"Silence": Film Review

Back in the early '80s, I bought Shusaku Endo's novel Sílence. Finally issued in paperback, and with me enrolled at a Jesuit university, I rushed to savor it. A harrowing novel (see my linked review), this angered at least on Amazon the likes of sensitive Catholics unable to accept that a priest under pressure after witnessing the torture and death of others who died for one's presence might succumb.

The end of that same decade, Martin Scorsese read it. It was recommended by New York's Episcopal bishop in the wake of the controversy over his adaptation of another controversial work, The Last Temptation of Christ. Marty vowed to make it a movie, if he could figure out how to capture its hold.

He did, and as the scholar of American Catholicism Paul Elie's The Passion of Martin Scorsese in The New York Times Magazine observes: the book and the film join well. For the subject "locates, in the missionary past, so many of the religious matters that vex us in the postsecular present — the claims to universal truths in diverse societies, the conflict between a profession of faith and the expression of it, and the seeming silence of God while believers are drawn into violence on his behalf." Elie locates in the filmmaker's oeuvre a pursuit of the "poisoned arrow of religious conflict" and poison indeed surfaces in the film. I saw it at a premiere in Westwood, a block from the bookstore where I found the novel decades ago. The excitement of seeing this in the Regency, a cavernous 1931 Art Deco palace filled with maybe a thousand people, was palpable, for the director would be there for a panel afterwards. But I was unsure if many there knew what a story they'd face.

Face, as the image of Christ, in the film as Scorsese explained taken from El Greco --for the original work's use of Piero della Francesca did not transfer to the big screen when tested-- confides a human trust in its viewer, that He would accompany its beholder through whatever moral perils lay ahead. The divinity of Jesus is of course in Christian orthodoxy inseparable from his humanity, but for the director, the eyes had it. They convey the distance and the direction proper to a bold Jesuit follower.

The film itself, 2:40, unfolded slowly. It was difficult for me to gain full immersion as a woman two seats down connected as she proclaimed to the producer checked her smartphone regularly, and a man behind me kept chuckling at dramatic moments perhaps taken by the nervous or shallow as comedy. There is a bit of levity, in the tragic Judas-figure of Kichijiro keeps popping up at tense moments begging for the protagonist Fr. Sebastian Rodrigues' confession, Yet that moved me, not to laughter, but to their poignant bond, which gains significance as the narrative turns to the priest's struggles.

That Japanese convert-traitor asks where is the place for a weak man in this world. A common plaint. Scorsese's vision raises up Rodrigues as an alter Christus in Passion Play form, entering twice cities on a donkey while being pelted with stones and abuse. I suppose this fits, on the other hand, any priest. Yet the acting skills and the power of the necessarily didactic script by Jay Cocks and Scorsese project Endo's investigation well. As a child he was baptized, and he questioned here and in The Samurai (set among Franciscans of the Mexican conquest) the ability of a foreign people to truly give in to an invader, or a promise of liberation for the poor within a peaceful and carefree paradise, when the basic tenets of this faith were garbled, as the "Son of God" comes rendered from their native Sun.

As Rodrigues replies, that land is poisoned. Nothing can grow there, the Japanese powers reason, as all rots in this island swamp. The tension between apostasy and martyrdom, fidelity and surrender tightens the energy. Early on, all is painterly fog in the cold and chilly islands where the renegade Christians have gone underground as relentless crackdowns have reduced the 300,000-strong community in the wake of St. Francis Xavier to a remnant, hunted down and all burnt or drowned.

Later, in Nagasaki, clarity returns, amidst the regimented architecture, ranks, and sumptuary distinctions. Rodrigues' predecessor, Ferrara, speaks eloquently for moral compromise, to spare pain. As their translator adds, no man should take away another's spirit. I watched this with engagement. I presume it may not have swayed all (my wife advised cutting twenty minutes and squirmed at the debates I found in jesuitical tutelage as fascinating and stimulating). But as Scorsese mentioned in the after-film panel (joined by production designer Dante Ferretti, actors Liam Neeson, Adam Driver, Andrew Garfield, Issei Ogata, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, and producer Irwin Winkler--and a fawning host who called the director "Maestro"), he hoped the film would bring "peace of mind."

I second his ambition. Elie's skillful article locates the film within the inculturation aims of imperialism and religious missions. (But he overlooks as do many that the novel was translated by a Belfast Jesuit, Fr. William Johnston, who taught at Sophia University run by the Society in Tokyo, and who himself embraced Zen.) Do we insist the newcomers to a practice go over to the practices of the faith? Or as the Jesuits did in China, do we accommodate the faith to indigenous folkways and traditions? St. Boniface, when he preached to the Frisians in the 8th century, was told he should not destroy the temples and groves, but make them into centers of worship and pilgrimage for a new generation. Clever, as this supplants rather than terminates the sacred connection. But the fervent and fundamentalists may refuse compromise, and thus this challenging film and novel remain relevant.

As Pope Francis, the first Jesuit installed in the Vatican as such, told Scorsese on the film's first showing in Rome, may the film bear much fruit. That's a message all of us can applaud, this season.

"Ice Age Columbus"

It never occurred to me that during the last Ice Age, European hunters might have been blown off course on the massive sub-polar pack ice covering the North Atlantic, towards North America. This thesis, contrasting with the conventional Bering Strait land bridge model of indigenous settlement, has been advanced by Bruce Bradley and Dennis Stanford. Predictably, there's been massive denial from the "Clovis" contingent defending the standard model of Siberian migration. Still, it's intriguing.

