August 1944

When, after about 25 hours of viewing, the first US Army jeep arrives on the outskirts of "Un Village Francais," alone, it comes as a shock, if a welcome one.  In the course of four years, we have seen many elegant French sedans and no-nonsense French trucks, open German staff cars and also the light German personnel carriers that inspired the Volkswagen "Thing" in the late 1960s.  But the always iconic little jeep seems to signal defiance of the Wehrmacht all by itself, to signal, in fact, that the Liberation is at hand.  But by now we know that chaos and death will only accelerate in the short window between the jeep's appearance and the Judgment Day that awaits.

The jeep has come with two men to Villeneuve to blow up a bridge, so that a Panzer corps will be trapped in a pocket from which it can do no harm to the advancing US 7th Army.  Things go awry; "Bob" has to return to divisional headquarters to secure a new detonator, leaving his comrade Chris behind.

Our principal heroine, "Marie," a farmer who has risen to local leadership of the Resistance, convinces Bob to allow her to come along for the ride, for the purpose of convincing his commanding officer to rescue Villeneuve, with the Germans and the French militia threatening to slaughter the villagers on their way out of town.

At the headquarters, in the open air, Bob and Marie have a brief conversation as they wait for their audience with the CO.  As always in the series, Marie wears shabby clothes and appears to be without make-up, but the camera virtually caresses her beautiful and expressive face.  

Bob first asks Marie in his shaky French if she wants a cigarette.  (She does not smoke.)  Then he offers her a stick of gum.  "What is gum?" she says.  And then "I am not a cow!"  Finally he offers chocolate, and she lights up.  When he conjures a Hershey bar from a supply tent, here in the midst of battle, and more or less at the snap of his fingers, she smiles and says "Now I know that you will win this war!"

 

It's a Story More Strange Than Any Episode of "Twilight Zone" or "The Outer Limits"

But I beg your indulgence, to hear me tell it.

More than 300,000 years ago, a proto-Chinese man "married" a proto-Southeast Asian woman.  Let us call the tribe they engendered "Asia Man" ("AM").  Somehow, AM found his way, or was transported, to what is now Central Africa, below the Sahara.  The evidence for this includes the fact that the descendants of AM carry remnants of a disease that can only be contracted via the bite of the tsetse fly, whose range is narrow and concentrated in that part of the world.

Still about 300,000 years ago, Someone or SomeThing ("SoS") experimented with the DNA of AM, mixing it in with the DNA of chimpanzees or their close relations the bonobos, as well as other strains.  The result was the creation of an entirely new species of intelligent, bipedal creatures whom we shall call "Tridactyl Man" ("TM"), because its most striking features are its three-fingered hands and three-toed feet, both with more phalanges than are found in human fingers and toes.

There are other remarkable differences between TM and homo sapiens.  They are only about 60 centimeters tall, but their craniums are relatively large.  Their rib cages are structured much differently than our own.  Because they had no molars, we assume that they lived on a liquid, or at least very soft, diet.  The joints of their hips, and the structure of their feet, suggest that they must have walked in a way that would strike us as awkward and eccentric.

Some of the TM have metal plates, made from sophisticated alloys, embedded within their chests, perhaps implanted to overcome a genetic weakness in that part of the body.

And now something most difficult to explain.  By roughly the time of Christ, TM somehow had been transplanted across the Atlantic to the Nazca region of Peru, a coastal desert land that they shared with the Nazca tribe of homo sapiens.  There, some of the bodies of TM (the "Nazca Mummies") were buried in caves or tunnels, in what is called diatomaceous earth.  This is a powerful natural desiccant that is used even today to kill insects without poison.  It is assumed that it was used deliberately in the case of the Nazca Mummies to preserve their bodies -- not just skin and bones but internal organs and connective tissues as well -- because we find them now in a remarkable state of preservation after 2000 years or so.  Hence, the Nazca Mummies are not really mummies at all, not having been "mummified!"

The first of the mummies came to light, quite literally, about ten years ago.  Since then, a number have been subjected to intensive investigation by scientists in Peru and Mexico, but also in Petersburg, Russia and in the United States, the last under the auspices of one John McDowell who is, we are told, the eminence grise of forensic sciences in the States.  The research has included carbon dating, state-of-the-art medical scanning, and DNA sequencing that compares the specimens with all known terrestrial species that themselves have been sequenced.  Already, two peer-reviewed papers discussing preliminary results of investigations into their nature and origin have been published in mainstream journals.  Much much more will reach the scientific community and the public (if there is any interest in the public) in the next year or two.

