"In crystallography, crystal structure is a description of the ordered arrangement of atoms, ions or molecules in a crystalline material." (Wikipedia)
Poland, 1969. It is the tenth year of Władysław Gomułka's term as Communist Party chief. Poland, like other countries on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, has attracted international attention for its films, most of them reexamining the tragic/heroic past (Kanal, Ashes and Diamonds). In the Sixties, a new trend in Polish cinema of films set in the present (Knife in the Water, Night Train) emerged, and by 1969, when Krzsysztof Zanussi made his feature film debut, there had been demonstrations by university students in Warsaw.
Structure of Crystal (Struktura kryształu), written and directed by Zanussi, student of physics and philosophy, is quiet, contemplative, and sagaciously cool. On a cold afternoon, Janek and his wife Anna are waiting by the road, which can't be distinguished from the rest of the snow-covered landscape. It's getting late and Anna wonders if there was some miscommunication. A large sledge loaded with hay passes them. Two young children, students of Anna's (she is their teacher) pass by on their way home from school. Past 3 o'clock, they hear an engine and see Marek's car, a VW beetle, rapidly approaching. Marek sees them, stops and reverses, jumps out of the car and embraces Janek.
They are friends and former colleagues. Marek is a highly-accredited university professor, author of studies on crystal structure, recently returned from visits to Harvard University. Janek gave up his career to live with Anna in a state-owned dacha, spends his days providing the local airport with meterological observations while Anna teaches grade school. Though they are old friends and Janek is happy to see Marek after so many years, he knows why he has come.
Janek and Anna's lives, as Marek slowly learns, are contented, even fulfilled. And it puzzles him how a man he once knew, who was at the head of his scientific field, could be satisfied with such a quiet life. In one scene, we see them sitting together, Janek, Marek and Anna, and Marek says, "Like in a Chekhov play. We're only missing a samovar. Silence and nothing happens." But Anna insists, "Actually, there is a lot happening in Chekhov's plays." Janek asks Marek if he knows how Chekhov died, and explains:
"He suffered from TB. In his day it was a fatal disease. Doctors sent him away to Crimea. He had many friends there. He was visited by actors of the Moscow Art Theatre. When he felt he was going to die, he invited guests. They stayed up till late and Chekhov entertained them with funny anecdotes. He was on his sofa. He didn't feel well. He asked for a glass of champagne, took a sip and spoke in a very low voice: 'Ich sterbe' ... And he turned towards the wall ..."
But Anna stops him before he can finish his slightly garbled version of the story.(1)
Marek learns that Janek was in a mountain climbing accident and had been bedridden for six months. He gave up mountain climbing, but not because of the accident, he tells Marek, but because he no longer has the time to devote to it.
The two most important exchanges between the two men revolve around Janek's abandoning his research and going into, essentially, internal exile.
MAREK: Listen, I see that one can take a holiday for a few months, a year. To catch your breath. But you've been here for...
JANEK: Almost five years. Has it ever occurred to you that "catching your breath" may be the right way to live?
MAREK: Come on, man, one has to do something. These are the best years of our lives. You'll have time to meditate when you retire.
JANEK: Are you sure?
MAREK: Of what?
JANEK: That you'll live long enough to retire?
MAREK: Stop fooling around.
JANEK: I meant it.
And later:
MAREK: Excuse me. I don't want to be indiscreet but I don't get it, what a man like you is doing here. What do you fill your days with?
A short montage follows showing us how Janek fills his days - with fetching water from the well, baking bread, making home-brewed beer, tending his honey bees.
MAREK: How old are you?
JANEK: I'll be 36 in March. No, 37. Right, I was born in 1931, so it's 37.
MAREK: Dear God, man. You're almost forty. Three-quarters of your life have already passed and you busy yourself with bullshit. How can you waste your potential this way?
JANEK: Waste what?
MAREK: Gifts, talent, yourself.
JANEK: How do you know I waste my life?
MAREK: It is so banal but life, you have to make some decisions. One must ... find some goal in life. And I am looking at you and, by God, I don't get it. Where are you going?
JANEK: Maybe I'm just trying to answer this question. I guess it'll take me the remaining quarter of my life or more. We're quite long-lived in our family.
Zanussi dramatizes the choices presented to the intellectual in times of conflict: to remain engaged, no matter how disappointing the results, or to disengage from society and withdraw, if not exactly to an ivory tower, to a cabin in the woods and take no part in the events of his age.
