Up... and away.

Up is a bittersweet animated film from Dreamworks that charters the adventures of elderly Karl, a widower, who revolts against continual efforts to evict him from his home. Using a colourful myriad of balloons, his gusto for adventure is revivied as his house takes off into the sky, in search of Paradise Falls, the long intended location coveted by his late wife's fantasies. Unbeknowst to Karl at take off, a young Wilderness Scout, Russell, has hidden under the foundations of the house (in search of the snipe that would secure his 'assisting the elderly' badge), and so is also along for the ride. The film is principally concerned with his dynamic of elder-child, or rather the disenchanted elder whose cynicism is gradually dissolved by the infatiguable child whose morality and optimism pushes them both into a quest to reunite a brightly coloured bird with her chicks.

It is funny and charming, but also extremely poignant. Karl is lost without his beloved wife, reflecting the sentiments - no doubt - of so many people in his situation. His attachment to his home concerns his reluctance to let go of that physical anchor with his wife's memory, to the place in which they met, married, and which now houses him in the world of the living with the things that tenderise her aftermath. Initially, his desire to complete his mission to resettle his abode above a grand waterfall in South America overrides all other imperatives. Indeed, his actions occur and are talked about beneath the benevolent image of his late wife who had long harboured exciting plans of adventure and discovery. There is a sense in which Karl is haunted by a feeling of failure, that these dreams were never fully realised, and the noncorporeal accompaniment of his wife - fixed between memory artefacts and imagining memory - gives added purpose to his flight.  However, in the end, when the choice between his house and his comrades is at its most paramount, he lets go of the former and so enters a new phase of reconnecting with the living, and letting go of the dead. Knowing Dreamworks and their ilk, it seems unlikely that any other outcome would be plausible. As chance would have it, just before this split, he finds a new section to his late wife's adventures book. Her sections dedicated to adventures, which he had believed empty (and therefore representative of her thwarted ambition) full of pictures of their life together, ending with the message:

 

***

Walking around the city I have lived in for just over ten years now, I sought a connection between myself and its physical properties. In those moments, I couldn't really feel one, and found myself oddly disjointed. It seemed as though the city was disinterested in my place among it. My city is a popular tourist destination, and their daily throng permeates its streets with a depth and overwhelmingness that may be diluted in bigger places. For a moment, I found myself considering my city as a priceless crown, guarded in a museum. People come and look and ooh and aah, but the residents are likewise separated by panes of glass. The latter are custodians, but never really owners, because the crown is there to visited, to be admired from afar. They must constantly share it with the masses who continually drift in and out, and relate to it as tourists relate to sites during their trips. Perhaps, however, these sentiments arise from the feeling that this is not really my home. I wasn't born here, I didn't grow up here. The surrounding county holds the bodies of several of my maternal line, a discovery made only a couple of years ago. But in those moments I thought... that they had had their time, and that sometimes it takes more than knowing where feet once tred to see those faces in the dust and grass.

A little while later, I met a friend and broke my reverie. Another day, I'll no doubt see the city in a different way.

Fear walks abroad

While my partner was busy mixing tracks for his next album, I found (at last) a full length Youtube version of The Ghoul (1975). I first saw this film in my early twenties, one of those late night distractions for insomniacs, but had been unable to locate a copy in DVD format to add to the ever growing gusset of my vintage horror collection. Directed by Freddie Francis and released by Tyburn, The Ghoul is an unsettling slice of English horror that is perhaps not as popular as it should be. It has a distinctly Hammer aesthetic (unsurprisingly, as many Hammer associates were involved in the picture), with its old country house interior and period (1920s) setting, and a plot not overly dissimilar to Hammer classics like The Reptile. The connection between The Ghoul and The Reptile goes somewhat further than these visual and narrative links, and represents an interesting - albeit troubling - trend concerning the portrayal of non-European cultures (namely, in these cases, societies associated with Hinduism ) as sources of the macabre. In these examples such cultures deliver evil and destruction into the otherwise civilised English landscape of the upper classes (both films revolve around manor houses).  

The Ghoul and The Reptile incorporate several interesting dynamics, and reflect themes concerning the loss of children and the infiltration of occult cults affiliation as a source of infection. Both films involve upper class fathers who are doctors, and the ghoul and reptile of the titles refer to the infected states and hideous metamorphosis of their children, who have been lured into cult membership while both families were abroad. Whilst recognising the loss of their children, neither father can bring himself to be their destroyer, and so remain benign - although not really active - in maintaining the new lives of their offspring. The Reptile's Dr Franklyn is contemptuous toward his daughter, who retains her former mortal form for long periods. The Ghoul's Dr Lawrence is more melancholic, clinging to Christian worship in his private chapel while victims are prepared and left for their murder and subsequent consumption by his son. While both are not exactly complicit, then, they ultimately allow the actions to take place, and for the cover ups concerning the nature of their childrens' victims' deaths.