Perhaps the best known of the mummies that have been studied is one called "Maria."  Her DNA analysis is so dense with information that scientists can conjecture as to the cause of her death -- a massive infection that was triggered by the eating of raw shellfish that are native to coastal Peru.

So far as we know, there are no elephants in Peru, but the elephant in this particular room is, of course, the implication that TM was made neither by natural evolution alone nor by the Hand of God, at least if God is conceived to be as portrayed in the Bible.  Who was this Someone or SomeThing that intervened in our world?  What was its purpose in doing so?  Is it still among us, or does it lie perhaps just beyond The Veil?

And a more disturbing question still.  Could we ourselves also have arisen, metaphorically speaking, from Someone's petri dish?

 

The French Language Is Bangin' Round Me Head

Thanks to three seasons of "Un Village Francais," binge watched with sub-titles.  (Four more seasons yet to be watched.)

Indelible characters.  Gorgeous period automobiles.  Gorgeous period women as well, but each captivating in her own, subtle way.  The farmer's ill-dressed wife perhaps the most beautiful of all.

The plight of the Jews portrayed unflinchingly, and not en masse; we have come to know each before a twist of fate or a betrayal places them onto cattle cars that the "sub-prefect" assures them are destined for a suburb of Paris, and not for Poland.

The factionalism.  The moral compromises.  The intense love affairs that the French simply can't seem to sublimate to the circumstances!

I understand for the first time what it really meant to join the Resistance -- often abandoning every semblance of normal life to live like a hunted animal, for a time indeterminate.

After three seasons, from the perspective of 1942, one can't help but see it through to the turning of the tide.  What will become, for example, of the SD Gruppenfuehrer Muller, who delights in extracting confessions by snipping strategic and most sensitive spots with the little wire cutters that he keeps in the drawer of his elegant desk?

Meanwhile, resonating at the Hour of the Wolf:

Ecoute-moi bien!

Pas de tout.

Les Americains sont sur les plages d'Afrique du Nord.  Personne ne sait ce que cela signifie.

(and lastly)

Ma cherie, je regrette completement de te connaitre, tu sais.

 

God Grant Me Respite From This Stupid Election

Respite, that is, in the form of two lengthy, European "streaming" serials -- "Babylon Berlin" and "Un Village Francais."

The first gives us a picture of Berlin during the Weimar years leading up to Hitler's ascension to chancellor.  We see chaos unfolding, and life-threatening struggles among many factions -- Hitler's Nazis, of course, but also brownshirts bitterly opposed to him, communists loyal to Stalin, communists loyal to Trotsky, militarists who want a revival of imperial Deutschland under the Kaiser, and the minions of vicious gangland figures.  And at the core, a beautiful, slow-unfolding romance between a police detective, scarred by his experiences in the trenches of WWI, who has been imported from Cologne to Berlin, and a young woman who splits her professional time between the Berlin Police Headquarters and a brothel that sits, not very discreetly, beneath the city's most popular and elegant dancehall/cabaret.

The second follows an ensemble of inhabitants of a French village that lies about halfway between Geneva and Marseilles -- Villeneuve -- from the day in 1940 that the Wehrmacht rolls in and from thence through the entire war.  Our focus is on a doctor who rather reluctantly becomes major of the town and his beautiful but faithless wife, the mayor's brother, a communist who takes up arms against the Germans, the brother's young son Gustave, the manager of a sawmill/concrete plant, his wife and his young mistress, who migrates into the Resistance, a sinister German functionary with an addiction to morphine, a police inspector of a certain age who falls in love with a Jewess who has been expelled from her position as headmistress of the town's elementary school, the endearing middle-aged man who is assigned to replace the headmistress, and a beautiful young teacher at the school who falls in love with a tall and handsome German sergeant.

The first production is German; the second is French; the creators/producers had nothing to do with one another.  And yet we can see the two stories as one story, separated in time by about ten years and in distance by less than 900 miles.  It is about a cataclysm in Germany that spread to become a cataclysm in France and, of course, further to the East, to the gates of Moscow, and how ordinary people were tested and ground up by that cataclysm.

