Here's That Rainy Day

Maybe I should have saved those leftover dreams?
Funny, but here’s that rainy day.
Here’s that rainy day they told me about
And I laughed at the thought that it might turn out this way.
Where is that worn out wish that I threw aside
After it brought my love so near?
Funny, how love becomes a cold rainy day.
Funny, that rainy day is here.


Of all the days of the year that it had to choose from, a typhoon passed directly over my island on Christmas Eve – at 9 PM, no less. For two hours I listened to the approach and departure of one express train after another. At 11 PM it tapered off, with an occasional train swinging back to remind me of the storm’s power. I managed to drift off to a nervous night’s sleep after midnight, blowing out my candle and only using the battery-powered fibre-optic Christmas House that I bought in a fit of nostalgia 11 years ago as a much-needed nightlight.

A snowstorm would’ve been preferable. A snowstorm would’ve been welcome on Christmas Eve. Indeed, if it had been a powerful blizzard that dumped three feet of snow, with drifts burying cars, that paralyzed transport, cancelling flights and closing the airport, it would’ve been welcome on Christmas Eve. If the mayor told everyone to stay home, to not venture out, who needs to go anywhere on Christmas Day? And even if there were a power failure, as always happened whenever it snowed or sleeted in the South when I was a boy, it would call forth the image of a family huddled for warmth, perhaps before a blazing fireplace, sharing the priceless gift of being together.

Here, when the power fails, my electric fan stops working and, even at night, I begin to sweat. The only difference, now that I am acclimated, is that I no longer mind sweating as much as I once did. And early last Wednesday on Christmas morning, everyone ventured out to survey the devastation. Whole groves of banana trees had been felled; trees that had hung on to their branches were denuded of leaves. You could almost see a horizon. Houses you didn’t know were there appeared, missing their jungle cover. The sun was unobstructed and incredibly bright. The shade of the palm trees was no longer there. But if I showed you a picture, before and after the typhoon, you wouldn’t be able to see much difference. Natural disasters, that come in many guises in the Philippines, expose the fragile infrastructure to devastating damage. It seems at such times that the country is only held together with scotch tape and string.

I feel like I’ve blundered into the last stanza of Larkin’s “Here”:

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

Since my arrival in these climes of tropical weather, I have seen my personal record of successive days living without electricity broken three times. (My original record was three or four days, established, if memory serves me right, in 1971, when an ice storm knocked out the power in Columbia, South Carolina.) Here on my island in 2008, a typhoon called Frank knocked out all the power for nine days. Then, in 2011, an earthquake left me without power for 14 days. And then, as a sort of culmination, typhoon Haiyan, called Yolanda here, took it away for thirty-seven days. It would be wise, I suppose, to learn to live without electricity, since its absence brings about so much – what else can I call it but suffering? But that would require the unlearning of a lifetime of habits with which I am unable part.

If I wanted to describe to you what it’s like to have power restored, for a bare lightbulb on the ceiling to suddenly come to life and shine through the darkness (oh, what darkness!), I might allude to the experience of a prisoner of war, tunneling his way toward freedom, and after interminable days of labor and subterfuge, always on the point of being caught and finding all of his labors go to waste, he climbs out of the hole to find that he is outside the wire, that he made it. Now the run to freedom begins in earnest.

So here it is - the last day of the year. If I bothered about auspices, this moment is most auspicious. Alas, the circumstances couldn’t be less auspicious. One of the most common superstitions among these people who live in the dark (and who seem to like it there) is when the palm of your left hand itches, it means money is coming. But you mustn’t scratch it, or the money won’t come. Just like living here – having an itch you can’t scratch. As much of a skeptic as I strive to be, I find myself annoyed by such folk ways. Yet whenever my left palm itches, I sometimes stop myself from scratching it. It reminds me of Primo Levi, who once found himself in a situation - in Auschwitz – in which he came close to renouncing atheism:

This happened in the October of 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death. Naked and compressed among my naked companions with my index card in hand, I was waiting to file past the "commission" that with one glance would decide whether I should immediately go into the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instant I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed: you do not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a non-believer is capable. I rejected the temptation: I knew that otherwise were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it. (The Drowned and the Saved)

I wouldn’t want my skepticism to be tested on the point of death. I don’t think I could be so resolute.

As for my resolutions, I hope to be wiser one year from today. If I can be richer, let my riches come in many forms. Out goes the bad old year. In comes the new.

