400 Years of Distaff Deception, Depicted in Film

Don't blame me ladies; I am just the messenger.

As I write this, there are two feature-length films scheduled for imminent release.  While they seem entirely unrelated on the surface, a common theme emerges naturally that is plain just from the stories that they tell.

One is Ken Russell's adaptation of the true story recounted in Aldous Huxley's "The Devils of Loudun," the adaptation first released in 1971 but now to be re-released in a restored version that includes scenes that were left out of the original as too provocative and controversial for a general audience.

In 17th century Loudun, France, a handsome and charismatic young priest, Father Grandier, is posted to the town.  His sermons are much loved, but he is in fact a licentious scoundrel.

There is an Ursuline convent in the town, and its abbess, Sister Jeanne, becomes sexually obsessed with the young priest.  She asks him to be her personal confessor with hopes that that relationship will blossom into something more.  When Father Grandier declines, pleading other responsibilities, her romantic attraction quickly turns to bitter resentment and hatred.  Her schemes against him culminate in what we would now probably characterize at the abbey as displays of mass hysteria.  The nuns in her care fall into wild abandon.  They lie on the floor, hike up their skirts and shout out the vilest of obscenities.  These displays become a form of mass entertainment for the townspeople and for others who come to Loudun just to bear witness.

When various Church authorities investigate what is going on, Sister Jeanne convinces them that Father Grandier, in league with Satan, has facilitated demonic possession of the nuns.  The ensuing attempts to exorcise them lead to further blasphemous displays, to the mixed horror and delight of the locals.

All of this takes place against a backdrop of political intrigue that is orchestrated from Paris by none other than the infamous Cardinal Richelieu, who at the time perhaps wielded the most power in France after his patron, King Louis XIII.

The Grandier affair fit nicely into Richelieu's larger scheming, and when the priest was convicted of conspiring with the Devil to ruin the souls of the Ursulines, Richelieu personally authorized and blessed the burning of Grandier at the stake.

Huxley's telling of this tale is remarkably detailed and doubtless historically accurate; because the entire affair was centered on the Church, meticulous records were kept and they have remained intact for four centuries.

In a postscript, Huxley details for us as well the horrifying final days of the Cardinal himself.  Fittingly, perhaps, his last illness and hare-brained attempts to cure it turned him into an object from which everyone involuntarily recoiled in disgust.

The second film is "You Can See Everything," a documentary about the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes, once America's youngest self-made female billionaire, now serving time in a federal prison for fraud associated with her late company Theranos, which purported to have invented a revolutionary way to do blood tests with mere pin pricks rather than needles.  At her peak she had George Schultz and Henry Kissinger on her board of directors; Barack Obama made her a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship, or "PAGE."  Now all of that lies in dust.

The film begins with its co-director, comedian Nathan Fielder, shadowing Elizabeth for a month in her husband's home as she prepares to enter prison, but the film's investigation of her psyche goes on for three years.  The trailer, which is all that we have at the moment, is oddly riveting; something in the unblinking gaze of Elizabeth communicates a deep and dangerous level of mental disturbance.

I don't have the stomach to witness the depravity of "the devils" as portrayed by Russell and, besides, I have already absorbed the whole story from the infinitely more subtle pen of Aldous.  But I will succumb, I think, to Fielder's portrayal of the Holmes saga, even though I suspect that what lies at the core of her particular 21st century epic deception will forever remain opaque.

 

A Match Made in Heaven?

If Marian Anderson had married Luis Aparicio, she would have been Marian Aparicio, the living embodiment of Fatima and Lourdes.  And their kids could have marketed themselves as "The Singing Shortstops."  But it was not to be.

 

On the Theme of Oneness

The swell was light to moderate as we steamed from Boston to Ipswich late last summer.  A straight shot from the North Channel, President Roads, to Thatcher Island, then around Halibut Point and west to the big buoy a few miles off Crane Beach.

In retrospect, the rise and fall of the boat mimicked the rise and fall of the human chest in deep sleep, or indeed in deep meditation.  

As in the beginning there was the Word, the secret is said to lie in the confluence of three things -- sound, light and frequency.

 

Dreadful Dwelling

I was living on the 79th floor of one of the so-called "pencil" buildings in Manhattan.  In fact, I shared the entire floor with my two older siblings, Mary and Charles.

