Book Review « Black Clock

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John. Chapter One. Verse One.

After twenty-one hours of traveling, four different countries, three different planes, and three hundred and fifty pages, a litany kept repeating itself in my mind: my life, my time, my hope, my god, my faith, my love, my glory.

With his 2006 debut novel And The Word Was, Bruce Bauman has given us the gift of an honorable character and an honest man; a man who isn’t afraid to love. Neil Downs is an ER doctor from Queens who runs away from New York City after the tragic death of his son. He ends up in New Delhi, where a myriad of factors come together and blow up in front of the reader, ranging from the political to the philosophical to the hypocrisy that exists in our everyday lives.

Neil tracks down his favourite writer, Holocaust survivor Levi Furstenblum, whose writings are interspersed throughout the novel and are the catalysts to certain events. What was fascinating to me was Neil finding himself in the writings of Levi while Levi’s writing reflected what Neil is not. Levi might have lost his god, his family, and his faith in humanity, but Neil did not. Yes, Neil lost his son, his god, and even his wife for a while, but he was always on the path toward repairing this. Perhaps my favourite parts of the novel are the instances when Neil kneels down to help an injured young woman, and to place rocks on specific graves, as if he is brought to his knees from all the guilt, the tormented ghosts of his past, and his regrets.

(And perhaps my choice of Edith Piaf’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” wasn’t a random yearning that has been haunting me ever since I read Bauman’s first sentence.)

Curiously enough, “epistasis is the biological term, which science best defines as that nothing is simple and everything depends on everything else” (Bauman 230). The etymology of “epistasis” comes from the Greek word “epi,” meaning “upon,” and “stasis,” which means “stopping;” therefore “a stopping” or “stoppage.” While Neil is in this constant game of “stop and go” (something that Levi knows all too much about), they both need each other and everything that exists in the universe in order to survive.

In essence, this sums up Bauman’s novel beautifully (even if the science that has been carefully penned into this novel is sometimes out of my reach but hey! That is the beauty of fiction). When you lose a person you love, you lose a part of yourself. When you lose your god, your faith is shaken and you start to shatter into small fragments. Most of the time, those two are interrelated and I’m not quite sure which way the causal relationship works.

It is the tug of war that goes on in our entire universe. It is the debate of god and science, of love and loss, of death and life. It is the alienation that Neil feels wherever he may be, mentally or physically. It is his wish to go deaf—for silence in a world that is anything but silent. It is the desperation for something more and the unwillingness to accept that perhaps seeing is believing. It is the bonding of people who are suffering and how they heal each other by searching for the truth together, consequently bringing each other to salvation.

I can’t stop thinking about the struggle that Holika, an intriguing upper-class Indian woman who had a brief affair with Neil, faced with the social norms that exist in India. I can’t help but think about Abraham and Isaac. About Rilke and “The minds of murderers are easily comprehended.” About the similarities between India and America. Between Israel and Palestine. All the corruption and death, but all of the underlying humanity that is surely found between them. Between, between, between . . .

Ultimately, the greatest tragedy is not Levi Furstenblum losing his family or his god. It is not Neil Downs losing his son in a savage hate crime. It is not the unfairness that plagues India, America, or the world. The tragedy, fundamentally, lies with Sarah Roberts—Neil’s wife who is lamentably silent throughout the first part of the novel—who has her own heavy cross to carry. A cross that is so heartbreaking and so intense, that not even words could contain her pain as most of her journey was off the page. She was alone. And when Neil hears the anguished words of what really happened, our stomachs are in our throats, too.

Because while every single one of the broken characters in the book lose faith in a god that lives out of reach, Sarah loses faith in the man she loves. She lost faith in herself. But as much faith as was stolen from her, she did not lose faith in humanity. Humanity—which Levi (spells ‘Evil,’ spells ‘Live’) Furstenblum only saw the most vicious, the most atrocious, the most horrible aspects. Humanity—which never cared about the agony that was found in the victims of the 20th century, a counterpart to the hatred that was felt by their torturers.

And The Word Was is a novel that teaches the reader that hope is often found in the strangest, dampest, and darkest of places. It tells the story of hope always dying last. While I willingly run to the city that Neil Downs has tried to leave behind, I realise that hope is time, and my time will last as long as I want.

By Eleni Demetriou
an Associate Editor for Black Clock and a graduate of the MFA Writing program at CalArts.

