Truly, Dee

brightwalldarkroom:

WHY NOT?

by Evan Bryson

In another life, I would have joined a monastery. Instead I’m saddled with 70K in student loan debt and follow a masturbatory regime that seems lately to have crossed the high curve of its parabola, to borrow a phrase from John McPhee. No one bothered to explain to me the nature of dialectical materialism until after I’d signed the promissory notes. In fact, in the four years I actively studied and the one year I malingered until finishing my degree, the word dialectic, if it came up at all, pertained only to the realm of aesthetics, where it seemed to rinse conflicting avant-gardes of their ruddy political thrusts in a manner similar to washing potatoes before baking. In the realm of aesthetics, the manufacture of meaning using any dialectically-fronted aperçus is worthless, especially if you care about a credit rating, and if you are attempting to consolidate said continent of student loan debt you must care about your credit rating. (If you are under the age of eighteen, you should remedy this ignorance before you too indenture yourself to the liberal arts. There are people who can help you. I cannot. See a career counselor in phlebotomy post haste to learn where lay the golden tickets of petit bourgeois blood-drawing, mostly in the streets; snatch them up, save yourselves, I beg you. You’ll have health insurance and everything.)

I read more books now than I have sex, and I check my email more than I read books, and I sext message from the agricultural plane of Indiana. In this sequence virility is not an index of ardor but one of reckoning; my very organ for sensing the epiphanic in this life is a little bored, a little tired. I’m beginning to doubt that sex is epiphanic. Did I ever believe it was? Was it related to the amount of books I read? This is the twilight of my youth, the onset of generational fears. I fight the darkness back by waving a stick dipped in pitch and ignited, to use a confused metaphor. I think my ideas are pathetic.

In regard to the above, there is a scene half-way through Black Narcissus where the sisters sing Christmas carols sequestered atop a snow-peaked mountain in their Himalayan convent. In the cold dark outside the lattice windows of the modest chapel, flecks of snow whet the edges of the night, deflected somehow by the miracle of clear sharp English voices. The nuns’ faces are luminous, inner-lit by passion. Some of this passion seems spent on appreciating Christ’s birth, but a greater reserve is burned through deviousness: each woman of the holy order sings of her own elating secret. Kieślowski stages a similar scene in The Double Life of Véronique four decades later, near the beginning of his film. Nubile Weronika, a spiritual woman divested of habit, sings in a thunder shower, ecstatic, orgasmic. I had been thinking about the sexual rancor of Black Narcissus and my living in penury, impotent, lying sick in my mentor’s house not too far from my alma mater, when the image of Irène Jakobson’s warm breasts superimposed on the proceedings. Her strong arpeggio stroked my ears, her eyes flashed in the rain shower; her mouth was full with water. Between my belly-aching, geltabs of fever-reducer, impressions of Véronique, and the sly spiritual immolation of the caroling nuns, I felt a vaguely religious thrill, purely pagan, stirring. In another life, I would have joined a monastery, I thought. The prospect remains hallucinatory.

Is it obvious that the enormous bell Sister Clodagh pulls every morning is a homolog of God’s mighty genitals? Of course pointing out Black Narcissus’ eroticism is de rigueur and, perhaps, beside the point. Has enough been said about Jack Cardiff’s radiant cinematography, how its complement in Brian Easdale’s film score situates its mystery and its lushness squarely between The Wizard of Oz and Vertigo for sheer swooning? It’s rude to pant in the theater—in the darkness, alone, it suggests inappropriate behavior—but this is what happens to me when any measure of real beauty, real vastness, appeals to my senses for extended scenes. I grow breathless at delight; passages of Avatar had this effect on me too, and it’s the same feeling as having spent a Sunday service singing hymns, mouth dry and lungs heaving. (What do I feel about singing hymns? I feel good about it. I like to sing and they’re easy to memorize. In high school, I was president of the United Methodist Youth Group in town. I did this for 1. organizing ski trips and 2. community service hours, of which I was required to fulfill 80 before graduation, and 3. lit studies, that is scanning the Bible for the AP exams in the spring. I’m not proud that I was UMYF president and agnostic, but I take some satisfaction in my Methodist peers having well-organized and amply-funded trips to Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom, and all the raking we did of old people’s lawns, and all the games of hide-n-seek we played in the massive church.)

