The Tara-ist

From Writing Los Angeles

Don Antonio was but a lad when his father’s family removed from the city of Mexico to California.  They came in one of the many unfortunate colonies sent out by the Mexican Government during the first years of the secularization period, having had a toilsome and suffering two moths, going in wagons from Mexico to San Blas, then a tedious and uncomfortable voyage of several weeks from San Blas to Monterey, where they arrived only to find themselves deceived and disappointed in every particular, and surrounded by hostilities, plots, and danger on all sides.  So great was the antagonism that it was at times difficult for a colonist to obtain food from a Californian. They were arrested on false pretences, thrown into prison, shipped off like convicts from place to place, with no one to protect them or plead their cause.  Revolution succeeded upon revolution, and it was a most unhappy period for all refined and cultivated persons who had joined the colony enterprises.  Young men of education and breeding were glad to earn their daily bread by any menial labor offered.  Don Antonio and several of his young friends, who had all studied medicine together, spent the greater part of a year in making shingles.  The one hope and aim of most of them was to earn enough money to get back to Mexico.  Don Antonio, however, seems to have had more versatility and capacity than his friends, for he never lost courage; and it was owing to him that at last his whole family gathered in Los Angeles and established a home here.  This was in 1836.  There were then only about eight hundred people in the pueblo, and the customs, superstitions, and ignorances of the earliest days still held sway …

While he was at the San Antonio Mission, a strange thing happened.  It is a good illustration of the stintless hospitality of those old missions, that staying there at the time were a notorious gambler and a celebrated juggler who had come out in the colony from Mexico.  The juggler threatened to turn the gambler into a crow; the gambler, after watching his tricks for a short time, became frightened, and asked young Antonio, in serious good faith, if he did not believe the juggler had made a league with the devil.  A few nights afterward, at midnight, a terrible noise was heard in the gambler’s room.  He was found in convulsions, foaming at the mouth, and crying, “Oh, Father! Father! I have got the devil inside of me!  Take him away!”  The priest dragged him into the chapel, showered him with holy water, and exorcised the devil, first making the gambler promise to leave off his gambling forever.  All the rest of the night the rescued sinner spent in the chapel, praying and weeping.  In the morning he announced his intention of becoming a priest, and began his studies at once.  These he faithfully pursued for a year, leading all the while a life of great devotion.  At the end of that time preparations were made for his ordination at San Jose.  The day was set, the hour came: he was in the sacristy, had put on the sacred vestments, and was just going toward the church door, when he fell to the floor, dead.  Soon after this the juggler was banished from the country, trouble and disaster having everywhere followed on his presence.

- By Helen Hunt Jackson from her “Echoes in the City of the Angels”

From Walker Percy’s “The Moviegoer”

Tonight, Thursday Night, I carry out a successful experiment in repetition.

Fourteen years ago, when I was a sophomore, I was a western at a moviehouse on Freret Street, a place frequented by students and known to them as the Armpit.  The movie was The Oxbow Incident and it was quite good.  It was about this time of year I saw it, for I remember the smell of privet when I came out and the camphor berries popping underfoot.  (All movies smell of a neighborhood and a season: I saw All Quiet on the Western Front, one of my first, in Arcola, Mississippi, in August of 1941, and the noble deeds were done, not merely fittingly but inevitably, in the thick singing darkness of Delta summer and in the fragrance of cottonseed meal.)  Yesterday evening I noticed in the Picayune that another western was playing at the same theater.  So up I went, by car to my aunt’s house, then up St Charles in a streetcar with Kate so we can walk through the campus.

Nothing has changed.  There we sat, I in the same seat I think, and afterwards came out into the smell of privet.  Camphor berries popped underfoot on the same section of broken pavement.

A successful repetition.

What is a repetition?  A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle. Last week, for example, I experienced an accidental repetition.  I picked up a German-language weekly in the library.  In it I noticed an advertisement for Nivea Creme, showing a woman with a grainy face turned up to the sun.  Then I remembered that twenty years ago I saw the same advertisement in a magazine on my father’s desk, the same woman, the same grainy face, the same Nivea Creme.  The events of the intervening twenty years were neutralized, the thirty million deaths, the countless torturings, uprootings and wanderings to and fro.  Nothing of consequence could have happened because Nivea Creme was exactly as it was before.  There remained only time itself, like a yard of smooth peanut brittle.

How, then, tasted my own fourteen years since The Oxbow Incident?

As usual it eluded me.  There was this: a mockery about the old seats, their plywood split, their bottoms slashed but enduring nevertheless as if they had waited to see what I had done with my fourteen years.  There was this also: a secret sense of wonder about the enduring, about all the nights, the rainy summer nights at twelve and one and two o’clock when the seats endured alone in the empty theater.  The enduring is something which must be accounted for.  One cannot simply shrug it off.

The Tree of Life

During my viewing of The Tree of Life, at least 6 people walked out of the theater, mostly during the 20+ minute montage featuring the birth of life on our the planet.  At this point, the film had been less a film and more a collection of whisperings and images that teetered between transcendent and annoying.  The theater was mostly packed with Malick fans, who were all either with it, or determined to stay with it (as a side note, it seems that everyone I meet now is the biggest Terrence Malick fan.  I know he had fans before, but this movie seems to have galvanized them.  At the bar where I work the other day, I heard an older gentleman relating a brief history of what we all know about the guy - that he makes one movie every 9 years or so - to a younger girl.  News Flash – when the filmmaker in question is the biggest thing at Cannes, when his movie is playing every half-hour at the Arclight, and when Brad Pitt is starring in his film, you can’t claim him like you’re talking about some obscure band you saw at The Smell.  Snooki will probably see this movie and have an opinion about it.) But I chuckled a little when those few people walked out, because I imagine that Terrence Malick wouldn’t have minded that much.  Even as I was holding my breath to see whether or not I liked the movie as a whole, what I appreciated was that I was at the mercy of an artist who had enough vision, clout, and bombast to produce such an incredible undertaking, to distribute it to theaters as accessible as the Arclight, and then to hold us captive to his vision for 2 hours.  Usually, when I go to a movie and don’t like it, it’s because the film, in trying too hard to capture my love (and the love of millions like me), has bent itself into something I don’t like at all.  In this case, I felt as if the filmmaker was saying, wholeheartedly, that this is what he wanted to make and he could honestly care less whether or not I wanted to leave.  And that made me love him. 