Discovery Channel in 2004 made a documentary you can see here under the clever title Ice Age Columbus. This dramatizes, with re-enactments (did the actors speak Basque?), computer analyses, and interviews, the "Solutrean hypothesis." Before Clovis spear points were found in today's New Mexico, ca. 500 years after the "Beringian" bridge was crossed, there may have been earlier survivors on the other coast who'd emigrated from today's South of France, with distinctive shaped spear tools.

One point, flaked to this standard, has been dredged along with a mastodon, from the waters off Virginia. This artifact is called the Cinmar biface, and if the dating with the wooly beast's remains is correct, dates to 22,000 years ago. The problem is that the shorelines back then, as in the Great Banks off Newfoundland which were probably the "Plymouth Rock" or "Vinland" for the cavemen and women made chilly, floating refugees, have been submerged by the waters after the glacial melting.

The Wikipedia entry linked to the hypothesis tends to argue against the hypothesis. But one link to a 2012 article in the Independent mentions a finding that appears key, despite detractors. The film for all its merits has to compress a lot in a little time. The seals drawn in a cave Bradley shows seem to suggest the natives knew how to hunt them, but the jump from this is too rapid; likewise why the Cinmar biface is not examined more in detail as to its origins invites speculation. So, the Indie piece may cheer on the few proponents of the alternative theory. Other tools from 26,000-19,000 y.a. have been tested, all from the American East Coast. Summing up Bradley and Stanford, it reports that "chemical analysis carried out last year on a European-style stone knife found in Virginia back in 1971 revealed that it was made of French-originating flint." How do the opponents respond to this?

The DNA data appear to be used by both sides. Haplotype X has been asserted as the genetic link between the two continents. It may be that more research has to be done, in a very contested debate.

The docu-drama has a memorable scene imagining millennia later the meeting of the eastward-bound natives with the descendants of the Iberians. That changes this prequel for Thanksgiving, doesn't it?

"A Clann Díbeartha"

To follow-up my previous entry on the Irish in Montana, here's a link to the Indiegogo crowdfunding project. This is to help generate income for three documentary films proposed by the local historians. This is a worthy endeavor to document the contributions to Irish culture from its Western heartland, part of Big Sky dynamism.

Information about the three films is here. There's one on Thomas Francis Meagher, the Fenian felon turned famed escapee, then Civil War veteran, and finally two-time Territorial Governor. There's another on Marcus Daly, who rose from poverty in Co. Cavan as the Anaconda mining magnate and one of America's richest men. Finally, there's a tribute to two founders of the Gaelic League in Butte, Seán Ó Súilleabháin and Séamus Ó Muircheartaigh, who inspired today's transmitters there of a renewal for an teanga beo. The Friends of the Irish West sustains this energy.

I encourage you to support this enterprise. I saw in Missoula at last month's ACIS-West conference the RTÉ documentary by Breandán Feiritéar, Scéal ar Butte, a bilingual presentation of three brothers in the copper mines, and their fates. The same director plans to make these films in Gaeilge + Béarla.

The blog entry title today is "her exiled children." This phrase resonates for the diaspora, as these words are taken from the 1916 Proclamation of Irish independence. They remind us that the call for freedom spanned the seas, and that many, as this exhibit displays, responded to that cause from here.

Is it immoral to serve?

We commonly heard it said "thank you for your service" in post-9/11 America. So, I ask my veteran or current on-duty students if they'd recommend their choice to others contemplating enlisting. They've returned to get degrees on the G.I. Bill; there is a V.A. hospital nearby campus that attracts many. At least a few after their combat come back disabled mentally, others physically. Many others are happy if a bit weary after their tours of duty, including a spirited woman tallying 37 years in the Army at present. Most say they'd encourage others. A "party girl" from Miami turned her life around by choosing to join the Coast Guard. A stalwart Texas student came back with a prosthetic leg and a year of therapy learning to walk on it, but also a determination to stay motivated; he landed a great job and convinced his cousin, also a veteran, to take classes from me a few years later; as different as the quiet, affable one, a young father and quite modest, and his boisterous, tattooed and orange-work suited and greasy pipe fitter booted relative were, they both succeeded, articulately and admirably.

As an aside, after I wrote this original post, in a threaded discussion this week with many high-achieving students in a class made up mostly of veterans, one wrote when we chatted online about the impact of globalization, competition among lower-waged workers with immigrants, the role our effort plays vs. the privilege or discrimination many claim for themselves, and the hardship of getting more than entry-level jobs (despite our government's and economy's much-touted "recovery"):

It annoys me to no end when people look for hand outs because they are X or they did Y. It reminds me of when my battalion was coming back from deployment and our Sergeant Major spoke with us before getting on the planes to bring us back. He told us with no question, but rather 100% certainty "No one cares." The speech is much longer and many other choice words are used but the main message is that no one cares. Not that people don't support the military, or that they won't be appreciative of what we did, but they can not begin to know what we went through. No one cares because they can only sympathize. No one cares because they didn't choose to do what we did. So to expect anything special is ignorant.

That full on hit me in the most when I applied at King's Fish House here in Huntington Beach. They had walk-in interviews and I started out as a server, and then a bus boy because I wasn't qualified to be a server, which I have no background as a server so I didn't blame them. But then got a call back asking me if I wouldn't mind washing dishes because I wasn't qualified to bus tables. Each time the next person would thank me for my service and tell me how much they appreciated what I did. I was very annoyed with them, and have never stepped in that restaurant since. And even though I could tell they sympathized and supported the military, they did not care and they were not going to make a business decision that would not benefit them.

A few disagree with enlisting in hindsight, but very few to date. I stumbled across this today when searching for a different topic entirely, and so I share it. Glen T. Martin argues with Three Reasons Why it is Immoral to Serve in the Military of Any Country. I'm reminded of Max Aue's words near the start of the immense epic by Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones. In my review of this novel a few years ago, I singled out key passages, as these have often been overlooked by critics of this story  told by a gay man, blackmailed, who then joins the SS. He narrates his unsettling version of events.

"If the State one must serve is made up of ordinary folks, some will find themselves on the wrong side of history, then as now, not by a chosen career path or personal preference, but by the pressures of bureaucracy and the exigencies of the moment that pressure people into acting. Not all victims are good and not all executioners are evil, Aue reasons.

The State, both sides agree as do we, must exist, must call its male citizens to take lives in its name and its female ones to serve its demands. Free will vanishes if a soldier is assigned to a concentration camp or mobile killing battalion: "chance alone makes him a killer rather than a hero, or a dead man." (592) We give up the right not to kill and our own right to life, if male, he warns, to do our wartime duty to our masters.
"The real danger for mankind is me, is you. And if you're not convinced of this, don't bother to read any further. You'll understand nothing and you'll get angry, with little profit for you or for me." (21)

The counter-arguments are legion. Google "pacifism" into an image search for angry memes. Despite them, a Quaker image I liked via my review of Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke, more controversy.
P.S. Thanks to Carrie McIntyre for noting "The Lives of Others" and "Barbara" as congenial with Aue, and to Matt Cavanaugh for urging me to "The Baader-Meinhof Complex," and Four Minutes.

Elijah's Chair

 On April First, after Alex Gibney's HBO documentary on my hometown's most famous "tax-exempt religion" founded by a pulp novelist aired, noted atheist Neil DeGrasse Tyson dismissed scare claims. “But why aren’t they a religion?” he asked. “If you attend a Seder, there’s an empty chair sitting right there and the door is unlocked because Elijah might walk in. OK. These are educated people who do this. Now, some will say it’s ritual, some will say it could literally happen… It looks like the older those thoughts have been around, the likelier it is to be declared a religion. If you’ve been around 1,000 years you’re a religion, and if you’ve been around 100 years, you’re a cult.” I have some hesitation with Tyson's glib argument, as critiqued since by Steve Neumann. However, as I listened last summer to an audiobook, Janet Reitman's similarly thorough expose that confirms much of what Lawrence Wright's study has uncovered, I wondered about Mormons, and Jesus, Mohammed, and Moses in the same way. Or this documentary on one of my hometown's more recent, odd, spiritual set of seekers, The Source Family. If a cult survives a decade it's on way  to being a sect, and after a century, a religion. As the founders fade and memories get mythologized, in the past, invention replaces oral history with either more of the same or, as in Buddhism, belated compilation and codifications. (Yes, we keep two traditions defying logic: kosher and Elijah's Chair.)

The trouble with the Exodus, like those tablets Joseph Smith claimed to have translated before they vanished, or the historicity of Jesus, the veracity of Mohammed, or what the Buddha really said, all fall into the abyss, lacking first-hand testimony. As I wrote last year, the Exodus may not have happened, at least as we celebrate it with 600,000 fleeing Pharoah's hardened heart and actions. There might have been a small slave revolt, and few hanger-ons, the borderers called "ivrit" could have well hung out with the fugitive rabble.

Two nights ago, we held our seder. My wife narrated her version, complete with a prank she and my older son engineered well on me. But, tired of the triumphal "they tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat" storyline, we decided to host our older son, his college friends, and two older, secular Jews with a different take. We've evolved over a quarter-century of this, and so we shared this activity, I post it as it may inspire others out there, who approach with not a fixed identity but an evolving imagination how we tell this story commanded to repeat each year for thousands of them, relevantly:

"The Seder is the annual Jewish celebration commemorating the Exodus from Egypt, which freed the Jewish people from slavery. The story is that God subjected the Egyptian people to plagues which grew more brutal, culminating in the death of the first born son. The tears of thousand mothers finally softened the Pharaoh’s heart. 

We look forward each year to taking a breath, dining together and reveling in the freedom we enjoy.  Jews are commanded to tell the tale, not once, but twice. We have done so dutifully for a quarter of a century. We clean the house and get rid of bread and noodles and cookies in order to simulate the Jews hurried Exodus from Egypt. We do this though because we've always done it. We are proud that at this time Jews all over the world are reflecting on their freedom but the story we're commanded to tell might as well be Cinderella or Hansel and Gretel. The fairy tale trivializes our wonder at our own blessings and brushes the struggle of those less fortunate than we are under the rug. We long for something more real and meaningful and we come to you." (So my wife wrote, and proposed for us to fill out in Comic Sans below. I did so as an example, trying to keep my guest list limited, hint-hint.)

My Seder

My name is:

I would have my Seder at: under the redwoods where my friends Bob + Chris live

The living or not living people I would invite are: 7 Living: Bob, Chris, my wife and sons and girlfriends as applicable; 7 Not-living: Hypatia of Alexandria, "La Malinche," Emma Goldman, Hans + Sophie Scholl, Michael Dillon, Thomas Merton. 

We would eat: a vegetarian meal but a delicious one, cooked by my wife (with help!)

We would celebrate our freedom by: playing music we could all agree on in the background, while discussing ways to advance justice, equality, tolerance, and other genteel values while taking into account our own earnestness and blinkered minds

We would acknowledge those who are not free by: gathering our funds and actions to support the righteous cause of our choice, but neither for profit nor for a politician.

Instead of matzoh for affikomen we would hide: a dog's chew toy as one will be nearby.

Whoever finds the affikomen will get: to donate the amount to a favorite charity

Corporate as avant-garde?

 

While I figured Tom McCarthy's new novel, Satin Island (reviewed in the L.A. Times) might be too much to take on given my busy life and backlog of other books to read for now, I found, thanks to FB friend, the author's Guardian article insightful. It elaborates the anthropological applications that the LAT review and the novel itself document. "The death of writing--if James Joyce were alive today, he'd be working for Google" features this insight among many, near its conclusion:

As for the world of anthropology, so for the world of literature. It is not just that people with degrees in English generally go to work for corporations (which of course they do); the point is that the company, in its most cutting-edge incarnation, has become the arena in which narratives and fictions, metaphors and metonymies and symbol networks at their most dynamic and incisive are being generated, worked through and transformed.

His final words remind me of a fact that has intrigued me. Many of my students are computer majors and even more are gamers. But they will work in cubicles, they tap away on laptops, they stare at a screen enchanted for far longer than a book may entice most of them. I doubt they'll fall for "metaphors and metonymies" in pagebound fashion. Music fades, films recede unless tied into a reliable superhero or graphic novel franchise, and culture revolves around gadgets.

 While “official” fiction has retreated into comforting nostalgia about kings and queens, or supposed tales of the contemporary rendered in an equally nostalgic mode of unexamined realism, it is funky architecture firms, digital media companies and brand consultancies that have assumed the mantle of the cultural avant garde. It is they who, now, seem to be performing writers’ essential task of working through the fragmentations of old orders of experience and representation, and coming up with radical new forms to chart and manage new, emergent ones. If there is an individual alive in 2015 with the genius and vision of James Joyce, they’re probably working for Google, and if there isn’t, it doesn’t matter since the operations of that genius and vision are being developed and performed collectively by operators on the payroll of that company, or of one like it.

I live among this. I study languages, I pore over medieval lore and obscure writers, I dream of the past even if my place within it would likely have been a nearly blind boy, falling off a dark cliff not too long into his appointed span of years, one moonless night, hopelessly myopic and too thin to live. I like how Game of Thrones fascinates many. My older son shared this ingenious attempt at HuffPo to reason its fantasy world's workings into the increasingly complex series about to unveil season five.

Contrary to McCarthy, I'd mention from my vantage point among those who seek corporate jobs that this world of work cannot enchant as many. I read Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End one vacation while my workplace underwent a series of "reductions in force" that are still ongoing. I liked it but I was downcast at the same time. Ed Park's Personal Days tried to tie the keyboard-driven class to a rather post-modern conceit, and the unfinished The Pale King by David Foster Wallace to my surprise drew me into its accountant's vision, working for the IRS at a Midwestern "office park," of the connection between the government's attempts to change the tax code and corporate hegemony.

All these do sound bleak. Few movies take place mostly at work, and few want to escape this setting by finding entertainment about it. Parks + Recreation or the two versions of The Office, of course, can be cited to the contrary, but compared to the vast subject matter audiences prefer, they're rare.

Meanwhile, I integrate the satirical series Silicon Valley into my Technology, Society and Culture course, and my students sit up. They may even put down their phones. For, they see their ambition.

Game of Thrones: Who's next?

I've been very busy with the new term and teaching and mentoring. So, not much downtime to ruminate. So, for the record, a quick entry. My older son told me about this and given I rarely mention the idiot box on this forum, I am happy when it's not so sophomoric or soporific. Having enjoyed Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad, and The Wire, to name finished series of high quality; in the middle of House of Cards, Masters of Sex, Homeland, and Better Call Saul (two of these are very good, the other two....); in hiatus for Black Mirror, Peaky Blinders as well as this series, I offer this:

Game of Thrones: Seven Wildest Theories about the forthcoming season. I have a hard time keeping dark bearded armor clad Brits apart if less so their fetching and disrobed Celtic, exotic, or even Brit counterparts or foes of the distaff gender, and I resist any character brought back from the dead (even Sherlock or Spock), but in the meantime, for those with more time to obsess and fantasize, have at it.

Gruff Rhys' "American Interior": Book + Music Review

At twenty-one, John Evans left his Welsh farm. Arriving in Baltimore in 1792, he set off from the Alleghany Mountains into uncharted heartland. He sought a lost tribe of Welsh Indians.

His distant descendant by a maternal uncle, Welsh musician Gruff Rhys, is best known for his singing and songwriting as a founder of Super Furry Animals, and currently as a solo artist and a member of Neon Neon. Long intrigued by his forebear, Rhys pursues Evans' path on an ambitious 2012 "investigative concert tour" up the great rivers of Mid-America into the Great Plains. It's all documented in a "psychedelic historic travelogue", an album, a film directed by Dylan Goch, and a bilingual app mingling these media from Penguin (the last not made available for this review).

"It sounds like a joke: here were a Scotsman and a Welshman employed by a Spanish king, leading a boat full of French speakers into the precarious tribal waters of the Mississippi." Furthermore, John Evans sought to rid the West of the British, reach the Pacific, capture a unicorn, grab a seashell or two as proof, and then return for a two-thousand peso reward from Spanish Louisiana's governor, at a time when British Canada threatened to sweep south into Mexico, after French Canada succumbed to the British Empire, and as the American expansion under Thomas Jefferson eyed territory which the Spanish feared losing.

Into this geopolitical arena, young Evans entered. For five years, he mapped many blank spots and tried to verify what Rhys rightly calls the "most useful invention" of Prince Madoc. Supposed to have arrived from Wales in 1170 and rumored to have spawned a clan of Welsh-speaking natives who mingled with, or were, the Mandan of the present-day Dakota states, Madoc's reputation endured. In colonial America, a few Welsh emigrants swore they had met tribesmen who answered them in their common language. Rhys labels these as "ear-witness accounts". He explains how these settlers made Madoc "a tangible hero" among those pioneers who confused, for example, Kentucky's "Padoucas" with the supposedly Welsh "Magodwys" who had perpetuated their customs in Native America. This legend had persisted from Elizabethan times. Madoc's landfall (purported at Mobile Bay, Alabama) was appropriated by the English Crown, in a concerted effort to concoct noble lineage and irrefutable prior proof that the British could lay claim to the continent their forays now forced open to conquest.

As a Welsh speaker, Rhys brings the advantage of judging not only the discredited claims for Madoc, but providing comparisons between Welsh and Native American predicaments. Both communities feature indigenous speakers of a threatened language and ancient culture. Both face a relentless pressure which shoves the natives off their homeland, erases names and memories, and which forces their political assimilation. Evans, after all, proved no friend of the British. In 1793, he had been imprisoned by the Spanish in St. Louis, who feared either an American agent or a British spy. As a patriotic Welshman, he favored American claims to the New World's frontier. But he defected on the western side of the Mississippi River to the Spanish, becoming their citizen, so as to finance a 1795 expedition. Spain wished to fend off any British takeover west of their great river border. Spain had taken vast territories from the French, and soon Spain was at war with the British again in Europe.

So, the Spanish authorities sent Evans upriver to drive off the British who infiltrated into the Midwest across a contested Canadian frontier. Evans proves in Rhys' wry telling "responsibly delusional". He charted (but did not understand the sight of) volcanoes and veered from crocodiles. He survived passing through the lands of twelve tribes of hostile reputation, and an assassination attempt by a British operative from Canada. A skilled cartographer, after nine months in the Dakotas, the diligent emigrant Evans in conscientious fashion ultimately failed to match the Mandan evidence with any Magodwys of Madoc's purported lineage. By winter of 1796, Evans turned back from near Canada when his funds ran out and weather blocked his progress westward. His luck appeared to run out, too.

Yet, his mission paid off a few years later. Evans' hosts among the Mandan and guides from the Arikara told him what he needed to draw the first map of the source of the Missouri River. He noted the presence of what we call Yellowstone, and indicated how the Rockies comprised not one but three tiers of mountain ranges. This information enabled William Clark to plot the correct course when he and Meriwether Lewis planned and carried out their own venture less than a decade after Evans.

Rhys tracks Evans on his journey, even if his firsthand manuscripts have been lost and we must rely on those who met with him, corresponded, and copied his discoveries into their own reports. In turn, Rhys largely follows Gwyn A. "Alf" Williams' similarly lively Madoc: The Making of a Myth (1979). Williams, a Marxist historian and Welsh republican, proved a masterful interpreter in print and on film of this controversial topic, debunking persistent claims by a few Celtic romantics convinced of Madoc's existence, but Rhys appears in two places I spot-checked to repeat Williams' minor errors. For example, neither the self-styled Muskogee chief, William Bowles, nor the flamboyant double- or triple-agent Brigadier General James Wilkinson were Irishmen. Both were born in colonial Maryland.

In his own account, Rhys discusses his musical interpretation of Evans' undertaking sporadically. Although Rhys is on the road as not only an adventurer and interviewer but as a working musician, a reader needs a wider sense of how this "investigative concert tour" succeeded. Mentions of appearances, scattered lyrics, and a few comments from fans gain transcription. Rhys sees the sights and relates folksy or impassioned chats. The best of these happen on the prairies with native activists, and in Louisiana among voudou haunts. But many other places blur. Some characters barely register.

Therefore, the film (to be released on DVD April 18, 2015, in the U.S.) and the album fill in what the book may allude to or skim past. Rhys' PowerPoint presentation for American audiences, his rock songs worked out on the road, and his interviews (some with English subtitles, as the documentary aired on SC/4, the Welsh-language BBC channel) enrich the experience as he retraces Evans' steps.

The concept album, appropriately homespun and often acoustic-based, but also cinematic in scope, compliments the print version. "100 Unread Messages" lists Evans' itinerary in jaunty verse. "His mind was baked just like a cake as trouble gathered 'round." It's impressive to merge Evans' accomplishments into a skiffle song, in far less than five minutes, too. The melodic "The Weather (Or Not)", "Liberty," the title track, and the spacier "The Last Conquistador" and "Lost Tribes" mix the moods familiar to Super Furry Animals' fans, spiced by varied sonic textures, sprinkled with electronics and smooth vocals. Rhys always stands out singing in his first language. "Allweddellau Allweddol" (roughly "Keyboard Key") emits childlike native, tribal chants, wrapped into an experimental tune. "The Swamp" layers keyboards and processed beats, akin to his SFA and his three past solo albums. While some of this album floats along into its plush surroundings and threatens to drift away, the storyline manages to transfer Evans' vision into digital files through Rhys' skill in multimedia. These sixteen tracks can stand apart from the book or film, but Rhys' triple telling deserves full exposure.
(The film's trailer typifies the visual presentation; so does the array of platforms on the project site and, from the album itself, the title track video.)

"Iolo" gallops along as if a string-sweetened, synthesizer-warbling soundtrack for Evans' wild flight, when he was chased away by the Lakota. An anthemic "Walk into the Wilderness" precedes the pedal-steel, country-tinged musings on "Year of the Dog" and "Tiger's Tail". These demonstrate Rhys' knack for converting pop tropes into lush arrangements that try to evade predictability or repetition. "That's Why" picks up the pace, helped by guest drummer from The Flaming Lips, Kliph Scurlock. "Sugar Insides" resembles the Lips' congenial eclecticism, in fact. "Cylchdro Amser" (roughly "Circle Time") appropriately spins beyond temporal limits Rhys measures, as Evans' life orbits away.

Nobody knows what Evans looked like. So, Rhys in typically sly fashion commissions a three-foot "John the Avatar" as a felt doll. Rhys carries it with him as he traces Evans' five-year quest into the northwest as it was known, or not known yet, to Europeans. Intriguing vignettes parallel Evans' separation from his society, as Rhys encounters contemporary folks, native and other Americans, who warn of global warming and corporate control. A few still seek solace on the river, or in a simpler existence lived off of the grid, away from the urban gridlock. At one point, so far removed in places a map had yet to fill in, Evans was the most isolated white man on the entire continent, Rhys reckons it.

Throughout, as Rhys shows in genial but earnest manner, Evans faced challenges as he tried to prove what reality showed as false. Madoc was verified as only myth, when the Mandan failed to chatter in Evans' first language of Welsh. The dream ended, Evans returned on a sixty-eight day voyage down the Missouri River, 1800 miles to St. Louis. He tried working as a surveyor, but the fractious territory bristled with Frenchmen abandoned by their nation's loss to Britain. The Spanish tried to keep their hold on a region where the Americans and the British infiltrated to assert their own imperial claims. This left Evans no opportunity for an easy occupation. Rhys tries to track down Evans' ultimate fate.

In New Orleans, where Evans was monitored by a suspicious Spanish governor uneasy to let such a skilled frontiersmen loose in dangerous times to spill his secrets to a rival power, he succumbed to delirium by 1799. Whether due to depression after his long adventure's denouement, malaria, alcohol, or more than one cause, Evans met a humble and early end. No grave remains. Most documents in his own hand probably were thrown overboard by pirates looting the ship on which the Spanish, departing after the Louisiana Purchase, had loaded up treasures to safeguard in their Florida redoubt. While Evans' tale has been scrutinized by previous scholars, Rhys admits he has found a bit to add to Evans' saga, given their common language, and thanks to Rhys' recent archival research in Seville.

Out of his thin family tie, on a search for origins, Rhys connects with Evans poignantly. It's in an eerie, prescient form left for the reader, listener, or viewer to witness. (Here, I prefer the book to the film, as it evokes more sensitively Rhys' epiphany as he seeks Evans' final destination, if he rests near the site of New Orleans' notorious Storyville.) Beforehand, in a meeting conveyed well on both page and screen, Rhys visits Keith Bear, a Mandan flute player. Bear envisions the fabled dragon of the Welsh flag as combining mythic with real, out of a creature half-earth and half-air. Truths conjured from fables create their own power, spurring Evans and Rhys on to cross paths with native tribes, once hoped for as evidence of a utopian, hybrid heritage. The Welsh imagined a few natives in America had forged a congenial community and that they had lived as inheritors of Welsh customs, for hundreds of years. Out of such suppositions, the true and the imaginary create a kind of "common" sense, even if this conceit fails as commonsense. This expresses an elusive awareness beyond mere fact. In American Interior's multimedia endeavor, as innovative as an app, as venerable as an old map inspiring an epic, Gruff Rhys honors his ancestor, Ieuan ab Ifan (renamed John Evans by the English), as natives do. Rhys and Evans share, two centuries apart, a tribal Welsh vision quest.
Project's website
Artist's website
(This appeared on PopMatters 12-18-14 as "A Multimedia Tale of a Welsh Vision Quest")

David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas": Book Review

I'd been meaning to tackle this over the past decade; I wanted to see the adaptation by the Wachowski siblings released in late 2012. In of all places Park City, Utah (home of Sundance), in the off-season, Layne and I missed it and so opted for "Argo" (cheap ticket) in an exurb faux-Western mall. I tried that Christmas to rally my family after we bickered over Zero Dark Thirty and Django Unchained and I held down my paternal foot as I wasn't in the mood for either to celebrate the mythical birthdate of the purported Prince of Peace. We chose neither, settling on On the Road. Rarely do I venture into a theater these days, grousing as I do at people. prices, popcorn and promotion, but when I do, I want to see a spectacle enhanced by the big screen. I'd heard that ambitious adaptation of a sprawling narrative was met with bewilderment or annoyance; I'd reckoned the po-mo structure of the Booker Prize finalist (not for the first time for this 2004 entry) would baffle viewers as it did some readers. I left it unseen and still shelved.

Then, investigating "Buddhist Fiction," I found UU World nominated it for its shortlist. Dozens of copies (credit post-Matrix buzz!) were checked out of all L.A. and Pasadena libraries, but South Pasadena had it. I grabbed it. I took it along on too-brief an out-of-town trip, and I enjoyed it. Not sure if I loved it. The uphill climb for its first half is more rewarding: the challenge invigorates you to keep going. It accelerates into the curve, and through its central section. Out of that turn, it's downhill. The novel's easier to read, moves rapidly, but there's a sense of anti-climactic ennui. That may fit well the nature of David Mitchell's investigation of repetition and reincarnation, all the same.

This entry covers the passages explicating the themes I found most intriguing. It doesn't delve into the "Russian doll"-structure inspired by Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveller (as I suspected long before learning Mitchell in 2010 via The Paris Review credited that novel I loved thirty years ago) for the 1-2-3-4-5-6 then reversed arrangement--as this is now common knowledge. 

"The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing" features a Melville tone: Typee is mentioned later on. South Seas are visited by an American notary from the new city of San Francisco as the Gold Rush erupts. Afflicted by a worm entering his brain carrying a mysterious malady, Adam falls into the care of one Dr. Henry Goose on the voyage on the Prophetess. The style flows easier than much of (the later) Melville: "As Henry & I ate supper, a blizzard of purplish moths seemed to issue from the cracks in the moon, smothering lanterns, faces, food & every surface in a twitching sheet of wings." (39) We later find a typically casual recurrence of an image in the central story on the Big Island of Hawai'i: "Papery moths blowed thru her shimm'rin' eyes'n'mouth too, to'n'fro, yay, to'n'fro." (264)

"Letters from Zehelgem" might have been penned by John Banville or Julian Barnes. It's the type of contemporary novel that's shortlisted for a Booker Prize--as Mitchell a two-time nominee may know well. In the early 1930s, composer Robert Frobisher flees Cambridge, debtors, and justice by presenting himself in Belgium as an amanuensis to his elderly counterpart, and soon rival of sorts, Vyvyan Ayrs. Frobisher's flight from apprehension to Calais sums up his spirit: "Dover an utter fright staffed by Bolsheviks, versified cliffs as Romantic as my arse and a similar hue." (46) 

The tattered book he finds in Ayrs' manse, or half of it, is Ewing's journal, published by his son. In turn, "'Half-Lives': the First Luisa Rey Mystery" continues the saga as the recipient of Frobisher's letters back to England, Rufus Sixsmith, returns at the age of 66. He's a successful nuclear physicist in the late 1970s in California. But he's restless in Buenas Yerbas (a reversal of an early placename for S.F., by the way.) "West, the Pacific eternity. East, our denuded, pernicious, enshrined, thirsty, beserking American continent." (89) His career and his stance on this energy does not please a sinister (naturally) Seabrook corporation. Out of this, one "Hilary V. Hush" generates a pulp thriller, full of chases and conspiracies.

"The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish" takes us to that middle-aged, put-upon middle man, in contemporary England, who runs a feeble "author partnership" press: in its slush pile lands the first Luisa Rey mystery. He deals with the aftermath of a cause celebre where the writer of Knuckle Sandwich meets sudden notoriety, and the attention generates fame and profits for Cavendish. Flush with the proceeds, all seems it will go well, until it doesn't.  Kingsley or Martin Amis might be at home here. Consider this look as Timothy must flee from London: "you sly toupeed quizmaster, you and your tenements of Somalians; viaducts of Kingdom Brunel; malls of casualized labor; strata of soot-blackened bricks and muddy bones of Doctors Dee, Crippen, et al.; hot glass buildings where the blooms of youth harden into aged cacti like my penny-pinching brother." (161) 

On his journey north, Cavendish raises a theme common to Mitchell's characters: "we cross, criscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters." (163) His story stops suddenly (as do others), and we leap into an indeterminate post-apocalyptic future where a Korean superstate dominates a blighted planet. "An Orison of Sonmi-451" in the fashion of Haruki Murakami or Philip K. Dick follows an engineered fabricant's entry into sentience. Escorted out of her climate controlled confines, she confides to her listener the strangeness of a natural reality: "Trees, their incremental gymnastics and noisy silence, yes, and their greenness, still mesmerize me." (202) In such phrasing, the beauty of Mitchell's observations freshen the familiar. 

"Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After" occupies the core around which the other stories are mirrored in two, or tucked into. Zachry's telling recalls the altered language of Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, as well as the dialect and the quest of Huck Finn as one society's fragility is shattered by the arrival of tension, disruption, and unsettling values and ideas. These, filtered via Meronym from an enclave beyond the insular Valleymen, force Zachry to come of age in a brutal clash of cultures and enemies. The Valleymen are visited by Meronym, and Zachry learns why they have ventured so far across the ocean. What has happened after the demise of Nea So Corpros as the Korean hegemony is little understood; Meronym and a few Prescients guard a few factual or mythic gleanings against predators and plague that roil the globe and the miniscule remnants who've survived Earth's collapse.

The Old 'Uns have died off, and ignorance is their legacy to the stragglers who struggle after the meltdown. "Smart mastered sicks, miles, seeds an’ made miracles ord’nary, but it din’t master one thing, nay, a hunger in the hearts o’humans, yay, a hunger for more.” (272) Civilization vs. savagery tears apart the survivors: it's as if delayed gratification eliminated the consumers and capitalists, the warlords and the masses unable to wait and think before rushing to buy, spend, fight, grab, grasp. "Old 'Uns got the Smart o' gods but the savagery o' jackals an' that's what tripped the Fall." (303)

The novel then proceeds to wrap up Zachry's chronicle and propel us back the same way we came in. Although Cavendish sniffs: "As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.'s in postmodernism and chaos theory." (150) Of course, such devices long predate what was my own long slog through this at just this time in grad school and my own collegiate reading in and out of class. Mitchell applies these through such images as the moths cited earlier. It's not that difficult a novel to follow as some grousing readers and critics lamented; anyone who can read Calvino's tale can handle this. The second half, however, moves rapidly and feels often somewhat less engaging as the puzzle-pieces neatly snap together in turn. 