Jonathan Lethem Experiences “They Live”

I didn’t watch John Carpenter’s They Live. I’m not a buff by any standard. Intentionally, even as I anticipated the book’s arrival, I declined the free opportunity to see this film. But I have read Jonathan Lethem’s They Live. My interest stemmed from my Lethem fandom and a single description printed in size 18 serif font atop the front cover of this book: it reads, “A Novel Approach to Cinema.” My curiosity was snagged wondering at the narrative innovations Lethem could offer in a book of criticism. Other descriptions are similar, if not quite as stimulating. About their new Deep Focus series, of which this work is the first of two so far, Soft Skull Press promises it will present, “…long form criticism that’s relentlessly provocative and entertaining.” And in “Note to Approach I,” set as a preface, Lethem himself describes the piece matter-of-factly, writing “This is the first monograph on They Live.”

Above all, this book represents Lethem’s repeated viewings of They Live articulated through stream-of-consciousness probes on anything from the implied homosexuality of the characters, Los Angeles as its-unnamed-self, RayBan Wayfarers (or, as Lethem points out as the likely case in this movie, their drugstore rip-offs), to diving into racial, Marxist, and generic motifs. The quick introduction, a poetic and prophetic day-after reaction—entitled “What You’ll Recall of the Dream in the Morning”—renders the experience of this book as it does the movie more aptly than any review ever could.

A street preacher’s warning and a pirate television broadcast.
The demolition by riot policemen, helicopters, and bulldozers of an open-air homeless-persons’ compound in a vast vacant lot.
A brazen assault on a ghetto church.
A hero, a wrestler garbed as a construction worker.
A pair of sunglasses that reveals yuppies as alien ghouls.
A chilly, enigmatic beauty, her intentions toward our hero unknown.
The black guy and the white guy. They begin in distrust, but soon learn they’ve got enemies in common. From that point they’ll cover each other’s backs.
Machine-gun fire in a television studio.
A surprise with tits.

But, above all, two sequences…

That is to say, this is Lethem’s experience and this will be your experience too.

Lethem’s writing is, as usual, amazingly pleasurable. Free-associative though rarely tangential, it constantly compels forward movement by refreshing readers on what feels most like every peculiarity of the movie. “RayBan Waferers … had been established as a specifically eighties movie icon…” Or: “At the height of the colorization crisis, a rumor spread that Ted Turner intended to colorize the Kansas sequences in The Wizard of Oz…” Yet all these observations are tightly situated in the narrative of They Live itself. That is, the book literally follows the movie’s established discourse. Once the premises are settled, we start at “0:00” and move toward the movie’s conclusion at “1:30:21,” and to help check the two mediums when need be, run time is often cued—“(2:18)” or “(1:02:05).” Also, though this is a work of criticism, Lethem often presents the movie’s shots and sequences as fictional scenes. “Garbed in default blue-collar duds and wearing a back-pack, Nada picks his way out of the distance, across the tracks, toward us … our hero strolls into the story’s frame through the civilization’s back doors, unnoticed, an entrance simultaneously suggesting modesty of means, self-reliant competency, wraithlike anonymity, and (at least to begin) neutrality…” The overall effect is that of a novel stealing the film’s diegetic. That is to say, a novel whose narrator is embedded within the movie itself. (Not many other books give background music).

This was my reason for picking up the book: I’d imagined a work truly adapted from film, appropriating not only the plot but any trope of action and science-fiction movies or even film code. I’d imagined a perspective not unlike that in Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy, an ultimately distant view that treats the characters with seemingly complete objectivity, but made “fun” by the popcorn content. Why not, at a minimum, leave open the narrative hooks or even help produce rather than squelch them even before they come up? Here’s an example: in the section titled “Villainous Vehicles (22:40),” Lethem writes of helicopters, “Nada will later be killed by a sniper shot from one.” Is this your friend ruining the end of the story or is this Lethem purposely deflating the narrative so as to direct your full attention to his own “reading” of the film? Ultimately, as B-movies go, They Live is, in the best Roger Corman tradition, a film of ideas. Had I watched it, I would have understood this in my anticipation. Thus arises the need to expand, explain, and explicate. Another note that Lethem provides on helicopters is this: “So, in They Live’s ironclad us-versus-them scheme, the director’s affiliation with his persecuting machines points to a subliminal ambivalence, or even complicity.” Ultimately, this book becomes one of ideas that exist on so many slippery levels that… it, in many ways, re-enacts its own version of these events and becomes the movie as hoped for, as previewed or advertised, as promised.