Maybe it’s like kissing, or more like necking, really playing mouth monsters, shirts off, loudly coming up for air. I’ll say that the mastery of set-design contributes to this bliss. Championing Black Narcissus’ visual splendor feels quixotic because effectively it is championing the counterfeit: no part of the film was shot on location in India or in the mountains. But the visuals are overwhelming. Majestic mother-of-pearl peaks, orange-rimmed sunsets, cobalt skies so blue at the apex almost black, and the flowers of the gardens with their magical names (forget-me-nots, sweet pea, daffodil, Japanese peony), and the sweet murals of the harem life ironically adorning the interior of the convent. So there’s that. Watching some movies is to me as pleasant as swimming. You feel yourself in a current, cold or warm, and you can physicalize this comparison in terms of actively watching or passively watching, the way you can breaststroke or ring yourself in an inner tube and simply drift. I want to impress on readers the flu, my fragility and sickliness, and the darkness therein, of which these reflections passed and Black Narcissus shot through.

A construction half-formed in my head throughout the movie, the phrase Brazilian wax. I thought this several times throughout Black Narcissus and not because the crutch of this essay is provocative anatomizing. I was thinking this because of all the other nun fashion I’ve inventoried, we’ve all inventoried, collectively, over the years. There’s the chaste habits of Doubt and both Sister Act films, somber black, and Sally Field’s flying nun with her attenuated apron and mantel acting as rudder and wings, and darkly have we Susan Sarandon in Dead Man Walking wearing dowdy sweaters and a portentous necklace, gold filigree and a cross striking in its stressed arms, a truss for bloodletting, leering toward the Italian or Nicaraguan or Rwandan nuns, photographed in political atrocities, wearing black or white habits, usually strings, some beads, and either bleeding or dead, crushed, impaled, bullet-ridden maybe raped, or lingering among the dead, traipsing over the burnt members of their communities. All this iconography seeps into us and flattens our spiritual mores, disciplines us to look at these ladies’ good works, at their hands, at their cunning eyes. The living nuns are apogees of human filth—I mean they seem the furthest from what is sordid, corporeal, and immediate, in that they appear upright and stern and eternal; but also they live among the destitute, broken and ruined. When we remember Mother Theresa we think of her merry wrinkled face, her arthritic fingers shelling grains, and her blue knees in a game of kickball with orphans. I don’t think I’m making any of this up—I remember Roland Barthes appearing bored while looking at Koen Wessing’s picture of soldiers and nuns in Nicaragua during the rebellion in 1979, that dumb prick. Oh. I nearly forgot Nunsense.

Brazilian wax came into my head because of Hein Heckroth’s costuming. The faces of the nuns of Black Narcissus are set into the pure white habits, thickly yawning folds of soft creams, the creamiest, dramatizing the red of their lips. These nuns are lustral in the supremely naked way of having no coverage whatsoever, no pubis, no secrets, but dense shame. The irony of this—need I point out—is that these women have only their faces to show us. Near the end of the movie, when Sister Ruth slinks down the mountain path in her rouges and rabbit boots, the shock of brazen carnality on display is damped by the surge of suggestion that came before it. Her hips reveal only that she is curvy, if a bit narrow. Under all of Heckroth’s cloth she was entirely one big bare walking delirious vagina.

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Shame is inexpensive but long-lasting. I remember only two or three times lividly cursing my best friend, and once was after he had referred me to Freedom Debt Relief and my free consultation had gone quickly sour. I didn’t curse him to his face. I threw a tantrum alone. I never told him about it, though he phoned afterward. I was brittle with him. I know now that no one manages oppressive student load debt, especially debt to mega-creditors like the government or Sallie Mae, thanks to pernicious legislators exercising power against new lawyers in the 1980s. A crop of otherwise affluent young white assholes would graduate from law school and declare bankruptcy, because that’s what any 25-year-old with 150K in debt essentially is—this cleverness was quickly suppressed.

Anyway, my friend had 12K in credit card debt, accrued mostly, I unfairly suspect, in fraternity dues (again: for those under-eighteen readers, take note), and he had some success in whittling this trouble down to something manageable by talking on the phone to a patriotic debt relief counselor. It seems strange when I think about it. He joined the army for good measure. Being gay I had no such luck, but also my character is marked by unique striae, namely a ridge of terror transversing meekness and pacifism, a border that more or less repulses me from holding a gun. At a berserk low-point I called the relief agency and in short order was told they could do nothing and no one could do anything. This is universally known by all about student loan debt. I was in my father’s white work-van (on loan to me this difficult summer), and I sat amongst my paints and canvases and said Fuck until the capillaries in my eyes burst. I didn’t need eyes anymore. I wasn’t going to paint anymore and be poor and owe America everything. Fuck eyes. I filled out applications for entry-level civilian gigs in the Department of Defense. Though no job materialized from this madness, my shame remains.

