest” via Netflix DVD. Both supposed to be landmark films in their own way. Both pretty ridiculous, as far as I can see. The villainy overdrawn and hard to believe, the nobility strained and over-articulate, the despair as mannered and improbable as the villainy. Even the acting wasn’t very believable. Even Bogart!
Yet in their time these films were important to the people who watched them.
“Petrified Forest” was 1935, “Warlock” was 1959.
Yet the two dates were closer to each other by far than they are to 2022. A lot of water under the bridge since then.
Thanks, Sam. “You know what I want to hear, play it!”
Was “Casablanca” any more believable than the two films you just cited?
The acting was as transparent, in places, and the dialogue was as unreal, in places. But it does move you – at least it moved me, the few times I have watched it. Few, as in probably twenty.
That’s how we view 3D Theater, and how you as part of us do too.
And people’s fierce political and ideological certainties? Their social convictions? Their absolute certainty that they are on the side of the angels and people of a different opinion are not?
That’s the point of the Bhagavad-Gita, which, you will notice, did not prevent Emerson and Thoreau [who had read Hindu scriptures in the 1840s] from being madly partisan in the Civil War against slavery.
Henry died, actually. He said he could never get well while that war went on.
There’s never any predicting where your wishes will lead, or how they will play out, which is one reason to be a little careful what you wish for.
Now, we note with amusement but not with disapprobation that you responded to our advice to read the books you already own by – buying two more fat books.
Yes, but what books! Bulfinch’s Mythology, which I was surprised to see comprised three individually published volumes: The Age of Fable, the Age of Chivalry, and Legends of Charlemagne. And then, by Robert Graves, The Greek Myths. I think these are going to fill big gaps in my education.
Well, we said we approved. Only – read them, don’t think to be able to sleep on them a la young Edgar Cayce.
I believe I will. I’m looking forward to it, actually. Now we’ll see if the winds veer and I lose my interest.
That is a potential flaw in unconditional receptivity. Persisted in too consistently, it manifests as inability to persevere, inability to continue to believe in the course one is pursuing – Arjuna.
You’re really going to beat me over the head with that analogy, aren’t you?
Maybe. You’re running out of time, not to get the lesson – a second-tier decision may be made even on one’s deathbed – but to live it.
Yep, already too late for me to die young.
Don’t be too facetious about it. There is still time for an incredible increase in richness in the mind you have been forming, but there isn’t unlimited time.
Today’s theme?
Call it “Seeing through life,” perhaps, or perhaps “Seeing deeper into life.” Something on that order.
Well, we’ll see when I transmute it. Our thanks as always.