For this reader the total effect is that of an awed (odd) epic of an 1980s America that could only be retold precisely this way. It drew me in entirely—I set the book down only once to wrap myself in more blankets as my heater recently died—so by the end, I was completely rewarded, just as any reader is upon discovering an new manner in which fiction momentarily demystifies our world. “Put on the @*#!ing glasses.”

by Justus Caudell
an Editorial Assistant for Black Clock and an MFA Writing candidate at CalArts

Orpheus vs. Orpheus

THE HYMNS OF ORPHEUS     vs       THE ORPHIC HYMNS
by Orpheus                                                         by Orpheus
Translated by Thomas Taylor                       Translated by A. Athanassakis
306 pp. Philosophical Research Society      146 pp. Society of Biblical Literature

The beauty of the Orphic Hymns lies primarily in the mystery of their provenance. Legendary poet Orpheus, companion of Jason, descender into Hades, and father of ancient Greek theology, certainly had a busy and well-documented life of adventure. Due to the variety of legends and stories involving Orpheus, it is impossible to offer a sequentially arranged and definitive synopsis of his life. According to the different traditions, his father was either a quasi-legendary Thracian king named Oeagrus, or the god Apollo. Regardless, at some point in his early youth, Apollo became fond of him and gave him a golden lyre, which he taught him to play. Orpheus’ mother, who was either the Muse Calliope or a mortal woman descended from a Muse, instructed him on the writing of verse. The key aspect of the Orpheus myth resides there, in his felicity with song and poetry. According to Aeschylus, Orpheus’ talent was such that the very rocks and trees responded to his compositions. He was a member of Jason’s crew on the Argonaut, and saved his companions from the Sirens by outsinging those legendary temptresses. He later descended into Hades to reclaim his deceased wife, Eurydice, and his songs were such to move the pity of Death himself. Eurydice was granted life, on the condition that Orpheus could lead her out of the underworld without looking back. He failed, and she remained in the clutches of Hades. He was so distraught by this that he renounced the love of women, and is sometimes credited with the invention of Greek homosexuality. The most famous account of his death is at the hands of a group of enraged, female followers of Dionysus, who resented his love of male youths and his rejection of their god. The Dionysian priestesses ripped him to shreds in a drunken fury, but could not prevent his severed head from singing. His golden lyre was reclaimed by Apollo and installed in the heavens, where it can be viewed to this day as an arrangement of stars.

There is no definitive statement within any of the ancient sources of the Orpheus myth to explain when and for what reasons he sat down to compose his hymns, which are the only extant complete body of his writing. In addition to the hymns, there have come down to us a fragmented Theogony, known as the Rhapsodic Theogony, and pieces of an Argonautica told from Orpheus’ perspective, which are also attributed to Orpheus himself. The complete hymns were known and read at least as early as 500 CE, when they were mentioned in a Latin codex (Athanassakis xii). The current collection, on which our two English translations by Thomas Taylor and A.A. Athanassakis are based, appeared around the 12th century. Our translators offer widely differing scholarly ideas about the true history of the hymns, opinions which greatly influence the style and content of the respective translations. Even their answers to the key questions – Did Orpheus exist? and Did he write these hymns?–are widely divergent.

Thomas Taylor published the first English translation of the hymns in 1792. An avowed classicist and ‘liberal mind,’ Mr. Taylor prefaces the hymns with a lengthy dissertation on the life and theology of Orpheus. His purpose for embarking on the work is to reveal the heritage of Greek philosophy as beginning with Orpheus and continuing through Pythagoras and Plato, and to also showcase the striking similarities between the religious ideas of the ancient Greeks and modern Christian beliefs.

Ultimately, his prefatory dissertation is of more value than the translations themselves. Mr. Taylor, through close study of obscure ancient sources, many of them available to him only as crumbling medieval manuscripts, has provided us with a clear and sensible historical outline of the hymn’s genesis, and also a revelatory summation of the life of the author. Mr. Taylor accepts it as a matter of fact that Orpheus did in fact exist, that he (more or less) accomplished all the feats attributed to him, and that he composed his hymns as a repository for his spiritual and philosophical knowledge. The ingenuous solution to the obvious biographical paradoxes – i.e. how could one person die so many different ways – is that Orpheus is a reincarnate spirit, like the Buddha, and that there were actually four ancient Orpheuses, and five if you count the first Orpheus’ decision to reincarnate initially as a swan, so as not ‘to be born of woman.’ Each of these Orpheuses accomplished different things; for the sake of this review, we need only identify that it was the fourth Orpheus who composed the hymns, sometime between 800-600 BCE.

