Just as, these days, Europe and the U.S. et al. think of Iran as a source of terror, spearheaded by Iran's President Ahmadinejad, so Persia is a source of terror for Paris in The Phantom of the Opera, by Gaston Leroux. The Phantom has come back to his birthplace, France, from Persia via Turkey (also a threatening region of the world, when The Phantom of the Opera was published in 1910.) In Persia, the Phantom has turned his architectural skills toward the construction of a torture chamber; he is employing his skills of construction for purposes of destruction. Similarly, he builds a palace for the Shah that allows the Shah to move about unseen and even to disappear utterly; that is, the Phantom has built a defensive weapon (against, quite possibly, the Shah's enemy, the Emir of Afghanistan). Thus, the Phantom perfects his evil in Persia and, after a Persian police chief rescues him from execution, he is able to take this perfected evil back to France, specifically, the Paris Opera.
This Persian police chief, known throughout as the Persian, is inextricably linked to the Phantom (Erik). He knows the Phantom well, as he points out frequently but most specifically and at length in this paragraph, in his narrative:
I knew my Erik too well to feel at all comfortable on jumping into his house [in the cellar of the Opera]. I knew what he had made of a certain palace at Mazenderan [in Persia]. From being the most honest building conceivable, he soon turned it into a house of the very devil, where you could not utter a word but it was overheard or repeated by an echo. With his trapdoors the monster was responsible for endless tragedies of all kinds. He hit upon astonishing inventions. Of these, the most curious, horrible and dangerous was the so-called torture chamber. (179)
The Persian describes the torture chamber as a hexagon lined with mirrors and containing a tree that "was absolutely true to life and was made of iron so as to resist all the attacks of the 'patient' who was locked into the torture chamber." (192) The Phantom's other inventions well-known to the Persian include the ability to create certain sound effects--such as the roar of a lion or the pattering of rain--intended for torture to the point of insanity and death.
The Persian is well aware of the Phantom's utterly destructive nature. He knows and says that "[Erik] is a real monster--I have seen him at work in Persia, alas..." (171) and "...he was restrained by no scruples and he employed his extraordinary gifts of dexterity and imagination...to prey upon his fellow men." (219) Nevertheless, this Persian police chief rescues Erik/the Phantom from execution by the Shah, thereby allowing this "real monster" who is "restrained by no scruples" to travel out of Persia first to Turkey, where he constructs deceptive devices for the Sultan's use, and then to Paris, where he assists in constructing the Opera--which he later decides to make his home--and from where he terrorizes the Opera managers, singers, and dancers et al., and ultimately, secretly, threatens the lives of hundreds of opera-goers.
The Persian, eventually realizing his terrible mistake, decides to lead the jealous, enraged Raoul, Vicomte de Chagny, to the Phantom's house in the cellar of the Opera, in order to kill this monstrous Phantom, after all. Instead, the Phantom nearly kills both Raoul and the Persian--who maintains contact with the Phantom even after the near-death event. And especially meaningful contact, too.
The Persian is writing his narrative of events for the Paris newspapers, when the Phantom visits and tells the Persian that he is going to die "of love for [Christine Daae], I...I tell you!...If you knew how beautiful she was...when she let me kiss her...." (211) This kiss is a radical event for this man, whose hideousness drove away his own mother. For the Phantom, this kiss means that a woman has loved him for his own sake, and it is this perpetually frustrated desire, to be loved for his own sake, that has obsessed and driven him all his life. He confides this over-riding desire first to the Persian (on p. 175) and then to Christine herself--"And yet I am not really wicked. Love me and you shall see! All I wanted was to be loved for myself." (182) No question then--at the core of this story is a universal longing, to be loved for oneself versus being loved for one's good looks--definitely demonstrated by Christine's other admirer, Raoul, Vicomte de Chagny.