Anna Karina

Anna Karina, who died Saturday, was the most recognizable face of the French New Wave, thanks to the roles given her by Jean-Luc Godard. (He wanted her to do a nude scene in Breathless, but she refused. "But I just saw you in a bathtub in a commercial," he argued. She wasn't nude, she countered, but covered in soap suds.) The lilt of those films, their youthful - if overweening - insouciance, their anarchic air of flaunting convention, is inimitable and by now a fixture of film history. Godard may not have been a master of his craft, but he was determined to demonstrate to everyone his contempt for official cinema. Karina's mad dash through the Louvre in Band of Outsiders with Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur is as iconic - if not nearly as moving or meaningful, because the film wasn't nearly as good - as Jeanne Moreau's run, wearing men's clothes, across a footbridge in Truffaut's Jules and Jim (it helped that both films were shot by Raoul Coutard, unarguably an artist).

Like Hanna Schygulla, who held a similar position in relation to Fassbinder, Karina broke free of Godard's control and enjoyed a career of her own - more lucratively, if far less critically acclaimed. (It wasn't a contest, but the argument over Godard's relative importance was laid to rest long ago. Truffaut won.) Funny how auteurists even now try to downplay her performance in Visconti's beautiful adaptation of Camus's The Stranger, simply because their dogma won't allow them to recognize the film's excellence. (It's so unlike every other Visconti film - which is probably why I love it.) Her performance, as Meursault's unfortunate girlfriend, was touching.

But she is being extolled, yesterday and today, for Pierrot le fou, Masculin Feminin and Alphaville, films as redolent of their time as Sonny Rollins's first recordings. It seems to me intensely sad that lately the only time people want to argue about the meaning of the word "cinema" is when a venerable filmmaker dares to question the validity of trashy superhero movies. (What made it far worse was when he explained what he meant to the halfwits who worship at the Marvel - or Disney's Star Wars - altar.) As long as people who take the subject seriously want to explore what real cinema is, they will find out soon enough how integral a part Anna Karina played in cinema's greatest decade, which was actually only about seven years, 1959-1966. I am sorry that the flesh and blood woman has passed, but her image, her lovely face and form, are as immortal as Garbo's, Monica Vitti's, and Setsuko Hara's. Vivre Karina. (Vivre cinema.)

Another Christmas

Watching the Robert Zemeckis movie The Polar Express for maybe the fourth time this past week, I was reminded of what James Agee wrote more than seventy years ago about the original Miracle on 34th Street:

Santa Claus (well played by Edmund Gwenn) comes to Herald Square and wraps up the millennium in one neat package. Clever, and pleased with itself, and liked by practically everybody; but since I have always despised the maxim "Honesty is the best policy," I enjoy even less a statement of the profits accruing through faith, loving kindness, etc. I expect next a "witty, tender little fantasy" presenting the Son of God (Sonny Tufts) as God's Customers' Man." (1)

Miracle is such a perennial holiday favorite that it has been remade at least twice, and yet it is little more than a cute love letter to our sanctimoniously secular, peculiarly American brand of consumerism, in which the meaning of Christmas has been hijacked by a cartoon figure made up of an unholy hodgepodge Saint Nicholas, his doppelgänger Santa Claus, a popular illustration by Thomas Nast, Currier & Ives, and the story "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" by Clement Clarke Moore. The distinction, I think, is crucial: while believers in Jesus are expected to take the story of his birth as gospel truth all their lives, belief in Santa is only expected from children. When they grow up, their faith is extinguished by their embrace of a factual, rational universe in which it is absurd to accept the existence of a jolly old man (even if he is a saint) who distributes gifts to all subscribing children around the world - in one night!

The Polar Express is easily the most expensive ($165m) and elaborate of a long line of holiday movies that are committed to convincing children (and the child who lies dormant within all of us grownups) that Santa Claus exists. There are some - non-Christian foreigners, mostly - who are so confused by our juxtaposition of Jesus and Santa that they have come to the conclusion that the former is the latter as a young man. Who knows but that this confusion will become prevalent in succeeding generations that never adopt a religion, let alone reject one? Not only is the deployment of The Polar Express' motion capture technique taken to somewhat scary - even creepy - extremes, but its incorporation of every cliché about Santa and his elves on the North Pole (which is a piece of frozen ocean that is constantly on the move) is a sign of its determination to transcend critical judgement.

A recent Guardian article addressed the curious tolerance of film viewers for otherwise execrable films that have anything to do with Christmas.(1) The new movie, Last Christmas, written by Emma Thompson, has proved to be as awful as Love Actually - that Christmas-viewing favorite among the British. Factors that would otherwise sink a newly-released film - bad writing, predictable plots, poor execution (acting, directing, editing, etc.) - somehow has no effect on a holiday-themed film. One proof of the strange immunity of holiday films to criticism is the fact that no one watches them at any other time of the year. They are an integral part of the process with which we try to induce what is mysteriously known as the "Christmas Spirit." We play old songs like "White Christmas" and "Jingle Bells" and festoon our homes inside and out with garish decorations and lights - all of it designed to put us in the mood for the season. If the Christmas Spirit means anything to me, it's about memories of Christmases past. In a powerful way, continuing to keep Christmas well is a commemoration but also a kind of séance in which the ones I have lost are represented in spirit. I continue to take part in the old rites because they cannot.