As for the Taylor translation itself; it is, in a word, terrible. Mr. Taylor himself seems to acknowledge this, and offers in his preface not only the timeless translator’s complaint of the ultimate impossibility of their enterprise, but also an explanation of the Hymn’s singular difficulty. Apparently their construction around conclusive epithets involves so many hermetic devices that it is impossible to communicate their meaning to the uninitiated. According to Mr. Taylor:

Most of the compound epithets of which the following Hymns chiefly consist, thought very beautiful in the Greek language; yet when literally translated into ours, lose all their propriety and force. In their native tongue, as in a prolific soil, they diffuse their sweets with full-blown elegance; but shrink like the sensitive plant at the touch of the verbal critic, or the close translator (ix).

None of this, however, explains Mr. Taylor’s most grievious injury to his source material: his decision to render the hymns in a contemporary idiom, wholly prosaic and entirely inappropriate, complete with an awkward a-b-a-b rhyme scheme. Yikes.

A. Athanassakis does a much better job with the actual translation, and in his preface offers a much more sober–some would say boring and unexciting–explanation of the hymn’s provenance. According to him, Orpheus existed in the same way Hercules did: as a mythical character that, over time, accumulated a symbolic/spiritual significance which attracted a band of worshippers. The Orphic hymns were thus composed around 400 CE by a nameless priest of the Orphic cult, for use in a ritual setting.

Mr. Athanassakis, who has taught in the Classics Department of UC Santa Barbara for nearly thirty years, composed his translation in the 1960s, on a commission from a group concerned with making available obscure ancient religious texts for scholarly study. It is intended as a corrective for the Taylor translation, which, according to Athanassakis, obscures the intermittent literary quality of the original. Mr. Athanassakis, a professional scholar of Greek and translator, has also done celebrated, academic translations of the Homeric Hymns and Hesiod’s Theogony; having no personal knowledge of Greek, I take this to signify a greater fidelity to the original than that offered by Mr. Taylor.

The Athanassakis translation is, as he states, straightforward and unadorned. There is no rhyme scheme, no attempt to resolve linguistic obscurities; the result is a batch of hymns that are intermittently dull, often interesting, and, on a couple of occasions, truly stunning. Take, for example, the two renderings of Hymn LXXX.

Taylor:

TO THE WEST WIND

Sea-born, aerial, blowing from the west,
Sweet gales, who give to weary’d labour rest:
Vernal and grassy, and of gentle sound,
To ships delightful, thro’ the sea profound;
For these, impell’d by you with gentle force,
Pursue with prosp’rous Fate their destin’d course.
With blameless gales regard my suppliant pray’r,
Zephyrs unseen, light-wind’d, and form’d from air.

Athanassakis:

TO ZEPHYROS

Western breezes, ethereal begetters of all,
as you blow gently your whisper brings deathlike rest.
Vernal and meadow-haunting, you are loved by havens
because to ships you bring . . . soft and light air.
Come in a spirit of kindness and blow perfectly,
O airy, invisible and light-winged ones.

Again, I have no personal knowledge of ancient Greek, but “vernal and grassy” can’t sound good in any language. It can be seen that in the Taylor translation we get a stilted example of English Romantic poetry, stamped upon an ancient Greek source; in the Athanassakis, a simple but moving poem of ethereal beauty. The value of the Taylor translation, as stated, resides in his explication of Orphic theology and adventurous interpretation of the hymn’s compositional history. As a purely literary document, however, the Athanassakis work stands on a higher level. It is impossible to determine the historical accuracy of the Orpheus myth. According to Orphic scholar M.L. West, who bases his determination on various ancient Greek sources, Orpheus would have predated Homer by several centuries, and even the ancient accounts that document that era are secondhand and steeped in allegory. Regardless, whether the hymns are the literal utterances of Apollo’s son, or the creation of “a religious association of people who called themselves mystic initiates” (Athanassakis 4), their literary quality is revealed in the more recent translation. It can be hoped that more scholarly attention may solve the riddle of their appearance, but until then, we must enjoy them for what they are: beautiful poems of indisputably spiritual significance.

by Doug Matus
a writer from Texas who now lives in Los Angeles

Posts Tagged ‘Book Review’—

John. Chapter One. Verse One.

Jonathan Lethem Experiences “They Live”

Orpheus vs. Orpheus

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