Dr Franklyn (Noel Willman)

Dr Lawrence (Peter Cushing)

Both fathers are ultimately, destroyed with their children. Dr Franklyn attempts to kill his daughter, now in reptile form, but is bitten and dies shortly before a fire - which has broken out in the cellar where she rests - consumes the house, killing her. Dr Lawrence - who had promised his late wife that he would preserve their child - eventually kills his son, and shortly afterward, himself.

But, as both fathers are not acitve participants in their children's murderous activities, their safeguard and nurture comes from another source: in The Reptile, it is the Malay servant, and in The Ghoul it is the Indian former nursemaid Ayah (which is not her real name) who now acts as housekeeper. These individuals are Asian natives, devoid of names, in the English home, and both encourage the destructive actions of their white charges. The Reptile's servant is more dogmatic and akin to a master rather than father figure, but The Ghoul's servant seems more readily surrogate mother, who prays for the appearance of the girl who will feed the ghoul, and tends to his every need.

Ayah's religious affiliation (with a Shiva based death cult) is the more obvious of the two, and the incorporation of certain aesthetics, like statues, demonstrate the Hindu influence. The presence of non-European artefacts also situates the fathers as reluctant anthropologists, and these visuals suggest the quite literal presence of the Other entwined in the tapestry of the native home.

Rachel Fell McDermott's (2003) chapter in her co-edited volume Enountering Kali (with Jeffrey Kripal) has raised the issue of the misappropriation of Hindu beliefs in Western films, which may provide a warped view of god and goddess worship. Her consideration is Kali, and she aptly demonstrates the problems with the demonic-esque Kali represented in films like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and the barbaric nature of her followers. To rely on these interpretations alone is to subscribe to a Westernised whitewash that dilutes the essence of certain religious beliefs to their sinister undertones. Yes, there are dark tones in the pallet of Kali's divinity, but she is so much more than just the dark destroyer.

In The Ghoul and The Reptile, we should also be critical of the representation of Hindu based religions: while the cults in these films are fictious, it is obvious to the viewer that they are influenced by Hinduism. The exoticness of other cultures and religious traditions is obviously a great source of fodder for film, and certainly seems more thought-invested than the contemporary repertoires of torture pornography and serial killer thriller (I have to admit a bias here, as I hate the latter kinds of films, and am prone to wax lyrical about how they have slashed the quality of the horror genre). Also, it recognises the heights of the Western world's developing exoticised love affair with the 'Far East', who found in its cultural distance an unsanctioned playground for exploring new, lived esotericisms untarnished by post Enlightenment scientific rationalism.

These films are also melancholic psychodramas about the relationship between fathers and their children, children who have been lost to them by choosing to identify with an Otherness that ultimately supercedes their familial ties and Western identities.  Is there perhaps also an air of revenge against the colonial incorporated by these two servant characters (who, ultimately, have replaced the fathers as their children's guardians)? Considering that both servants are Indian natives, I wonder if it is possible to see the angry ghosts of colonial victims here, working their way through the micro-intimate fabric of English society, reducing the offspring of their oppressors to flesh eating ghouls and malicious reptiles. Of the two servants, I would argue that Ayah is the more complex: fierce mother? angry jailer? devoted nurse? Does she love the ghoulish charge she protects and feeds? This adds another layer to the dynamic, particularly pertinent considering that Dr Lawrence's wife had killed herself upon recognising the horrendous nature of the actions she undertook, and was connected to, when she and her son became part of the cult. With his father unable to truely fulfil his paternal role, perhaps Ayah steps out as a new mother, bonded by the son's new cult identity.

The loss encapsulated in these films is a loss that lingers in a spectral domain, and the characters exist in this world, and yet not entirely. Dr Lawrence is ultimately a recluse, with only Ayah and a cruel, moronic assitant for company. Dr Franklyn is abrupt, brooding and seemingly uninterested in long term social relationships. They are without their wives, who have perished long before the events of the film. Both are haunted by their secrets, which keep them apart from their English kith and kin, and both lament the people their secrets have corroded them into being. Both children are gone, lost to their fathers... but both fathers are unable, until the end, to acknowledge that loss and sever their paternal ties. And so, before these narratrives come to an end, they are inbetwixt, tainted by the past that will ultimately deny their future.