This combined narrative disabuses us of the notion that we ourselves would have made the correct moral choices had we been Germans when Hitler was on the rise, or French people under occupation who had some choice to collaborate or not, to protect their Jewish friends and acquaintances or not.  Indeed in both countries, after the liberation and the defeat of Germany, there was a convenient re-writing of history on a scale that was massive and local at the same time, to exonerate ex post facto both the oppressors and those who chose to collaborate with them.

It might be a good moral exercise to blend the two character ensembles outlined above, all of the protagonists in the combined narrative that is, and imagine them standing at St. Peter's Gate.  Our charge would be to sort and rank them by the measures of courage and guilt, two sides of a coin.  We would find very few clear, un-nuanced cases, and we would walk away from the exercise feeling much more humble about our own standing in the world.

 

The Multi-Layered Meanings of "A Maggot"

It must have been sometime in the mid-1990's when I gifted myself The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.  Since then, I have cracked it maybe three or four times.  

It may be the shorter Oxford dictionary, but it is by no means short.  It comes in two heavy tomes, each of almost 2000 pages, and the print is fine.

On page 1661 of the first volume one may find the definition(s) of the word "maggot," both the contemporary -- "Any soft-bodied limbless larva, esp. of a housefly, blowfly, or other dipteran fly ...," and that derived from the old Middle English -- "A whimsical or perverse fancy."

"A Maggot" is the title of the last-published (1985) novel of the celebrated English writer John Fowles.  Fowles makes it plain at the very beginning of the book that in reading it our eyes should be more focused on the second and older meaning, suggesting that someone's "whimsical and perverse fancy" will be a driving force in the novel, and also that for him to write it arose from a whimsical fancy.  And yet, the more unsettling, one might say disgusting associations that the word "maggot" brings to mind hang over the novel that follows like a sinister white cloud.  (And what of Fowles' choice of the indefinite article in the title?  Does it reinforce the old historical meaning? (This, after all, from the author of "The French Lieutenant's Woman," not "A French Lieutenant's ...))

In any event, so it is that a perverse fancy, albeit a shifting one, is at the center of the novel.  The story is set in 1736.  A young English lord has had a falling out with his father, an eminent but unnamed duke, over the former's unwillingness to marry according to the wishes of His Grace.  His Lordship departs London for Devonshire in the company of four others, but in the guise of a wealthy merchant, one "Mr. Bartholomew."  The others are: a middling actor who pretends to be his uncle, "Mr. Lacy," a still lesser actor in the role of a retired soldier, "Sergeant Farthing," there to provide protection with his blunderbuss, "Dick," who alone carries his own real name and is the manservant of Bartholomew, though he be deaf, dumb and otherwise mentally feeble, and "Louise," who in fact has been hired out to His Lordship for the duration of the trip by Miss Claiborne, the keeper of the most notorious "bagnio" or brothel in all of London.  "Louise," sometimes also "Fanny," and in reality "Rebecca," plays the role of maid to a fine lady of whom His Lordship is deeply enamored and who, we are first told, is the object of his journey, for the purpose of elopement.

But as the novel unfolds, we are asked repeatedly to abandon our understanding of what sort of perverse fancy drives His Lordship, only to replace it with a more outlandish one.  Is he tormented by his own impotence, and does he hope to cure it both by witnessing Fanny and Dick in wild copulation and by "taking the waters" in a certain place in Devonshire that specializes in a cure for this particular ailment?  Is he on a quasi-scientific pilgrimage of some kind, to Stonehenge and beyond, with a Rosicrucian or other occult orientation to it?  Beyond that still, but in the same direction if you will, is he a practitioner of Black Arts whose intention is to win favor with Satan himself by offering up Fanny, in helpless sacrifice, to be ravaged by the Devil?  Or is he a high priest, in practical station if not in name, in a benevolent and powerful religion the likes of which we have never before seen, and is his purpose in such capacity to shake Fanny to her spiritual foundations so that she can break free of her sinful past and reconcile in piety with her Quaker parents?