One device that audiences apparently needed a visual guide and a screenplay reboot for in the (unseen as yet by me) film version was the comet-shaped birthmark used by Mitchell to suggest reincarnations or rebirths of protagonists.  On pg. 85, Frobisher introduces his; Luisa finds this
and matches it to her own despite "I just don't believe in this crap" (120) and she tries to talk herself out of it as a coincidence. (122)  Zachry sees on Meronym her "whoahsome wyrd" one just below her shoulder blade in the light of Lady Moon (303); Cavendish reasons such an image "will have to go" if the Luisa Rey "young-hack-versus-corporate-corruption-thriller" will succeed on its potential. "Far too hippie-druggy-New Age"--a sentiment I've found echoed by some resenting the storyline as a novel or a film. (357)

Given as the UU World site and its counterpart study include this on a list of "Buddhist fiction," and granted the Cambridge-trained, now County Cork resident writer married to a Japanese woman and immersed via his fiction in Asian settings, there's no escaping placement of this novel into this niche. Yet, it rests there lightly. 

In "Orison," Sonmi hears from an Abbess (this rank continues among the Valleyman's cult of ancestor worship by icons in barrows on the Big Island) from the ranks of "recidivists" in a cave hidden as a safe house for her and other "tapeworms" who huddle off the corporacratic grid. For "fifteen centuries," nuns have persisted there. A stone figure (resembling of all people Cavendish) named Siddhartha "is a dead man a living ideal." (330) Little is known of the man; his "names" tellingly as well as his doctrine have been forgotten, after the Abbess's elder mentors had been eliminated when "non-consumer religions were criminalized." (The prediction made by the Buddha that after 2500 years his own message would gradually fade comes to mind; the rule of the Corporation-State forming around us may presage "Maitreya" ending the next span of five thousand years as the Buddha's successor. But such speculation lies outside the margins of Mitchell's ambitious narrative.) Sonmi manages to wish for reincarnation in the "colony" and on departure, the Abbess promises to relay her wish to Siddhartha. Later, Zachry will unlock an orison brought by Meronym that reveals Sonmi, whose cult will spread until she has been elevated to a goddess status by the Valleymen.

Progress, these shifts in belief and power, and earthly fate concern others in this novel. Earlier, Frobisher remarks on an aquatint of a Siamese temple. He compares its lore as it's relentlessly ornamented and improved: it will one day be equal to "its counterpart in the Pure Land" (81). Then, humanity's purpose fulfilled, Time will conclude. Frobisher offers an alternative analogy. Like Ayrs, the edifice rises upon the backs of ignorant and anonymous labor, and civilization claims its resplendence through those statesmen and artists who take the credit for themselves, as "architects, masons, and priests."

In the fittingly titled "'Half-Lives': the First Luisa Rey Mystery" Isaac Sachs contemplates the actual vs. a virtual past. The Nietzschean will-to-power enters Vyvyan and Robert's verbal sparring, and by this later section, the Sixsmith Report of Frobisher's correspondent stands for the threat to this humanist resistance against the machine men and women build (like that Siamese temple?). Sachs proposes a virtual past (as in the legacy in story of the Titanic outlasting the memories of its "real-time" survivors) and wonders how corporations and governments will co-opt this. 

Sachs continues to sum up the greater novel he's part of unwittingly. "One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each "shell" (the present) encased inside a nest of "shells" (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual future." (393) Naturally, comparison of this structure to a Buddhist (or post-modern) conception of impermanence and instability within the stories we tell and which we tell of ourselves opens this up to a neat critique***.

A few pages later, Luisa and a boy, Javier, discuss what if one could see the future. Javier asks: would you want to? Luisa hesitates, wanting to know if the future so seen could be changed or not. (401) She ruminates that acting now in the expectation of what the future holds may trigger that future scenario. "What happens in a minute's time is made by what you do." She leaves the conversation wondering inside her head about this "great imponderable." "Maybe the answer is not one of metaphysics but one, simply, of power."

Necessarily inconclusive, this novel of ideas in its last segment, a reprise of "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing" deals with civilized incursions across the globe, and how power forces change and alters presents and futures. "Ships bring disease dust here," Mr. Wagstaff observes to Ewing as they land at a Christian settlement on Rataoia in the newly named Society Islands. The natives die off, slaves are imported from other islands, and the natives decline in fertility as religious fervor does not inspire fecundity. "To kill what you cherish & cure," Wagstaff smiles, "that seems to be the way of things." (486)

Countering the missionary endeavor and its social Darwinism with humanist reasoning, Adam denies any rules in history. He affirms only outcomes. "Vicious acts and virtuous acts" spur results. (507) These acts emerge from belief. To fight "the 'natural' order of things," confidence in human qualities beyond selfishness impel idealists such as Ewing. He vows to become an Abolitionist (we glimpse this cadre in Sonmi's fearful realm), and he vows to become a force for change, even if but "one drop in a limitless ocean." (509) With that promise, we place back the novel's last nestled doll, or its first. 

(Amazon US 3-5-13 in shorter, depersonalized, slightly rewritten version. ***I've expanded the Buddhist and post-Buddhist, Marxian and anarchistic associations spun out of the encounter between Sonmi and the Abbess about Siddhartha in comment #2 replying to "A Spectre Is Haunting Buddhism: Give Marx Some Credit," by Glenn Wallis at Speculative Non-Buddhism on 3-7-13. I extended that into more countercultural contexts on 3-9-13 in comment #11 and virtual realm applications on 3-8-13 in comment #6,)