And yet, it is the Persian who concludes The Phantom of the Opera and so it is the Persian and, consequently, Persia that stays in the reader's imagination. In this way, the melodramatic horror of The Phantom of the Opera manifests itself within a context of East-West tension--tension that has escalated again especially sharply since 9/11. The tension might be described in this way: the East (Iran, Iraq et al.) terrorizes the West (Europe and the U.S. et al.) which then seeks to conquer, or at least control, the East. But then, on second thought--just as the Phantom initially comes from France--so, clearly, terror can come from anywhere...and so, perhaps, today terror is coming not as much from the East as from the West's persistent portrayal of a maniacal East, which, like the Phantom of the Opera, must then be hunted down....
Monday, May 31, 2010
Thursday, May 20, 2010
What's with all the sound and fury, Robert?
It's back to the nineteenth century with a vengeance, in the dangerously imbalanced world of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson. It's a world that could well bring to mind Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), which was originated by Marsha Linehan to treat Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), a disorder characterized by identity disturbance, impulsivity, suicidality, and anger (characteristics indubitably evinced by Jekyll/Hyde!). In DBT, the desired outcome is integration of Reasonable Mind ("Vulcan" logic) with Emotion Mind (passionate reaction) bringing about Wise Mind (serene intuition). In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one might say that Emotion Mind overwhelms and destroys Reasonable Mind, consequently destroying any possible emergence of a Wise Mind.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde begins not with Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde but with the lawyer Mr. Utterson, assuredly the novel's representative of reason who no doubt drinks that transformative drug, wine, in moderation. But why do I mention wine? Let me count the reasons. 1) The second sentence of the first chapter tells us--"...when the wine was to Utterson's taste, something eminently human beaconed from his eye." (Stevenson 37) 2) When Utterson has to make a difficult decision, he summons his head clerk and "a bottle of a particular old wine that had long dwelt unsunned in the foundations of his house." (68) And this is no incidental bottle of wine but rather--
...the acids were long ago resolved; the imperial dye had softened with time, as the colour grows richer in stained windows; and the glow of hot autumn afternoons on hillside vineyards, was ready to be set free and to disperse the fogs of London. Insensibly the lawyer melted. (69)
3) When Dr. Jekyll's butler Poole visits Utterson in a state of terror, Utterson gives him a seat and a glass of wine that, Utterson observes with astonishment, "was still untasted when [Poole] set it down to follow [Utterson back to Jekyll's house]." (79-80) Very apparently, Utterson has learned to turn that transformative drug, wine, to his own satisfying ends, while staying in the realm of Reasonable Mind. In clear contrast, Dr. Jekyll creates a transformative drug that turns against his Reasonable Mind while driving him into his Emotion Mind.
Near the start of the story, Jekyll's "fanciful" will offends the conservative Utterson (46), while Jekyll's "fanciful" ideas offend the scientific Dr. Lanyon (47). Then, somewhere between that night and the early morning, after conversing with Lanyon about Hyde, Utterson finds himself besieged by the very fancifulness that he despises and distrusts, specifically, "...now his imagination also was engaged, or rather enslaved." (48, italics mine) Unquestionably the imagination is a danger to be avoided, as opposed to a framework of system and logic, which is to be carefully constructed and maintained. And so, Utterson sets out to remove the danger of imagination, an aspect of Emotion Mind, by examining the mystery, an activity of Reasonable Mind--"From that time forward, Mr. Utterson began to haunt the door in the by-street of shops...by all lights and at all hours of solitude or concourse, the lawyer was to be found on his chosen post...And at last his patience was rewarded." (49) Similarly, from that point in the book forward, Utterson's methodicalness of investigation contrasts sharply with both Dr. Jekyll's loss of control over his own experiment and Mr. Hyde's impulsive, aggressive, and criminally violent behavior.
In a letter to Lanyon, Jekyll uses the word "reason" several times, twice, dramatically, in the first short paragraph:
There was never a day when, if you had said to me, "Jekyll, my life, my honour, my reason depend upon you," I would not have sacrificed my left hand to help you. Lanyon, my life, my honour, my reason, are all at your mercy...." (94, italics mine)
Then, at the end of the letter's third paragraph, Jekyll refers to the potential "shipwreck of my reason." (95) Reason is an essential commodity for Jekyll (and Lanyon and Utterson, et al. and so on). So is--as Jekyll himself puts it, in "Henry Jekyll's First Statement of the Case"--"the balance of my nature" (113) or "those balancing instincts" (116) or "the balance of my soul" (118). Dialectical Behavior Therapy is surely concerned with balance, specifically, tempering extremes of Emotion Mind with consistent application of Reasonable Mind (for instance, noticing the experience but not evaluating it).