We never discover the answer to this riddle.  His Lordship never returns from his journey, and his fate and his whereabouts remain unknown.  The fate of his servant, on the other hand, is to have been found hanging from a tree, dead by his own hand as far as we can tell.  For a denouement we don't have an unravelling of the riddle but rather finally, at novel's end, we see Fanny, now Rebecca, in late winter of 1736-7, married to an impoverished blacksmith and giving birth to a daughter, not by her husband but by Dick.  The daughter, we are told, is Ann Lee, who many years later will be buried in Watervliet, New York, near Albany, having risen to prominence as the second, female incarnation of the Christ, or at least said to be such divinity in the Shaker movement that she led!

Much of what we learn about the competing fancies of His Lordship we learn not in conventional description of the Devonshire pilgrimage but rather in long depositions of key characters, depositions taken by the lawyer Henry Ayscough, who has been engaged by the duke and charged with solving the central mystery and, more to the point, finding his son.  These depositions are posted to His Grace, as enclosures to obsequious letters in which Ayscough candidly explains his estimation of each witness and his tentative theory of the case.

The most noteworthy and, to me, impressive stylistic feature of the book is its immersion in the language of the time and place in which it is set.  In truth, I should say that I am as ignorant as the next person about what, in fact, the patois of that time and place sounded like, and so I can only say that Fowles' language has the ring of linguistic truth!

Here is a representative sample from Ayscough's deposition of David Jones, who played the role during the trek of Sergeant Farthing:

Q.  I would have you tell me what you made of Mr. Bartholomew's servant Dick.

A.  I made nothing of him, sir.  That 'twas beyond an Irishman's belief, a gentleman thinking to employ him for what he was.  He was strong enough, well set, for a good lackey, but naught else, see you.

Q.  Not a gentleman's servant, you would say?

A.  He did what he was bid, sir, well enough.  And I'll allow his master's secrets was safe enough with him.  And his belongings.  He would not even let me touch the little chest we had upon the packhorse, that weighed so heavy.  Our first day out I would help him carry it up, he pushed me off, and so for the rest.  He was more jealous cur than serving-man in that.

Q.  Marked you nothing else peculiar in him?

A.  That he would not laugh, nor even smile, not even when the company was as merry as cup and can.  There was a maid at Basingstoke one morning at the well, where Dick and I and others was standing by, and would dowse the stableboy for some impertinence, and ran after him with the bucket but fell, and dowsed herself, which a dead man would have laughed to see how droll it was.  But not he.  He stood always at the coffin's side, as the saying goes.  Ever found sixpence, and lost a shilling.

Fowles employs a clever conceit to buttress this our immersion in the language.  He reproduces and intersperses with the narrative facsimiles of actual publications that were popular at the time his tale takes place.  They are rather difficult to read, but worthy of the effort.  Here, from "The Gentleman's Magazine," the news of Tuesday, 19 Oct 1736 includes this entry:

Dublin.  A Woman big with Child going into the Country to lie in, was taken with her Labour on the Road, no body being near but a blind Man and a Boy, she begg'd the latter to go for Help, he refus'd unless paid beforehand, she pull'd out her Purse, in which was some Silver and a small Piece of Gold, which the Boy seeing told the Blind Man of, he immediately knock'd out her Brains with a Staff, took the Purse and went off : A Gentleman coming by, and seeing the Woman murder'd, rode up to the Boy, and threatening to kill him, he confess'd the Fact, and both were sent to Kilmanham Gaol.

Fowles' narrator qua narrator does not purport to be speaking from a perch in 1736, but rather in Fowles' own time.  For example, at one point he contrasts two characters as emblematic of left- and right- "brainedness."  Nevertheless, the narrator's own voice carries a modest level of formality that we may associate with times past, as here, where he inserts an aside after telling us that Rebecca has just hastened to use her chamber pot, "quickly raising her skirts":

She did not have to remove any other garment for the very simple reason that no Englishwoman, of any class, had ever worn anything beneath her petticoats up to this date, nor was to do so for at least another sixty years.  One might write an essay on this incomprehensible and little-known fact about their under-clothing, or lack of it.  French and Italian women had long remedied the deficiency, and English men also, but not English women.  All those graciously elegant and imposing upper-class ladies in their fashionable or court dresses, whose image has been so variously left us by the eighteenth-century painters, are -- to put it brutally -- knickerless.  And what is more, when the breach was finally made -- or rather, covered -- and the first female drawers, and soon after pantalettes, appeared at the beginning of the nineteenth century, they were considered grossly immodest, an unwarranted provocation upon man, which is no doubt why they so swiftly became de rigeur.