It is easy to see the attractions of Marek's life: financial reward, prestige, accolades from his peers. But Janek's life is alluring enough for Marek to notice: his intimacy with Anna, a life among the elements and all the time in the world on his hands in which to discover where he is going. Marek finds himself attracted to Anna enough to flirt with her. Anna, in her turn, is attracted to Marek's celebrity. But she is a country girl, after all, who knows her own limitations. After an excursion to a nearby town (in which we sight "the artist Lomnicki" getting in a car with two attractive girls - it's actually the actor Daniel Olbrychski), and taking in a Swedish nudie flick at the local cinema, Marek asks her on the drive home how she liked the movie. (Zanussi even includes a brief clip replete with Swedish nudity.) "I hate it when they show such filth," Anna replies. "After all, I'm a teacher."
Marek interrupts Janek and Anna's quiet life sufficiently for them to reaffirm their commitment to it. Janek figures out that Marek was sent on a mission to convince him to return to Warsaw and his life at the university. Marek's mission a complete failure, he answers the call to return to Warsaw. In the last shots, Marek, behind the wheel of his VW, drops the sun visor to shade his eyes from the sun's glare, just as Janek is gazing through his telescope directly into the sun.
Zanussi's sympathies seem to me somewhat split 49 years after the film's release. Evidently he sided with the more engaged, if cynical, Marek, who returns from years in the US with images of promise and prosperity. Janek has turned his back on his responsibilities as an intellectual in the challenging times facing Poland under Moscow's thumb. By now, however, I think Janek is the more sympathetic of the two.
For a first film, Structure of Crystal is remarkably accomplished and assured. Zanussi's handling of his actors (Barbara Wrzesińska, Jan Mysłowicz, and Andrzej Żarnecki) is subtle. Wojciech Kilar, who subsequently worked closely with Zanussi for decades to come, supplies the film with a spare and often lovely musical accompaniment. And Stefan Matyjaszkiewicz creates black and white images (2) so striking that he makes the winter setting as alluring as Janek's placid life. Still, as Marek insists to Janek, "Without a risk, without a fight, you'll never learn the truth." Marek's choice is the right one.
(1) Chekhov actually died in Badenweiler. His wife Olga is the originator of the story of his deathbed scene. Although he spoke almost no German, "Ich sterbe" ("I am dying") were his last words.
(2) Looking through a glossy American magazine, Janek asks Marek if he has seen color tv. "I prefer black and white," he answers.
I was lying in bed when my girlfriend, who was watching the Filipino network news in the sala, came to me and told me that an American, "Antony Buran," was dead. I rolled the name through the rolodex in my head and came up with nothing. She has a hard time pronouncing my last name, too, even after being with me for a decade. So when I got up late in the night and turned on CNN and saw that she was referring to Anthony Bourdain, I, like everyone else in the world hearing the news, was stunned.
Where are you going now? I was only one of Anthony Bourdain's ever-expanding audience. And like a lot of them, I felt like I knew him. He proved to us that he was so much more than a celebrity chef. I found him to be the perfect antidote to Gordon Ramsey, who seems to be on a one-man crusade to destroy the reputations of cooks and of cooking. For Bourdain, food was his foot in the door, his passport into the lives of people everywhere in the world he traveled to. He knew haute cuisine, the food served in high-end Michelin star restaurants. But he clearly preferred real food eaten by real people - street food in exotic places.
On a blog post from 2014, I called him The Detrimental Tourist, because his acerbic wit and cynical, snide asides weren't likely to attract tourists to the strange places he sometimes visited. It seemed to me that he was driven by something very dark, that attracted him to the wrong side of the tracks, the dangerous parts of the world. When he visited places like Paris, he expressed contempt for their biggest tourist attractions where people stand in line for hours to catch a glimpse of "the real Paris" - whatever that is.
I didn't share his literary tastes - William S. Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, and Hunter S. Thompson. Like them, many of his stories began with a hangover. His favorite novel was Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and his trip to the Congo was his retracing of the steps of Mistah Kurtz down the River Congo. I saw every episode of No Reservations and The Layover - his two series prior to Parts Unknown. For some mysterious reason, probably stemming from his foul language and his fondness for the underbelly of the world, Parts Unknown isn't aired in CNN International. The episodes I have managed to see were broadcast on other cable channels.