And, while I have to say the Birth of Life portion went on too long for my taste, it somehow primed me for the rest of the film, whose snapshot story-telling technique seemed downright linear compared to the first two sections of the movie.  The Tree of Life seems to be Malick’s attempt to put the events of human history in their proper context.  With the juxtaposition of the history of planet Earth against what seems to be maybe 6 months in the life of a little boy, the events in the life of the boy become, surprisingly, more cataclysmic.  Each emotion is a tidal wave; each new realization carries with it too much force. 

The heightened sensual quality of the images flooding the screen was effective in opening me up to the story.  Maybe it’s because I was so desperate for some story, any story; or maybe it’s because it’s difficult not to feel emotion when you see shots of volcanoes and oceans so majestic, you feel simultaneously proud to live on planet Earth, and ashamed to reside in a grubby one-bedroom in Silverlake.  Either way, where normally, I know that I would maintain a certain level of distance between myself and the characters until the filmmaker had somehow aligned my sympathies with them, in this instance, I felt immediately open to them.  And because the story didn’t move through traditional conflict and resolution structure, but rather unfolded through images I’m guessing were assembled in editing, my emotions crested throughout.  I found myself crying at the end, through the credits and into the lobby.  This was a necessary release after being denied the normal catharsis through tragic event and resolution structure, and instead being persistently bombarded with images of unthinkable beauty.

That said, what will stay with me, months and years from now, will be the performances of the two boys.  For me, the film’s greatest gift was allowing me to spend time in their world.  Malick’s understanding of childhood seems to me to be spot-on:  the omnipresence of parental influence, the weight of small tragedies, the texture of joyful (or painful) personal experiences that are rarely repeated or recaptured, if ever, later in life.  In terms of a storyteller who is up to the task of presenting childhood as it is, and not how we as adults might remember or project it, Malick is the best man for the job, by a long shot.  I don’t think I’ll ever, ever forget the images of two boys joyfully out-limping each other through a parking lot and then, a moment later, seeing a man with a real disability, and melting into a sober realization of the horrors that await them in adulthood.  Or the picture of one boy holding out a lamp with the bulb unscrewed and daring his brother to stick a wire hanger in there, and the younger brother, both afraid and trusting, doing it.  I’ll remember these moments, as I remember a precious few from my own from early life, because they have all of the innocence of childhood and the threat of its passage contained within them.  And That, despite the Our Father allegories, and Birth of Life montages, and a too-long sequence with a Sean Penn and a bunch of people milling around on a beach, is at the heart of this film.  And Terrence Malick, I’m grateful for it.

History is crazy!

Robert Lincoln, by the way, would continue to run the War Department for Garfield’s successor Chester Arthur.  In the 1880’s, this mostly entailed managing the dwindling Indian Wars out west, with one ghastly exception.  The same week Garfield was shot, one of Lincoln’s charges, a twenty-five-man Arctic scientific expedition was en route to Lady Franklin Bay.  Robert Todd Lincoln, writes Leonard F. Guttridge in Ghosts of Cape Sabine, “could not have cared less about the North Pole.”  Underprovisioned, thanks mostly to Lincoln’s indifference toward the project, the men arrived in the North Pole to set up a base, expecting a relief ship the following year.  It never came.  After two years went by without supplies or rescue, the starving party abandoned their camp and retreated home.  Only six survived.  The survivors ate the dead men.  It was a fiasco of planning and leadership, a national embarrassment and disgrace, and as the bureaucrat in charge, Robert Lincoln had frozen blood on his hands.  When the rumors of cannibalism surfaced, Lincoln and his counterpart the secretary of the navy conspired to cover it up by announcing that the reason the bones of the dead had been mangled by knives was that the survivors cut up their comrades’ flesh to use as “shrimp bait.”  That’s how ugly the scandal was - that turning human flesh into shrimp bait was a positive spin.

- Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

Dr. Edward Curtis on the bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln

“There it lay upon the white china, a little black mass no bigger than the end of my finger - dull, motionless and harmless, yet the cause of such mighty changes in the world’s history as we may perhaps never realize … Silently, in one corner of the room, I prepared the brain for weighing.  As I looked at the mass of soft gray and white substance that I was carefully washing, it was impossible to realize that it was that mere clay upon whose workings, but the day before, rested the hopes of the nation.  I felt more profoundly impressed than ever with the mystery of that unknown something which may be named ‘vital spark’ as well as anything else, whose absence or presence makes all the immeasurable difference between an inert mass of matter owing obedience to no laws but those covering the physical and chemical forces of the universe, and on the other hand, a living brain by whose silent, subtle machinery a world may be ruled.  The weighing of the brain … gave approximate results only, since there had been some loss of brain substance, in consequence of the wound, during the hours of life after the shooting.  But the figures, as they were, seemed to show that the brain weight was not above the ordinary for a man of Lincoln’s size.”

From Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation