Light On Dark Water

A Little GKC

Chief among my complaints last week about the treatment of Chesterton by Christopher Hitchens was the fact that he passed over Chesterton’s spiritual vision while in the end dismissing him for certain of his political views. I wanted then to describe or summarize that vision, by way of justifying the importance I give it, but found myself at a loss for words. Nothing but reading Chesterton (or any writer) can give one a real sense of what he’s like at his best. No sentence or two that I could come up with in haste seemed anything but conventional and inadequate, and I didn’t have time to go searching for excerpts that might serve, so I let it go. But the only real defense one can make of Chesterton’s faults is to give examples of his virtues, so I spent a little time this morning with Orthodoxy, discovering that I had marked quite a few passages on an earlier reading. The first two are from the “Ethics of Elfland” chapter and although not adjacent are related. The third is from the last chapter, "The Romance of Orthodoxy."

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

***

The one thing [modern thought] loved to talk about was expansion and largeness. [Herbert Spencer] popularized this contemptible notion that the size of the solar system ought to over-awe the spiritual dogma of man. Why should a man surrender his dignity to the solar system any more than to a whale? If mere size proves that man is not the image of God, then a whale may be the image of God…. It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree.

***

I have remarked that the materialist, like the madman, is in prison; in the prison of one thought. These people seemed to think it singularly inspiring to keep on saying that the prison was very large. The size of this scientific universe gave one no novelty, no relief. The cosmos went on for ever, but not in its wildest constellation could there be anything really interesting; anything, for instance, such as forgiveness or free will. The grandeur or infinity of the secret of its cosmos added nothing to it. It was like telling a prisoner in Reading gaol that he would be glad to hear that the gaol now covered half the country. The warder would have nothing to show the man except more and more long corridors of stone lit by ghastly lights and empty of all that is human. So these expanders of the universe had nothing to show us except more and more infinite corridors of space lit by ghastly suns and empty of all that is divine.

***

And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God for an instant seemed to be an atheist.

BergFest 2012

I mentioned last week that my wife was out of town. I took the occasion to watch some movies that I knew she was not much interested in. Last Saturday night it was Bergman’s Shame, which I have been wanting to see for several years now, because it belongs to the same agonized late 1960s period that produced Persona and Hour of the Wolf, both of which fascinate me, and which were its immediate predecessors. (I had actually seen it as a college student in 1968, but remembered only the opening and closing scenes.) Caught up again in Bergman’s world, I decided that the rest of the coming week would be my private Bergman Festival, and that I would watch one Bergman film every night till my wife’s return on Friday. In the end I had to make time for some other things, and only watched four over the six nights. That was enough for now, though I'm eager to see Wild Strawberries and Winter Light again. Here are some brief reactions.

Shame

Part of me wants to say that this is a great film; another part says it is too relentlessly brutal and grim to qualify. Persona and Hour of the Wolf were disturbing psychological studies, the former decidedly strange, and enigmatic if not incomprehensible, the latter mixed with something seemingly supernatural (and evil). Shame is straightforward in comparison: a portrait of two people pushed to psychological extremes—to destruction, maybe—by war. Johan and Eva (Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman, as in Hour of the Wolf) are a married couple without children, living on an island which is invaded by a foreign army. Wishing only to be left alone, and in the end only to survive, but caught between the invaders and the defenders, they are driven to various forms of betrayal and brutality. The atmosphere is constricted, anxious, and menacing, and watching the film, especially its last half or so, is not what you would call a pleasant experience. As with all Bergman’s work of this period, it’s full of powerful black-and-white imagery, often very beautiful in spite of the subject matter. I’ll watch it again for that, and for the last haunting sequence, with its hint of…not redemption, exactly, but a sort of awareness that hell is not all there is.

A Passion

This was and still is distributed in the US as The Passion of Anna. I don’t know why; perhaps someone thought the suggestion of sex would make it more appealing. If so, I doubt it worked, and anyone who did pay to see it expecting a lot of sex would have asked for his money back. A Passion is certainly the better title, as the characters are suffering on the cross of truth itself, fearing the knowledge of what they really are. This is another Sydow vs. Ullman piece, with a couple, Andreas and Anna, locked in the combat of a destructive relationship. It’s one of the first if not the first of Bergman’s movies to be shot in color. I don’t think it’s as good as some of the other work of this period, but still, it shouldn’t be missed by anyone who loves Bergman. Again in this film certain important facts are left ambiguous, or at least they seemed so to me, but in this case it seemed to me less acceptable not to know them. One wants to know which is the really crazy one, Anna or Andreas. Perhaps it’s supposed to be clear, and it’s my fault that I didn’t see it. I’d like to read some other opinions.

The Seventh Seal

As Beethoven’s 5th is to the symphony, or the Mona Lisa to the portrait, so this movie is to the art film: the familiar example which serves as an emblem of the entire field. Being so familiar (relatively), it may similarly be taken for granted. That’s a mistake, because it is a great work. I believe this was the fourth time I’ve seen it, but the last time was at least ten years ago, and it had faded somewhat in my memory. I devoted one of my festival nights to it because it hasn’t been long since I saw Winter Light and the other works which deal with the question of faith, and I wanted to refresh my memory about it.

It’s at least as good as I remembered, as a work of art. It can be seen as an anguished 20th-century version of a medieval mystery play. The characters represent a wide range of possible responses to the problem of meaning: tormented questioning (the Knight), innocent acceptance (the traveling players), honorable cynicism (the Squire), dishonorable cynicism (the spoiled theologian), decent stolid earthliness (the smith), delusional or fanatical faith (the witch and the flagellants). Lay them out that way, and you see what’s missing: fully conscious Christian faith. The question, then, is framed in a way that more or less excludes the answer that would in fact have been all around an actual medieval knight, and I was left a little dissatisfied on that score.

But the intensity of the Knight’s search testifies to the seriousness of Bergman’s treatment of the questions. And whether one believes that death is the end or the beginning—which is to say, whether one takes the final vision as an actual release into an actual world where “the rain cleanses their cheeks of the salt from their bitter tears,” or as a symbol for accepting oblivion as the resolution of all questions, which seems more likely—the end of the film is a magnificent moment.

I don’t remember grasping, on earlier viewings, that the Knight’s upsetting of the chessboard is not to give himself a reprieve but to allow the young couple and their child to escape—I mean, as opposed to their simply taking advantage of the moment. That’s a pretty important point, and really perfects the story.

Smiles of a Summer Night

It’s been a long time since I saw or heard Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, but I remember its atmosphere as being something like this. It’s a complex romantic intrigue in which a set of unhappy people floundering around in unsatisfactory and mostly immoral situations get shaken up and re-sorted in the course of a Swedish summer night, in which darkness never really falls. Some end up happy, some at least less unhappy, one sadder but wiser. It’s light, witty, poignant, and, well, Mozartean. It was Bergman’s first international success, and gave him the credibility he needed to get approval for his next project: The Seventh Seal. I wonder how the film company liked the result. It must have seemed as if Mozart had followed Figaro with Wozzeck.