The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.

As a child, The Last Unicorn was my favourite film. Its sumptuous depiction of magical beasts and a suitably noble quest delighted my growing imagination, adding characters and colours to the mythic landscape of my private fantasy world. As a teenager I discovered (and promptly sped through) the book (by chance, my father had an old paberback copy in his library), falling in love with the story again, albeit for different reasons. It seems right that I nurtured a love of the film first, and the book later, as the book is much more poignant about adult experience. As I got older, leaping into my twenties, I found that I revisited this story many times, recognising new resonances with the characters, and their hopes, and the inevitable tragedy of their fates.

It isn't a ghost story, but at its heart are themes which plant the seeds for ghostly legacies: that things must end although stories may continue. It recognises also the role of characters in the story; that they have their parts to play within a wider narrative, and are not the beginning or the end of that script. There is a sense, particularly as you near the end of Peter Beagle's tale, that the consequences were always inevitable. Despite the crossroad of choice in the Red Bull's lair in which Amalthea, now human, may decide to remain in the cast of her mortal form and marry the prince she has fallen in love with, we know, deep down, that this can't happen. Even though she begs Schmendrick the magician to let her remain as she is, it is ultimately her mortal lover, Prince Lir, who knows that "...things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned... The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story." While Schmendrick remarks that "...there are no happy endings, because nothing ends..." he is refering to the grander scheme of things. Mortals, after all, know above all else that some things must end.

The Last Unicorn is a story about the agony of endings, about the agony of not being able to hold onto that which is beautiful and wonderful and which you wished would last eternally. It is also a story about the agony of finding that you will not have the fate you wanted. This theme is further illustrated by the morose antagonist King Haggard, whose touch corrodes all that is boyant and good. A jealous gaoler, he keeps all the unicorns but Amalthea captive in the sea, so he can watch them at his leisure and feel something other than emptiness.

"I suppose I was young when I first saw them... Now I must be old - at least I have picked many more things up than I had then, and put them all down again. But I always knew that nothing was worth the investment of my heart, because nothing lasts, and I was right, and so I was always old. Yet each time I see my unicorns, it is like that morning in the woods, and I am truly young in spite of myself, and anything can happen in a world that holds such beauty." Haggard knows but loathes the limit of the mortal world. He is quintessentially a tragic figure, for he recognises and knows joy, but is ruined by the knowledege that it is fleeting. Such understanding is all consuming, and his rejection of the world around him sees it manifest as cold and grey and withering. His hunger for a recapturing of that moment of youthful joy is a greedy one, motivated by his misery, for his need to deny the frailty and age that chains him to his mortal life and its subsequent boundaries. In the end, he could not hold it forever. But then, he knew she was the last... and, as the magician Mabruk decreed, the last would bring his doom. There must always be a last. And, as our protagonists notion, unicorns may go unnoticed for a long time, but not forever.

The story also communicates a painful melody about the loss of childhood. A nostalgia for youth is demonstrated by another character, Molly, who joins Schmendrick and Amalthea in their quest to find the other unicorns after their escape from outlaws with whom she was assocaited. As the unicorn steps from behind a copse of trees, Molly's eyes fill with tears: "How dare you! How dare you come to me now... when I am this." For Molly, the unicorn is the visitor of young women, full of hope and their own innocent magic, and she cannot bare for that visitation to find her in the creases of late middle age, when the hope of maidenhood has gone and she is a woman of the world who has accepted her lot.

I found Molly's sadness particularly moving when I was in my late twenties. I remembered that longing for a sight of unicorns, for a recognition from the magical when I believed in all its possibilities. I'm 31 now, and sometimes wonder how I might feel if, after all those years, a unicorn stepped onto my path. A similar sadness perhaps, because my adult eyes would never see a unicorn as my childhood eyes would have done, and I fear I am beyond the rapture of pure, simple magical experience when one has no real concept of what the future will bring them.

At the end of the story, Amalthea is once again a unicorn. While she lamented that she would not be able to love her prince when recast into her immortal form, she watches him from the hill and remembers. It is the beginning of a new life, despite the return to her former immortal body. There is a sense in the story that immortality is something pure and untainted, it is always as the mortal young are so briefly, by the very nature that it is beyond that thing that ruptures mortals so: death. Before returning to her forest, she visit Schmendrick and Molly one last time. While Molly sleeps, Schmendrick regrets that he has done her a harm that he cannot undo. She understands this with a new uncertainty about what will befall her. "...I do not know if I will live contentedly... I have been mortal, and some part of me is mortal yet. I am full of tears and hunger and the fear of death, though I cannot weep, and I want nothing, and I cannot die." And yet... "My people are in the world again. No sorrow will live in me as long as that joy - save one, and I thank you for that too." The quest ended as it was supposed to, although unicorns will be coveted by magic, and may as well have remained in the sea for most mortals in the world. Similar fantasies written by contemporary Western authors have leant toward this order of things. After all, such magical things are banished by science.