What else was happening? I don’t mean to expose the undiluted triviality of my circumstances, which were more rustic than balls-out crippling by any stretch of the imagination—I live on a farm. I don’t have internet. When my boyfriend calls—he did just now—to ask if I’ve seen the new Lady Gaga video (“A lot of birthing, all manner of it, and bloody,” is his report)—inevitably the answer is No. But intellectual marginalization has attendant pain and is very specific to this moment in history, especially for the creative class, hemmed in by the internet. There are too many of us being nice to each other. We are the new boring lumpenproletariat. There’s no avant-garde because the avant-garde is not very nice, and not being very nice interferes with the hiring practice. Getting hired is a thing. At any moment, one of our connections—you know, someone we’ve networked with—could secure for us employment or a gig if only we don’t piss them off. For comparison, pithy Félix Fénéon is presumed to have pipe-bombed rivals at the Hôtel Foyot. (Ironically, the explosion’s sole casualty was Fénéon’s friend, the poet Laurent Tailhade.)

Where was I?

That summer I was Home Again. What happened next amounts to Tall Tales. I began a fitness program that occasionally slipped into exercise bulimia. I ran 4 miles every day in the evenings along the same course my twin brother had run in high school, in his attempt to shed off weight before wrestling meets. I was ghosting the physical ambitions of my brother, haunting his trek, stripping away the micro layers of fat for lack of a salaried job. His junior year, my brother cut 20 pounds, possibly more, running this circuit through the cornfields of my home. If you touched his cheek, it stayed indented. He was ashen and starved and automatically surly, prone to bursting into tears around food. (Wrestling season coincides with the most gluttonous of holidays, what with practices beginning around Halloween, and tournaments surrounding Thanksgiving, Christmas and the New Year. A lot of wrestlers are criers; it’s kind of endearing.) I felt caught up in the same cycle, in all of July into August and beyond. I worked three part-time jobs in three different counties, hauling my work clothes and work apparatuses in my dad’s giant, gas-guzzling white van, which I nicknamed Moby-Dick. I was a slim morsel in the mouth of the whale! When I got off from these jobs—Gallery Attendant, Video Rentalist, Host—I went on long runs and wept. I tottered into bed unable to hold books, the sinews of my body crackling, like I had spent the day spit-roasting. A lot of things were happening then—things with my boyfriend, for instance, who was in Texas, in the gaping maw of Teach for America—but mostly I was lost in Symbolism. That, and Tall Tales about the economy and artists, privation and shame, and other dichotomies of inertness.

Other films featuring nuns take a long view of describing the bureaucracy of the order—the narrative suffers under documentary injunction, so that viewers can experience a richly felt “day in the life” quality to the proceedings. The structural motifs of these films are composed of scenes in which nuns are seen submitting, singing, weeding, praying, hobbling, whispering, disciplining, and usually failing, or stalling in their sacraments before a satanic impasse. (Nunsense not excepted.) Black Narcissus seems unconcerned with doctrinal faith, or imagining the fulsomeness of pious deeds. The sisters stand along their earthen works bereft of a coherent tradition. They are mesmerized under the infinite vault of cold mountain air. The sky is too close. They are close enough to the sky to see angels, and yet none are there. When the nuns lose their sense of vocation, other senses are amplified, arousing memory and reverie.

Writers, producers and directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger acknowledge Black Narcissus’ eroticism. I’m not going to move beyond the film’s seductions. Here is a brief summary with spoilers: Several nuns are sent to a convent in the Himalayan steeps, so as to provide schooling and medicine for the village of pagans below. Probably they get altitude sickness—a slow burning sickness that makes all the nuns a little crazy. Though they win over the peasantry and find time to do needle-point, they hardly ever eat and do even less in the way of converting. Where crops should have been sowed, instead, flowers are planted. Reading the Bible doesn’t help and eventually the sisters despair. One night one of the nuns goes bat shit, she is jealous and horny, and in the morning she tries to push her sister superior off a cliff!