Certainly, Emotion Mind is not necessarily a dangerous, poisonous thing. Without Emotion Mind, there would be no romance, no art, literature, or music--for a start. Rather, there isn't much place for Emotion Mind in the Victorian world of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or--let's not kid ourselves--in the technocratic, bureaucratic world of 2010...and Hell hath no fury like Emotion Mind scorned!
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde begins not with Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde but with the lawyer Mr. Utterson, assuredly the novel's representative of reason who no doubt drinks that transformative drug, wine, in moderation. But why do I mention wine? Let me count the reasons. 1) The second sentence of the first chapter tells us--"...when the wine was to Utterson's taste, something eminently human beaconed from his eye." (Stevenson 37) 2) When Utterson has to make a difficult decision, he summons his head clerk and "a bottle of a particular old wine that had long dwelt unsunned in the foundations of his house." (68) And this is no incidental bottle of wine but rather--
...the acids were long ago resolved; the imperial dye had softened with time, as the colour grows richer in stained windows; and the glow of hot autumn afternoons on hillside vineyards, was ready to be set free and to disperse the fogs of London. Insensibly the lawyer melted. (69)
3) When Dr. Jekyll's butler Poole visits Utterson in a state of terror, Utterson gives him a seat and a glass of wine that, Utterson observes with astonishment, "was still untasted when [Poole] set it down to follow [Utterson back to Jekyll's house]." (79-80) Very apparently, Utterson has learned to turn that transformative drug, wine, to his own satisfying ends, while staying in the realm of Reasonable Mind. In clear contrast, Dr. Jekyll creates a transformative drug that turns against his Reasonable Mind while driving him into his Emotion Mind.
Near the start of the story, Jekyll's "fanciful" will offends the conservative Utterson (46), while Jekyll's "fanciful" ideas offend the scientific Dr. Lanyon (47). Then, somewhere between that night and the early morning, after conversing with Lanyon about Hyde, Utterson finds himself besieged by the very fancifulness that he despises and distrusts, specifically, "...now his imagination also was engaged, or rather enslaved." (48, italics mine) Unquestionably the imagination is a danger to be avoided, as opposed to a framework of system and logic, which is to be carefully constructed and maintained. And so, Utterson sets out to remove the danger of imagination, an aspect of Emotion Mind, by examining the mystery, an activity of Reasonable Mind--"From that time forward, Mr. Utterson began to haunt the door in the by-street of shops...by all lights and at all hours of solitude or concourse, the lawyer was to be found on his chosen post...And at last his patience was rewarded." (49) Similarly, from that point in the book forward, Utterson's methodicalness of investigation contrasts sharply with both Dr. Jekyll's loss of control over his own experiment and Mr. Hyde's impulsive, aggressive, and criminally violent behavior.
In a letter to Lanyon, Jekyll uses the word "reason" several times, twice, dramatically, in the first short paragraph:
There was never a day when, if you had said to me, "Jekyll, my life, my honour, my reason depend upon you," I would not have sacrificed my left hand to help you. Lanyon, my life, my honour, my reason, are all at your mercy...." (94, italics mine)
Then, at the end of the letter's third paragraph, Jekyll refers to the potential "shipwreck of my reason." (95) Reason is an essential commodity for Jekyll (and Lanyon and Utterson, et al. and so on). So is--as Jekyll himself puts it, in "Henry Jekyll's First Statement of the Case"--"the balance of my nature" (113) or "those balancing instincts" (116) or "the balance of my soul" (118). Dialectical Behavior Therapy is surely concerned with balance, specifically, tempering extremes of Emotion Mind with consistent application of Reasonable Mind (for instance, noticing the experience but not evaluating it).