I already declared, years ago, my favorite Christmas movie, made by Frank Capra. But it isn't It's a Wonderful Life, which Capra made after the war and is a film that I would love to remake. My favorite Christmas movie is Meet John Doe, but it isn't about Christmas. The film ends on Christmas Eve in the snow with distant bells ringing, but it wasn't supposed to. A desperate man has come to city hall to fulfill a promise - to jump from its roof at midnight if people didn't start loving one another.

In a speech earlier in the film, the title character (whose real name is John Willoughby, played with aching conviction by Gary Cooper), tries to convince anyone who is listening (on the radio) that it's time to live up to the Christmas ideal:

I know a lot of you are saying to yourselves, "He's askin' for a miracle to happen. He's expectin' people to change all of a sudden. Well, you're wrong. It's no miracle. It's no miracle because I see it happen once every year. And and so do you -- at Christmas time. There's somethin' swell about the spirit of Christmas, to see what it does to people, all kinds of people.

Now, why can't that spirit, that same, warm Christmas spirit last the whole year around? Gosh, if it ever did, if each and every John Doe would make that spirit last 365 days out of the year, we'd develop such a strength, we'd create such a tidal wave of good will that no human force could stand against it. Yes sir, my friends, the meek can only inherit the earth when the John Doe's start lovin' their neighbors. You better start right now. Don't wait till the game is called on account of darkness. Wake up, John Doe. You're the hope of the world.

John Doe's mistake was probably trying to stretch brotherly love too far (and too thinly). Of course, the Christmas Spirit simply can't last. It was never meant to, even when Christmas was a pagan celebration to tell the gods of winter that, no matter how cold and dark and dead the world around us may seem (with the winter solstice a week from today), we are here with our lights and life and abundance to defy it.

In these terms and in the old spirit of Christmas, I wish all of my readers (all five of you) a lustrous and joyous Christmas.


(1) The Nation, August 30, 1947.
(2) "Turkey anyone? Why standards slip at Christmas when it comes to film," by Steve Rose, 2 Dec 2019.

Something To Remember Him By

The Oriental Theater on Randolph St.

And when I wouldn't take her downtown to the Oriental Theatre she didn't deny herself the company of other boys.


It was last Saturday. I was sitting in the sala (living room) of my small, dark apartment late that morning on my Philippine island. But it wasn't 85 degrees, with my front door open so I had enough light to read by. I had been transported to Chicago in February by Louie, the narrator of Saul Bellow's story, "Something to Remember Me By."

One day in early February, 1933, Louie, 17 and in high school, lives through a day so exceptional, so incredible that it reveals to him the workings of a hidden force in his life, the very principles of existence. This unforgettable day, which Louie relates in old age to his grandchild, "began like any other winter school day in Chicago - grimly ordinary." Just how ordinarily grim, Bellow makes extraordinarily clear:

Chicago in winter, armored in gray ice, the sky low, the going heavy ... The temperatures a few degrees above zero, botanical frost shapes on the windowpane, the snow swept up in heaps, the ice gritty and the streets, block after block, bound together by the iron of the sky ... The street ice was dark gray. Snow was piled against the trees. Their trunks had a mineral black look. Waiting out the winter in their alligator armor they gathered coal soot ... The days short, the streetlights weak, the soiled snowbanks toward evening became a source of light. 

But, like a threnody, there is Louie's dying mother, so near to death that each day holds the threat of him returning home in the evening to a father who will embrace him or strike him with his fists in his "Biblical rage." Louie has an after-school job delivering flowers. On this particular day his delivery takes him to the city's North Side, an hour's ride by streetcar. He's delivering lilies to a family in mourning. He is shown through to the kitchen, past a room empty but for the coffin. He looks at the corpse, a girl older than his girlfriend, now "all buoyancy gone, a weight that counted totally on support, not so much lying as sunk in this gray rectangle."

