Posts about review

Necessary Monsters: ‘The Book of Imaginary Beings’

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This book is a compendium of fantastical creatures from myth and folklore. Unlike its mediaeval equivalent, the bestiary, this is not to be read as moral allegory or as a practical handbook to be taken on journeys to the edge of the world. You won’t find advice here on how to learn from the industriousness of the bee, nor how to steer your ship clear of the path of an approaching sea serpent. ‘The Book of Imaginary Beings’ is intended rather as entertainment, an indulgence in what Jorge Luis Borges calls the “lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition”.

It is a slender book, just 150 pages or so. It could of course have been far longer, as Borges acknowledges in the preface of the 1967 edition:

“The title of this book would justify the inclusion of Prince Hamlet, of the point, of the line, of the surface, of n-dimensional hyperplanes and hypervolumes, of all generic terms, and perhaps of each one of us and the godhead. In brief, the sum of all things – the universe.”

I’m tempted to think that Borges enjoyed the idea of this book more than the finished thing itself – a bestiary of infinite length containing an infinite number of beings could easily have been a subject for one of his own short stories, which are full of such paradoxes and references to imaginary encyclopaedias (in fact, I wouldn’t put it past Borges to have slipped one or two creatures of his own in between the covers of this book). But Borges is not one to write at great length, let alone an infinite one, so he has drawn some necessarily arbitrary boundaries, which don’t include lines and hypervolumes; nor shape changers such as werewolves; nor many other famous creatures. It is a very personal choice, the author’s own intellectual curiosity guiding his foraging amongst the books in the Biblioteca National, and the selection is all the better for it.

Featured here are well known creatures such as the Dragon, the Phoenix, and the Minotaur, as well as lesser known ones, like the Squonk (“when cornered and escape seems impossible, it may even dissolve itself in tears”), and the Ass with Three Legs (“its coat is white, its food is spiritual, and its whole being is righteous”). The majority are from myth and folklore, though there are a handful of literary inventions present, like ‘An Animal imagined by Kafka’.

One of my favourites is the Monkey of the Inkpot (“four or five inches long; its eyes are scarlet and its fur is jet black, silky, and soft as a pillow”), which has a taste for India ink and sits on the desk beside those who write, waiting for them to finish. When the writer puts his pen down, the creature drinks what is left of the ink and sits back contentedly.

The Monkey of the Inkpot sitting on Borges’ desk must have been a very plump fellow indeed, for the author uses up very little ink in these short entries. That is not to say that they are cursory, for their brevity is a consequence of careful selection, clarity of thought and conciseness of phrase, not lack of research. There is in fact an enormous amount of research behind this book, it’s just that Borges spares us superfluous detail, giving us insight instead:

“Time has notably worn away the Dragon’s prestige. We believe in the lion as reality and symbol; we believe in the Minotaur as symbol but no longer reality. The Dragon is perhaps the best known but also the least fortunate of fantastic animals. It seems childish to us and usually spoils the stories in which it appears. It is worth remembering, however, that we are dealing with a modern prejudice, due perhaps to a surfeit of Dragons in fairy tales.”

This is undoubtedly the most erudite book you will ever read on the subject, but there’s none of the dry, uninspired writing that often accompanies academic rigour. Borges’ prose is witty and elegant, and a joy to read. Borges knows better than anyone else how reality, myth and fantasy intertwine and he clearly understands the nature of the beasts he writes about, identifying their varying shades of reality as nimbly as an entomologist identifying the shades of colour in butterflies. And though he reminds us that “the zoology of dreams is far poorer than the zoology of the Maker”, he makes us realise that many of these fantastical creatures are, in some ways, just as important:

“We are ignorant of the meaning of the dragon in the same way that we are ignorant of the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the dragon’s image that fits man’s imagination, and this accounts for the dragon’s appearance in different places and periods. It is, so to speak, a necessary monster….”