Certainly, Emotion Mind is not necessarily a dangerous, poisonous thing. Without Emotion Mind, there would be no romance, no art, literature, or music--for a start. Rather, there isn't much place for Emotion Mind in the Victorian world of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or--let's not kid ourselves--in the technocratic, bureaucratic world of 2010...and Hell hath no fury like Emotion Mind scorned!
Sunday, May 9, 2010
What's going on, Jon?
Several years ago, a rather Buddhist supervisor of mine asked me, "What are you believing?" A momentous question, it stayed in a corner of my brain. The question re-emerged as I read There Is No Other, a stunning collection of short stories by Jonathan Papernick.
Initially, the first short story of the collection ("Skin for Skin") reads like a letter to the (now defunct) "Ask Beth" column in The Boston Globe. Girl arranges to be alone with boy, who, thereupon, wants to do more than make out. She does not want to do more than make out, but she does not want to be a "cocktease," either. What's a girl to do? Especially--and here ends any resemblance to "Ask Beth"--when the girl is Jewish and the boy is not. This matter of faith is neither light-weight nor easily surmounted. Although the boy quotes Friedrich "God is dead" Nietzsche, he lifts the crucifix "over his head with great difficulty, as if he were bearing the True Cross on his narrow shoulders...." (Papernick 10) Although the girl defines herself as "not Jewish" but rather "a secular humanist [who believes] in self-determination," she is nevertheless shocked to see the boy's uncircumcised penis against his thigh, "like the emergence of a sea monster from a bathtub." (11) Indeed, she is so shocked that she feels compelled--well, never mind the particulars--the point is, what she believes compels her toward what she ends up doing.
If the first story is like "Ask Beth" with a twist, then the second story ("There Is No Other") is like NCIS with a twist: the suicide bomber is a black Jewish 7th grader, Junius Barker, who promises not to blow up the classroom if someone can tell him why the Jews are the Chosen People. The "someone" who could tell him is the teacher, Aaron Needle, but the boy has decidedly turned on him--"And you, Needle, zip it." (24) Rising tension between Junius and Needle is dissolved in a prayer--
"You shall know today, and take to heart, that Adonai is the only God, in the heavens above and on earth below. There is no other." (27)
The word "other" is what resonates. The concept of "the other" meaning "the alien"--a concept crystallized by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex--is at the heart of this story. Despite the prayer uniting Junius and Needle, Junius feels very much like "the other," a feeling he pours forth in this rant:
"I want to know which half of me is chosen, the top half or the bottom, the inside or the outside, or the other way around? Why is it so hard to figure out? If God separated Jews from the other nations and gave them a different destiny, which half of me is chosen, which half of me bows down before the King of Kings, and which half can go fuck himself?" (29)
After throwing his arms around Junius in an embrace, which Junius resists, calling Needle a "homo" (yet another "other"), Needle whispers, "I believe in God. There is no other." (32) Needle's belief leads him--and Junius--to death, an ecstatic moment for Needle.
Another story in this collection ("The Miracle Birth") brought to mind a piece of Nurse Apple's Cookie Speech in the Stephen Sondheim musical Anyone Can Whistle--"My name is Apple, A-Double P-L-E, a fruit well mentioned in the Bible, that best seller of many miracles. I cite the Ten Commandments and the Burning Bush, to name only two." And I cite the Immaculate Conception (of Jesus), which is preceded, in the Old Testament, by the miraculous birth of Isaac to the exceedingly post-menopausal Sarah. Unquestionably, childless Shira Bavli in "The Miracle Birth" feels the weight of Biblical history: "Every time Shira came up to Jerusalem, she realized that [its] gravitational pull...was a hundred times that of the rest of the world, rendering even the simplest encounter as heavy as a stone cut from Solomon's Quarries." (50) Or, is Shira believing something about Jerusalem that endows it with this "gravitational pull"? In any case, Shira does give birth, at 40, to a girl, who, at 18, gives birth to a boy who, Vered believes, is the Messiah. Either of these births could be "The Miracle Birth" of the title, but, what I'm wondering is, does Vered really believe that her mother has "no faith that tomorrow can be better" (71), or is that just an angry retort in a mother-daughter spat of Biblical proportions?