He left the world just as mysterious as he found it. And, in his last act, contributed to the greater mystery of the human heart. Paul Bowles, another of his favorite writers, wrote, "Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home." The writer he most reminded me of is Paul Theroux, who once wrote, "Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going." Though he had been practically everywhere in the world, Anthony Bourdain never seemed to know where he was going. Farewell, fellow traveler.
One of the few advantages that comes from growing old is having some experience of life from which to draw precedents. Remembering the past, whether it is a moment or a whole period of one's life, is the best way one can understand the present, especially when one thinks that the present offers what we feel are unprecedented problems and difficulties to us. Having a clear picture of what happened in the past can dispel most of our concerns with the present.
Throughout the eight years of Barack Obama's presidency, there were some rather shrill voices in America (one of which belonged to our current president) that insisted that Obama's presidency was, for various reasons, illegitimate. For eight years some of these voices never went away. As a supporter of Obama (by which I mean an opponent of the alternatives to Obama: anti-liberal, authoritarian, hysterical populism represented by talk radio and its audience), I felt personally affronted by some of anti-Obama rhetoric, though not nearly as personally as black people, who saw attacks on Obama's legitimacy as racially motivated. I felt that an attack on a sitting president, or a sitting congressperson or governor or mayor, as not just an attack on an individual, but an attack on all of the people whose votes got them into office.
The United States is a representational democracy. Since all the decisions that shape our society and its laws simply cannot be decided by plebiscite, by a preponderance of votes by every eligible voting citizen, a government elected by a majority vote makes all such decisions for us. When Ted Kennedy died in 2009, I expressed the reasonable view that the only people who had a right to pass judgement on his fifty years in office were his constituents in the state of Massachusetts, whom he served as senator from 1960, when Ted's brother John vacated the seat to run for president, until he left office - as it were, feet first.
If one of us votes in an election and his or her candidate is defeated, he or she can have plenty with which to take issue in the ensuing term of the candidate who won. But what he or she is taking exception to is not the government. It seems to me that the problem they have is with democracy, since the candidate they didn't vote for didn't steal the office (even when they suggest that the election was rigged), but was put there by a preponderance of votes in a democratic election.
I have taken extreme exception with Donald Trump, with practically everything he stands for and every pronouncement that comes out of his mouth. He is a thoroughly deplorable man and a disaster as a president. But I make these denunciations mindful of all the American voters who put Trump in the White House, some of whom are related to me. My problem really isn't with Trump. I have a problem, thanks to the popular election of this disgraceful clown (despite Hillary winning the popular vote by almost three million), with democracy.
E. M. Forster published a book of essays in 1951 called Two Cheers for Democracy, a title that pretty much sums up my feelings about democracy. Forster wrote in a prefatory note, "These essays, articles, broadcasts, etc., were nearly all of them composed after the publication of Abinger Harvest, that is to say after 1936. A title for the collection has been difficult to find. One of my younger friends suggested Two Cheers for Democracy as a joke, and I have decided to adopt it seriously ... Until livelier counsels prevailed "The Last of Abinger" was to have been the book's general title. But I do not really want to record the last of anything and am glad to change. Human life is still active, still carrying about with it unexplored riches and unused methods of release. The darkness that troubles us and tries to degrade us may thin out. We may still contrive to raise three cheers for democracy, although at present she only deserves two."
Democracy is an imperfect system, but it's the best one we have come up with so far. I am a socialist, committed to a radical reconfiguration of society, which in its current condition resembles more than anything an incredibly elaborate swindle - a free-for-all in which the worst man wins. I am a socialist, but a democratic socialist. I don't want to overthrow the government, even if it were possible. As we have learned - in the hardest way -, all revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure. I am committed to the radical restructuring of society through democratic means. And - yes - Bernie Sanders is a kind of hero of mine. Socialism means the people shall rule. It is all about human brotherhood. If this surprises you, you should know that I became a socialist when I found out that everything I had been told all my life about socialism was a lie.
No matter. The best way - the only way - to oppose Trump is with democracy, which is clearly what he fears most (other than the rule of law). If it is disclosed that he used unfair means to win the 2016 election - which seems to me obvious by now - he will still have to be turned out of office with democracy, with the free and open exercise of our democratic right to defeat him if he is crazy enough to run for re-election.
I think we need to stop being government-haters when it is really democracy that gets us into these messes. Stop hating the government and change it.
Get out and vote.