The prince will mourn his lost love until he dies, and perhaps some ghostly essence of that will continue when he does not. The unicorn will mourn her lost love always. She has grown older, and cannot entirely reverse that. Once one has bloomed into adulthood you can never be a child again. Both Amalthea and the prince are powerless to be anything other than what they are now, and while there was great joy and love and beauty in their time together, they must go their separate ways. Regret, as something ghostly, weaves between Beagle's lines, just as his story recognises the sorrow of our mortal condition. We will only be young once, and we will not live forever. Somethings, however, deliver us into the wrappings of regret's unhappy bandages that stick to us because it is the nature of what they are, but which we would not free ourselves from even if we could. The unicorn had to seek others of her kind, in the beginning, because she was lonely. Once we have a regret of this kind, it is with us always... and yet, there is a comfort in the memory of what it stems from that makes it worthwhile. This seems relevant for an understanding of the nature of an aspect of our consciousness, and perhaps that is what this story primarily deals with, and what it argues we must carry if we wish to really live. Loneliness is always worse than regret.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Song

 

When I am dead, my dearest,

Sing no sad songs for me:

Plant thou no roses at my head,

Nor shady cypress tree:

Be the green grass above me

With showers and dewdrops wet;

And if thou wilt, remember,

And if thou wilt, forget.

 

I shall not see the shadows,

I shall not feel the rain;

I shall not hear the nightingale

Sing on, as if in pain;

And dreaming through the twilight

That doth not rise nor set,

Haply I may remember,

And haply may forget.

 

- Christina Rossetti

A Pair of Wings

The church sat in the countryside, bold and brown as it sheared shut the faded corpse road she had followed from the nearby village. The sun was shining, but it felt cold for early Spring. She pulled her coat closer around her shoulders, shuddering thrice as she drew near.

It was the kind of church she had seen many times: a signpost to the sacred for a rural community that had dwindled since the industrial revolution called its inhabitants to places of smoke, dirt and metal. She couldn't imagine how that lure had suggested a sweet promise, but then she had grown up in a city, and she knew well how, once ensnared, it used habit and ease with which to keep its captors. To the left of the church, separated by a narrow path between an untidy garden and the edge of the graveyard, was an abandoned cottage that might once have been considered pretty. Time had dulled its whitewashed walls, which now peeked subserviently between the thick coils of ivy that seemed long since post health. Windows were greasy, with slivers of white amid the gloom like clumsy snail trails. An aura of neglect surrounded the place, and she felt a flicker of sadness for this forgotten home that had been abandoned to emptiness and the greed of second rate foliage.

There were clusters of gravestones that had been eroded by an equal dismissal. The memorials - these last stamps of name and lifespan - were all but lost, the dead beneath them slumbering as their identities became swallowed by time. She hoped a parish book of some sort remained, some token of these lives now long over. The fear of forgetfulness had been with her for many years, prompted perhaps by the absences pasted across her own family tree. Her parents, both only children, had shared a dislike of their own parentage, and hadn't minded that they knew little of whence they'd come. As she had grown, disjointed in their shadow, she had craved some kind of familial foothold, something memorial with which to position her surname as a connection to those whose genes were her ontological legacy. But there was nothing, just the barely recalled names of her grandparents, and the suggestion that most of her maternal ancestors had been killed in the second world war.

Only the flora seemed alive and present in this patch of the contemporary world, only they seemed to belong to the here and now as more than a memory. And then, on a patch of grass a metre or so from a church wall, there, something that made her pause, that caught her attention as though a passing breeze. A pair of wings. A pair of neatly severed pigeon wings, parted, torso-less, fresh.

 

The wings were of a carcass not long dead, and free from infestation. As she leaned closer she could smell hyacinth, surprisingly strong though no such flower grew nearby. There was a clot of wine coloured blood near the tops of the wings, neat, accurate, as though painted there by a professional whose pallet was almost dry. And then came a sudden burst of music: organ, decadent, baroque. It drew her to the church, and to notice that the oak door with its rusty iron hinges was slightly ajar: a reluctant invitation. She accepted, and as she did so, the music stopped.