If it weren't clear before now, I have great admiration for "A Maggot" and the audacious imagination that spawned it, and this without having explained its most audacious turn of all, one that places it, for some, in the category of science fiction instead of, or in addition to, the category of historical fiction. What was that turn? The last of the motivations of His Lordship, the benign one related by Rebecca to Ayscough in her deposition, remarkably has her enter a mysterious cavern with the nobleman, there to witness an oblong white craft that she calls a maggot!  A door drops down, she enters the craft, and then she is transported to the skies above a new and glorious world that she characterizes as the "Eternal June."  This and other visions from the cavern and its environs she incorporates into her still evolving religious perspective, which we might call "proto-Shakerism."

To me it is striking and mysterious that Fowles, an unwavering atheist, would in a historical novel paint for us a picture nearly 40 years ago that bears such close relationship to the "tic tac" phenomena that our US Navy pilots described before Congress, under oath, just last year.  But for their hard shells, they might well have been called maggots rather than lozenges.  Perhaps, then, it all bubbles up from our still-opaque and Jungian "collective unconscious."

 

On the Impossibility of Policing Social Media Content

Consider the following:

• A "Road Runner" cartoon in which Wile E. Coyote is first crushed by an anvil and then burnt to bits by an exploding box of dynamite.
• A "Three Stooges" short in which Moe pokes everyone in the eyes with two fingers and smacks Curly over the head with a frying pan.
• A security camera film from Latin America in which a would-be thief in a bodega is shot three times in the stomach, leaves a trail of blood on the floor, and falls dead in the bodega's revolving door.
• "Un Chien Andalou," the 1929 surrealist collaboration between Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, which opens with a woman, in close up, apparently having her eye sliced open with a straight razor (the eye of a dead calf was used in the making of the film according to Bunuel).
• An Instagram film of about 15 seconds length in which a series of toddlers scream their heads off until, from off camera, someone sails a slice of Kraft American cheese in such a way that it lands on, and adheres to, the tops of their heads, which immediately calms them.

Which of these films should pass muster on social media? The standards are different.  On X/Twitter, all of them would pass I think.  On Facebook, the first two would pass, and the second two likely not.  The last would be rejected, based on my own personal experience over the weekend, when I tried to put the clip on my Facebook feed together with a suggestion that I would try the "cheesehead" technique on my wife the next time she gets ornery.

And how would one write an algorithm that would rationally separate wheat and chaff here, taking into account historical and cultural context, the importance of preserving humor and sarcasm in a free society, and all of the other things that the courts have placed under the rubric of "redeeming social value" in judging, for example, whether pornography may be prohibited by law?  It seems to me impossible, but perhaps AI can tackle this challenge in our world to come like so many others.

I want to say (my overriding point really) is that it should be done, if at all, via the discipline of market forces, and most certainly not by the government, or else we will find ourselves on an Orwellian slippery slope of the most troubling kind.  This would be what you might call "a threat to democracy."

 

Hornblower Hamstrung

In my dream I was a British Navy captain, of a sloop it seems; she was smaller than a frigate, of 26 guns only.

She was a capture from the French, nee "Princesse de Cleves," but now "Aurora."  She was tethered to a grimy dock on the Thames, roughly midway between London Bridge and the Observatory at Greenwich.  In fact, it was always so; in all my time as captain she never moved under her own power.  And yet, one bright spring morning I stood on her quarterdeck and peaked up at the sun through her forest of cordage, and all seemed right with the world on that day.

On another day, we were compelled to host a small group of dignitaries on board for dinner in our cramped quarters.  We were so short manned that I was left alone to polish the silver myself in advance of the repast.

The strangest thing.  The Navy permitted me to share my cabin, indeed to share my bunk, with a beautiful young woman -- Pamela Liffey from the North Country.  She was slender and blonde, and her disposition was fiery and headstrong.  I loved her, and yet she never let me embrace her in the dark.  It was like a game we played between us; I would reach out to her over and over, and each time she rebuffed me.

Thus I was, and became known throughout the Service as, an emblem of futility.  I was The Little Admiral in Lead, painted white and black, and blue.