I hated it.  I hated everything about it.  What I hated most was opening one eye in the middle of the night and seeing the dimly lit roof of a building that I knew from the ground to be a formidable structure in its own right, an Art Deco knock-off from the late 1930s.  There was a rusty water tank on the roof, probably no longer in use.

I also hated the incessant swaying we experienced whenever the winds aloft exceeded 25 knots or so.  Likewise a faint, peculiar smell that came in the late fall and stayed for the winter, a telltale sign, I thought, of some fundamental glitch in the heating system that might turn towards catastrophe at a most inopportune time.

And the awkward elevator rides, filled either with silence or meaningless chit chat.  In the chit chat, the building itself substituted for the weather as the safe default topic of choice.

And the reaction I got from casual acquaintances, friends of friends and such, when they learned where I lived.  There was an assumption that I was filthy rich, but also a conviction that I must have had more money than taste.

In fact, my father bought the unit for us.  He paid for everything thereafter, including Christmas gratuities for the people at ground level.  He did it, of course, to exercise control; you won't be surprised to learn that he still exercises control from beyond the grave, via a complex series of trusts.

I thought of the arrangement at first as a kind of dystopian experiment that I could share with two of my very best friends, two people who understood me on a deep level and who were, and are, inherently interesting and companionable.  The artist and the bond trader (and no, you have them backwards as to which is which).

The COVID years were particularly difficult.  The common American isolation was made locally worse by a little handbook of rules that the building association must have copied from Xi Jinping.  I ignored it when I could get away with it.

I finally left in the late summer of 2023, for a teaching job in Missoula.  I live there now in a small house with a ground floor and only a ground floor.  From my back porch I can see the Clark Fork River, but just barely, wending its way through a waterfront park.  There is a very friendly tavern within walking distance of my house and, at the other end of the street, a modest church, of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, that I have seen only from the outside.

I sleep soundly for the most part, but from time to time a dream recurs in which I am floating motionless above the city, like the Goodyear Blimp hovering against a gentle breeze.  It's bad because it's vertiginous, but to make matters worse, in due course a peregrine falcon decides to practice his bombing runs against my head.  At that point I wake up in a sweat.

My daily driver is a vintage International Scout in British Racing Green with a transfer case and a heater that still is able to fend off the winter cold.  My students think that it's cool.

There, you asked me how it was, and I told you.  Straight up and God's honest to the extent that I am able.

 

"God Shed His Grace on Thee"

The famous phrase displays a grammatical ambiguity.  Is it simply telling us something that happened?  Or is it rather a subjunctive prayer, a wish directed at God with the "may" understood?

It's the latter.  How do we know this?  Because of what comes after, in the same sentence.  "And crown thy good," not "And crowned thy good."

 

The Great Mescaline/Baked Potato Convergence

It was the theme of my dream just now.  The setting was a fancy restaurant.  The meal was accompanied by a beautiful and original vibraphone solo, the notes of which now, of course, are permanently lost.

As if in desperation, the mind reaches in every direction for inspiration, but the meaning becomes more and more elusive.

Back here in the so-called real world, and just in the last week, three little tidbits, from disparate sources, that seem to point towards an equally elusive and variegated Elsewhere.  The intrepid USAF ICBM guardian Mario Woods.  ("He said that the propulsion systems of the craft are not built but grown.")  The SUNY Albany astrophysicist Kevin Knuth, reminding a podcaster that in the early 1950s an entire Italian soccer crowd experienced a rain from UFOs of fine filaments that came to be called "angel hair."  On physical analysis it was revealed that they had the same composition as caterpillar silk of all things.  And the groundbreaking professor of bioinformatics Michael Levin, publishing a new paper that seems to say that what we call "life" and "consciousness" and "intelligence" comes at us from a non-physical, non-local source, one that he calls "the Platonic Space."  And if you offer the criticism that "Platonic Space" is just a metaphor, he will insist that "all science is metaphor!"

I have not seen the Elsewhere, but I can feel it rumbling beneath my feet.  I will not live to see its eruption into the larger zeitgeist, but I believe that my grandchildren will.

 

May Perpetual Light Shine Upon Them

Upon all of the victims of the September 11 terror attacks.  Never to be forgotten.