Jorge Luis Borge’s ‘Labyrinths’

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The edition of this book that I own has a cover that perfectly encapsulates its contents. We are looking up a spiral staircase toward a painted ceiling of heaven, or perhaps looking down the staircase, to the floor of a forgotten library. Maybe even we are looking at a mirrored floor, which reflects a staircase above us. We could be on a stairway to the heavens; we could be an infinite spiral of thought; we could be the universe itself – a grain of sand in a painted spiral shell. I love the cover of this book as much as I love the words inside, precisely because it ‘is’ the words inside, but in a visual form.

(I love the back of this book also. There is another spiral there, this time in biro, a scribble made by my partner. I’m unsure whether she was just trying to get the ink in the pen to flow and the book was the nearest thing to hand, or whether she was drawing a spiral on a piece of paper, and the pen tore through. But I like the symmetry with the cover, and the fact that it’s her).

I used to carry this book with me everywhere, and I don’t think I would have done if its contents weren’t so succinctly summarised by its cover – because though I rarely read its contents, I need to be reminded of them. I need to be reminded that there are other people who see the world as I do, and I need to be reminded sometimes to look.

Borges considers fact to be inseparable from fiction. He is attracted to the philosophies, theologies and sciences of this world for their aesthetic value, not for any notion of truth. He takes an idea and extrapolates it to its logical conclusion, highlighting the tenuous relationship with ‘truth’ that the original idea held, while simultaneously enriching the world with the idea’s poetic potential, its uncertainties, and its mystery.

He is compared to Valery and to Poe, though to my mind his work has as much in common with science fiction. I think of the short story by Isaac Asimov in which a robot finds a way of committing murder without breaking its programmed Laws of Robotics – laws that should make the act of murder impossible. The way in which this apparent impossibility is revealed as possibility through an entirely logical series of developments, could be the work of Borges – though Borges would have made it a story about that mythical slave the Golem destroying its Cabalist master. And I suspect that had Borges indulged in hallucinogenic drugs rather than dusty libraries, he could well have written tales like Philip K Dick’s ‘Roog’, in which we are told of the daily theft of metal urns by alien invaders only to discover that we are in fact a dog watching the dustmen collect the bins.

‘Labyrinths’ contains a selection of Borges short stories, and some related essays. The short stories take up the bulk of the book, and contain many of his best (though the omission of ‘El Aleph’ is noticeable). Here we find ‘Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote’, in which Borges considers that hermeneutical problem of deciding who actually creates the meaning of a piece of writing – the writer or reader. In the story a modern reader of ‘Don Quixote’ sets about re-writing the book by living Cervantes life to the last detail before he writes it – the result being that “The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer.” (Notice, incidentally, the phrase ‘almost infinitely’ – Borges chooses his words carefully).

Elsewhere we have ‘The Circular Ruins’, which deals with the dream within a dream, the narrative itself an endless cycle, ending as it begins. We have ‘Tlon, Qbar, Orbus Tertius’, a mock essay on a fictitious society, which amongst other things references fictitious books in its footnotes. And we have ‘The Library of Babel’, the search for the Book of Books. I won’t elaborate on them, as they only really make sense in their entirety, so dependent is their meaning on their form.

But I will tell you more about the parables at the back of the book, written when he was old and growing blind. They are just a page or so in length, the necessity to dictate them encouraging him to be even more concise than usual. These I read often, as for me these are the most interesting of all – paradoxically he seems to see clearer than ever in his blindness. Take his description of classical gods in ‘Ragnarok’, an account of a dream, if it indeed it was a dream (it may be purely invented, though the distinction is ultimately unimportant). The gods appear one day in the library, evidently having lost their humanity through years of exile:

“…low foreheads, yellow teeth…. thick bestial lips showed the degeneracy of the Olympian lineage. Suddenly we sensed they were playing their last card, that they were cunning, ignorant and cruel like old beasts of prey and that, if we let ourselves be overcome by fear or piety, they would finally destroy us.”

Borges can be dark, he can be playful, he can be pedantic. But he is always unmistakeably Borges. Or is he? My favourite piece in this book casts doubt even on that certainty, the author seeming to genuinely struggle to identify where Borges the person ends and Borges the writer begins:

“I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor…Years ago I tried to free myself of him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight, and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. I do not know which of us has written this page.”

There are stories in ‘Labyrinths’ that I still have not yet read. I know some passages inside out while others remained undiscovered. And I like it this way – after all, once I’ve been through all the passages, I must by definition have left the labyrinth – and I don’t think I want to ever do that.

Because I too like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography, the taste of coffee… and most of all I like the prose of Borges.

Shortcuts to the Soul: review of ‘Photocopies’ by John Berger

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There is an image reproduced at the beginning of this book. It looks at first glance to be a photocopy, so stark is its contrast and so unclear its details, though it is in fact an image taken with a pinhole camera. It shows the author John Berger standing beside the first of the many people he writes about in this book, an artist who lives alone in the countryside. Very little can be seen of their surroundings, just the hazy silhouettes of a tree and the artist’s house. The figures themselves are silhouetted also, their features and clothes indiscernible, their smiles unseen. And yet the tenderness that exists between the two people is clear. Her head leans towards his, his body supporting hers like a sturdy tree trunk. And you can just make out the unkemptness of the author’s hair, as though such trivialities as appearance have been thrown to the wind.

It is not only a wonderful portrait, but a carefully chosen one, it being the visual equivalent to the writing that follows. For the writing, like the photograph, conveys so much about its subjects with so little. There are around thirty ‘chapters’ here, each one just a few pages in length, and each one being about a person who touched Berger’s life in some way.

He writes about a particular memory of each person, a memory that in same way defines that person’s essence, in the way that a portrait can. It reminds me of the drawings of Rembrandt, or Maggi Hambling. Those artists capture the essence of their subjects often with just a few strokes of the pen, and Berger writes with a similar economy. There isn’t a single superfluous word in this book. Take one word out of any of these portraits and the likeness would be lost, yet if you were to add one word more, it would stick out like an ugly ink blot.

Take Berger’s description of a Parisian photographer, now begging in the Metro:

“His eyes are an intense pale blue, and from time to time they twitch, as a dog’s muzzle twitches when investigating a scent. Its hard to watch his eyes without feeling you’re being indelicate. They’re totally exposed – not through innocence, but through an addiction to observation. If eyes are windows on to the soul, his have neither panes nor curtains, and he stands in the window frame and you can’t see past his gaze.”

Or this, his description of a motorcyclist about to mount his bike during a race:

“[he] puts on his helmet and stands very still, waiting, small, a shearwater looking out to sea from a cliff edge.”

Berger’s own humanity shines through every page, as does his respect for those he writes about. One of the most moving of all these moments is the one in which he visits a prison and reads a story to one of the prisoners, a man he has never met before but whose predicament leaves a lifelong impression on the author:

“The aim of incarceration is to reduce all exchanges with the outside world to a minimum. And this has an effect on voices. Ours, as we read, were unlike prisoners’ voices. Our voices were volatile – like swallows in flight seen through a window. Maybe our voices were more interesting than the story we were reading.”

The book is full of such acutely observed insights. And of course, this being Berger, a lot of these insights are into the nature of Art, its relationship with the people he describes and also with himself.

“A wisp of grass is blown onto one drawing. Tiny fruit flies alight on another. A scrap of leaf, transparent like parchment, drifts from a nearby field of maize on to another sheet. If I did not see these things being wafted on to the paper I would have mistaken them for painted marks. I’m no longer at all sure where to draw the line between art and nature, Becoming and Origin. This is the mystery that keeps me peering even after the light has dimmed and the chickens have gone quiet.”

I like this passage particularly as it goes some way to describing his own writing. It is hard to draw the line between the people he describes and the nature that surrounds them. People are closer here to their animal cousins than in anything else I’ve read. The motorcyclist who is a shearwater on a cliff edge, the photographer whose eyes twitch like a dog’s muzzle, or the artist who learns about her nature through cuttlefish, octopus and molluscs. It feels like some kind of distilled astrology, but one based on observation and earthy truths rather than the muddled light of the stars above.