The man between them is David Farrar’s Mr. Dean. Occasionally he uses the Lord’s name in vain, a transgression that titillates the younger nuns to no end. He has chest hair you could scour pots with, a bronze voice, strong nose—a nose that steers the expressions of his face like a keel—and powerful jowls with kind sea water eyes and greasy hair coiffed heroic-casual, in the vein of Robin Hood. He wears kit shorts draw-stringed above his navel with the fabric over his ass shaped into a potato sac. The hyper-masculine textures are off-set by these infantilizing wardrobe choices—strappy sandals and loose salmon-colored tunics, and Mr. Dean always rides around on a listing grey pony, his knees up to his ears. Golden knees, white thighs.

I think the aesthetics of jungle sex are always abortive, in that every winging thing in the environment tries to put white people off procreating there. Mosquitos, malaria, cholera, dysentery, typhus; all the leaves on the ground trembling with insects, fatty insects with tentacles, mandibles, stingers and a millions legs; the monkeys observing from nearby look and act like pre-sexual kids, hooting and pointing—all to say if Mr. Dean and Sister Clodagh’s pas de deux had evolved beyond playground teasing, they had even more censure coming from the diabolically sensuous environs. Merchant and Ivory never fared well in humidity, either. When bejeweled Kanchi (a carotene Jean Simmons, pulsing, ravishing, a mauve cobra princess) charms the young general (fey Sabu, sweetly perfumed in the scent of the film’s title, a dandy who enjoys the London cut of suits), I sense the filmmakers conceding to the natives’ heathen purity, rarified and mystical. The Eastern boy and girl can elope and fornicate: Western encyclicals are so much dross to their fauvist afternoon lovemaking. Just what does Black Narcissus cologne smell like?

Some movies scramble you like an egg. They have this power over you once, in one blue hour of winter twilight, when you’re sick. I guess. There I was beside my pile of tissues, mucus glossing the beard around my nose and mouth, degrees away from assuming the figure of a Mater dolorosa, wondering what the hell I had seen. Black Narcissus’ inner mechanism is Hitchcockian but when its spring releases, the outpouring is Matisse—papaya sunlight drenching brimstone. The monsoon washes away remaining psychic turmoil quaffing hot breath with cold rain.

Is it a particularly post-grad thing to listen to electronic music and theorize its relevance? My friend took a seminar devoted to analyzing Pet Shop Boys. One of his research papers was titled “Organica” and it was a historiographic overview of the evolution of intelligent dance music—Autechre and Squarepusher were his controls, I think—in relation to advances in biotechnology, such as mapping the human genome. He established a relationship between descriptions of exons in the structure of DNA and the allophones of Digital Performer and Pro Tools editing software, and the Ableton Live interface. Most of this existed in the realm of metaphor. His essential argument still seems very meaningful to me—that at the point when humankind could describe itself down to its constitutive chemical bits, the songs we sang of ourselves became wordless clicks and drones. The liturgical corollary may not be evident. In so much as we may know more of our own making, the means of describing this material become more obtuse and irrelevant to lay people. The essay was the preface to a larger defense of Auto-Tune.

I picked up a little Oxygen 8 MIDI controller to practice, I guess, what I preach. Making music that you’re not embarrassed to show other people takes even longer than painting pictures that you’re not embarrassed to show other people—thankfully songs are easier to hide than canvases as large as mattresses. Writing about film takes very little time indeed.

In fact I’ve not seen nuns in documentaries. No, that’s not entirely accurate: I have seen Sister Wendy Beckett discuss art on PBS. She seems lovely. The tendency remains to assume familiarity with the lifestyle (I say “lifestyle” en lieu of evoking the delicate wiles of Consecrated Virginity, or Anchoritic Life), if only by conflating poverty, education, and alone-time, which so many of us have. But just because you’re poor and consumed by questions of meaning, doesn’t mean you’re a nun, or a monk, as the case may be. Reading The Name of the Rose doesn’t make you a semiotician. Still, we embrace certain aesthetic/ethical convictions and imbue them with the ardor of religious doctrine, thus the scholastic tradition. This is consoling. Living an acetic lifestyle is consoling too, because it saves you the indignity of living off food stamps while tightening your quads. Listening upright in chairs to electronic music is not the same as attending Mass. But I think it’s what we’re left with. We need to make it mean something. And, like the nuns in Black Narcissus, we need to know when to leave off our meaning making. I need more ibuprofen. I need to be more gracious about defeat.

Evan Bryson is a writer living in Indiana. He tumbls here.