In all these stories, belief in someone or something--could be "yer darling sweetheart baby" or "baseball for the Palestinians"--surely transforms the believer. All these stories repay a belief in the transformative power of stories.
Initially, the first short story of the collection ("Skin for Skin") reads like a letter to the (now defunct) "Ask Beth" column in The Boston Globe. Girl arranges to be alone with boy, who, thereupon, wants to do more than make out. She does not want to do more than make out, but she does not want to be a "cocktease," either. What's a girl to do? Especially--and here ends any resemblance to "Ask Beth"--when the girl is Jewish and the boy is not. This matter of faith is neither light-weight nor easily surmounted. Although the boy quotes Friedrich "God is dead" Nietzsche, he lifts the crucifix "over his head with great difficulty, as if he were bearing the True Cross on his narrow shoulders...." (Papernick 10) Although the girl defines herself as "not Jewish" but rather "a secular humanist [who believes] in self-determination," she is nevertheless shocked to see the boy's uncircumcised penis against his thigh, "like the emergence of a sea monster from a bathtub." (11) Indeed, she is so shocked that she feels compelled--well, never mind the particulars--the point is, what she believes compels her toward what she ends up doing.
If the first story is like "Ask Beth" with a twist, then the second story ("There Is No Other") is like NCIS with a twist: the suicide bomber is a black Jewish 7th grader, Junius Barker, who promises not to blow up the classroom if someone can tell him why the Jews are the Chosen People. The "someone" who could tell him is the teacher, Aaron Needle, but the boy has decidedly turned on him--"And you, Needle, zip it." (24) Rising tension between Junius and Needle is dissolved in a prayer--
"You shall know today, and take to heart, that Adonai is the only God, in the heavens above and on earth below. There is no other." (27)
The word "other" is what resonates. The concept of "the other" meaning "the alien"--a concept crystallized by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex--is at the heart of this story. Despite the prayer uniting Junius and Needle, Junius feels very much like "the other," a feeling he pours forth in this rant:
"I want to know which half of me is chosen, the top half or the bottom, the inside or the outside, or the other way around? Why is it so hard to figure out? If God separated Jews from the other nations and gave them a different destiny, which half of me is chosen, which half of me bows down before the King of Kings, and which half can go fuck himself?" (29)
After throwing his arms around Junius in an embrace, which Junius resists, calling Needle a "homo" (yet another "other"), Needle whispers, "I believe in God. There is no other." (32) Needle's belief leads him--and Junius--to death, an ecstatic moment for Needle.
Another story in this collection ("The Miracle Birth") brought to mind a piece of Nurse Apple's Cookie Speech in the Stephen Sondheim musical Anyone Can Whistle--"My name is Apple, A-Double P-L-E, a fruit well mentioned in the Bible, that best seller of many miracles. I cite the Ten Commandments and the Burning Bush, to name only two." And I cite the Immaculate Conception (of Jesus), which is preceded, in the Old Testament, by the miraculous birth of Isaac to the exceedingly post-menopausal Sarah. Unquestionably, childless Shira Bavli in "The Miracle Birth" feels the weight of Biblical history: "Every time Shira came up to Jerusalem, she realized that [its] gravitational pull...was a hundred times that of the rest of the world, rendering even the simplest encounter as heavy as a stone cut from Solomon's Quarries." (50) Or, is Shira believing something about Jerusalem that endows it with this "gravitational pull"? In any case, Shira does give birth, at 40, to a girl, who, at 18, gives birth to a boy who, Vered believes, is the Messiah. Either of these births could be "The Miracle Birth" of the title, but, what I'm wondering is, does Vered really believe that her mother has "no faith that tomorrow can be better" (71), or is that just an angry retort in a mother-daughter spat of Biblical proportions?
In all these stories, belief in someone or something--could be "yer darling sweetheart baby" or "baseball for the Palestinians"--surely transforms the believer. All these stories repay a belief in the transformative power of stories.
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