His delivery done, by now almost dark, Louie visits the office of Philip, his dentist brother-in-law, with whom he can travel home. Philip isn't there. So Louie looks for him next door in a doctor's office. On entering an examining room, he encounters a young woman, lying naked on the table, copper wires attached to her wrists. Without showing the slightest embarrassment, letting him see everything, the woman dresses slowly. In his reminiscence written a lifetime later, Louie writes: 

As the woman raised both her arms so that I could undo the buckles, her breasts swayed, and when I bent over her the odor of her upper body made me think of the frilled brown papers in a box after the chocolates had been eaten--a sweet aftersmell and acrid cardboard mixed. . . The cells of my body were like bees, drunker and drunker on sexual honey (I expect that this will change the figure of Grandfather Louie, the old man remembered as this or that but never as a hive of erotic bees).

Complaining of muscle spasms in her back, the woman asks Louie if he can help her down the stairs to the street. Forgetting Philip, the hour, and his distance from home, Louie proceeds with her to the street, where she then asks him to take her home. "At the moment, a glamorous, sexual girl had me in tow. I couldn't guess where I was being led, nor how far, nor what she would surprise me with, nor the consequences."

But it's a setup, a prank that leaves Louie with no clothes and not even the seven cents for the streetcar fare. He finds clothes, but they're nothing but a woman's dress, a quilted bed jacket and a knitted tam. He puts them on and goes back to the street. Still looking for Philip, Louie locates a druggist who might know where he is. Mistaking Louie for a girl, the druggist suggests a neighborhood speakeasy where Philip sometimes went. 

Finding the place is easy enough. Inside, "A sort of bar was set up, a few hanging fixtures, some tables from an ice cream parlor, wire-backed chairs." The barman, a Greek, listens to Louie's misadventure. He sympathizes and offers to give him fifty cents if he will carry a drunk customer home. Louie gets him there and even cooks his two little girls a supper of fried pork chops. He feels his defilement is complete as the pork fat spatters onto his arms. "All that my upbringing held in horror geysered up, my throat filling with it, my guts griping." He looks in on the drunk, finds some pants and, putting them on, simply tucks the dress down them. He grabs a handful of pennies off the drunk's nightstand and leaves. 

Louie makes it home and is relieved when his father hits him on the head, instead of embracing him, a sure sign that his mother hasn't died. On the streetcar home he had thought of all the things his people did when someone died. "After a death, mirrors were immediately covered. I can't say what this pious superstition means. Will the soul of your dead be reflected in a looking glass, or is this custom a check to the vanity of the living?"

The meaning of Louie's long day in February is something he seeks in his books, something metaphysical. Yet he doesn't notice the signs he encounters along the way: the lilies, the dead girl in her coffin, the naked woman and her frustrated promise of gratified desire, only to be stripped naked himself and forced to scramble across the city wearing a dress.

When Louie escorts the woman to her "home," she asks him "What are you going to be, have you picked your profession?" But Louie is thinking

I had no use for professions. Utterly none. There were accountants and engineers in the soup lines. In the world slump, professions were useless. You were free, therefore, to make something extraordinary of yourself. I might have said, if I hadn't been excited to the point of sickness, that I didn't ride around the city on the cars to make a buck or to be useful to the family, but to take a reading of this boring, depressed, ugly, endless, rotting city. I couldn't have thought it then, but I now understand that my purpose was to interpret this place. Its power was tremendous. But so was mine, potentially. I refused absolutely to believe for a moment that people here were doing what they thought they were doing. Beneath the apparent life of these streets was their real life, beneath each face the real face, beneath each voice and its words the true tone and the real message. 

The woman notices the loose pages of a book in Louie's pocket. "You would have thought that the book or book-fragment in my pocket was a talisman from a fairy tale to open castle gates or carry me to mountaintops." He spends all his money on books. When his clothes are stolen, it's the book-fragment that he regrets losing the most.

Bellow's stories are almost all about loss, and about the salvages his protagonists achieve at the end - sometimes at the cost - of their lives. And they are always reaching for some design, a reason for, some solution to, the astonishing adventures that Bellow relates. Refusing to believe that the calamities that afflict them can have no ultimate point, they sometimes apply the most far-fetched reasoning, from a deservedly obscure book they once read, to make sense of it all. 

Giving proportion to what is out of all proportion. Like Chicago itself: "The city was laid out on a colossal grid, eight blocks to the mile, every fourth street a car line." The cars are streetcars. An hour's ride from home to the North Side. Louie would read on the long passage because, he claims, "Reading shut out the sights. In fact there were no sights - more of the same and then more of the same. Shop fronts, garages, warehouses, narrow brick bungalows." Louie trying to interpose the knowledge he finds in books on the immovable spectacle, the undeniable spectacle of city streets in all their ugliness and multitudinous meaning is the story's final irony. Bellow uses metaphors that add to the solidity of the world, making the world more substantial than it already is. Devoting the power of language to conveying the richness of sensual experience is Bellow's ultimate truth.