 

The church smelt as other churches did: like old books in antiquarian libraries. It was not large, and not overly ornamental save for the odd memorial plaque in marble or grey stone pinned to the walls. At the front of the church was an altar, on top of which lay a red blanket and simple bronze cross. She stood before it, tempted to reach out and touch it, to make contact, but conscious of an inprinted aversion from trepassing with fingers when it came to sacred things.

 

Standing near the altar, her eyes were drawn to a near hidden group of statures positioned near the back of the church. They were of angels, their faces raised toward the sky as though in agony or ecstasy. In the middle stood a figure that appeared human at first glance, kneeling with its head in its hands. She moved closer, curious, and saw that the figure was not intended to be human: on its back were two rough stubs positioned high on either side of the back: in places where one would expect the wings of angels to begin. This time she could not restrain her desire for touch, and reached out tentatively to stroke the edges of those pecular abrasions. They were not part of the original design, she could tell, for their spines bore the sandpaper-texture grooves that suggest a break. She could smell hyacinth again, hyacinth arising from the places she had touched.

 

The mobile phone beeping in her pocket broke her reverie, and she skimmed the message that called her back. Turning on her heels she alighted smoothly, suddenly eager for the secular comfort of her boyfriend's flat. The wings on the grass made her pause, and then the cooing of pigeons drew her eyes to the neglected cottage, upon which stood a legion of such birds. They eyed her seriously, she thought, and without understanding why she bowed her head in solemn greeting.

 

As she neared the village where her boyfriend lived, she drew out the map to survey her journey's landscape. There was no mention of a church, or a cottage, and she was sure she had not walked the full four miles it suggested the corpse road ran. Disconcerted, she by chance stopped a man she recognised from the local pub as her feet touched the dirt track that led into the village.

"What's the name of the church, about two miles north of here?"

"Excuse me?"

"A church, you can see it when you go over the hill." 

"Oh, sorry, but its such a bare ruin I forget that it was once a church. There was some dreadful violence there, a long time ago, and the priest was killed in the rucus so it was abandoned. I'm surprised you could tell it was a church actually, although I'm not so into my history as most I suppose. There was a village around it, well, more a hamlet really. But that all came down after the priest's death, and those that didn't go to the city went north." 

 

She dreamt that night, of a flock of pigeons migrating, chased away by some terrible thing that had destroyed and violated the sanctity of their home. Their flight was haphazard, as if these creatures knew how to fly but were unaccustomed to the limits of their bodies. She could smell fox, and dog, and a whole host of predators that raised hungry faces, growling to be feared as their wet snouts caught the scent of flesh. In the midst of it all she felt a sudden stab of grief, a falling, a wrenching of flesh and bone and sinew. Falling feathers, and with them, falling grace. A wingless white shadow drifted beneath the anxious kit. It whispered, softly: "these birds, these fragile mortal things, what strange avatars for the divine they are." 

 

Unknown artist

 

 

--

Inspired by the chance discovery of a pair of pigeon wings the lay in the graveyard of a church in Newcastle.



You, and I, and Rosabelle believe

Houdini, the scourge of the Spiritualists, disappointed by his own delvings into spirit communication, is immersed in a Spiritualist context in Kate Bush's Houdini (taken from her album The Dreaming). In this track Bush explores romantic secrets between the escapaologist and his lover, a hidden passing of the key that would ensure his escape from death. The context of this shared expression of love and hope is played out in parallel to a seance where the immaterial desires of love and hope seek reaffirming via the release of spirit from their non corporeal nothingness into physical phenomena and messages of love.

Edmond Jabes, who has entered my poetic thoughtscape recently via a reference in a Max Richter piece, has similarly suggested the need for the dead to be contextualised in language as a means to escape nothingness. He wrote that:

"It is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey to the desert. You do not go to the desert to find identity, but to lose it, to lose your personality, to be anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silence. You become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak."

 

Justine Picardie, in her moving account of the aftermath of her sisters' death (recorded in the 2002 If The Spirit Moves You) noted the agony of silence, of forgetting what her sister sounded like. Such silence seems to erode memory, as though it wishes to deny that link to somewhere beyond the here, the now, the physical. I can empathise with similar pangs when unable to recall the voice of a friend of mine, who died three years ago. Starting with catchphrases, I push at the walls of my memory and call to her, pressing against silence with balled up fists.

When the silence speaks, the dead roll out from the woodwork, surrounding the seance and its bereft participants, filling the aether with hope, with love, with a denial of the terrible threat of silence.