But above all, the collective whole of these portraits becomes a celebration of individuality, and of shared humanity. You feel you would love to meet every person in this book, and you’re left, invariably, with the feeling that you have had that pleasure. Insightful, tender and wise, it is one of the most life-affirming reads I can think of, and one to return to again and again.

“The two of us stood there facing the camera. We moved of course, but not more than the plum trees did in the wind. Minutes passed. While we stood there, we reflected the light, and what we reflected went through the black hole into the dark box.

‘It’ll be of us’, she said. And waited expectantly.”

Review of the exhibition ‘Magic Show’

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I’m looking at what appears to be a photograph, of what appears to be a view outside of a window, taken from inside what appears to be a room. Yet there is something not quite ‘right’ about the photograph. The space is clearly impossible, yet it is impossible to pinpoint why (I’m reminded of Escher’s ‘Ascending and Descending’). Art is always a fiction of sorts, and this is an exhibition entitled ‘Magic Show’, so I should be expecting the visual sleight of hand. And yet I find my mind insisting on attempting to make sense of the space Sinta Werner has portrayed in front of me, refusing to accept its unreality. It is the trick of the conjuror, as played by an artist.

Parallels between magician and artist are highlighted throughout ‘Magic Show’, a Hayward Touring exhibition, currently showing at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff. It is an impressively diverse exhbition, mixing actual magicians’ props and paraphenalia with artworks in many different media. Some work directly references the world of the illusionist, such as Juan Munoz’s photographs of the fingertip mirrors used by card sharks, whilst other work’s relationship to the theme is one more of technique and intent – such as Sinta Werner’s exquisitely perplexing space collages.

Sometimes the technique is intentionally exposed, such as in a series of films by Joao Maria Gusmao and Pedro Paiva, in which inanimate objects become animate – a rope becomes a snake, writhing viciously before two men, who cut it down with swords; boulders in a desert rumble slowly into life, rolling their way toward a shared destination. In all these films, no attempt is made to hide the artifice of the situation – the strings are quite literally visible. This honesty allows the viewer to engage with the work as a spectator, not an interrogator, and enjoy the touching, quaint absurdity of the actions unfolding before them.

The highlight for many will be Zoe Beloff’s “A Modern Case of Posession” – a film of a play about French psychologist Dr Pierre Janet. The play performed is interesting enough, but it is the way that it is presented that impresses the most. The film of the play is projected onto a small theatrical stage set. The film is shot in 3D, and with the aid of 3D glasses the viewer is treated to a wonderful experience, in which the miniature actors appear real enough to pick up off the stage and hold in the hand. The manipulation of scale and the viewer’s perceptions of it are both brilliant and playful.

‘Magic Show’ is an excellent exhibition, one which entertains, surprises, and occasionally perplexes – just like all good magic shows should.

‘Magic Show’ is on at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff until 12th September, after which it moves on to Pump House Gallery, London

When style needs no substance: the film ‘Suspiria’

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A young woman leaves an airport to hail a taxi for an unknown destination. It is pouring with a rain, the kind of rain that drives away all human presence, and you can see a hint of fear creep in when the first taxi passes straight by without even slowing. When the second taxi also passes by, the audience begins to share her trepidation, and we suspect that this film isn’t going to be an easy ride.

Indeed, not long after we see an exceptionally violent murder, shot with an almost cruel explicitness. But it is compellingly brilliant in its visual realisation – the victim’s face being pressed against the glass of a window, her features being pushed around into increasingly contorted masks of terror, configurations of flesh that that we didn’t think were possible. We are fascinated and repulsed simultaneously, as we are with all the violence in this film.

Most of the horror comes from the film’s oppressive atmosphere, hanging like a dense fog over the story that follows, which revolves around a witch’s presence in a secluded ballet school in Germany. The protagonist, a new student played by Jessica Harper, becomes a liability to the school’s witch when she witnesses the murder in the film’s opening scenes, and soon she is desperately looking for a way to escape the witch’s clutches.

Lurid lighting – bright red, blues and greens – light the dark corridors of the school. Director Dario Argento has no need to justify their presence, they are simply there for effect, giving the film a nightmarish quality. It works well, particularly in the dormitory scene, where the white curtains are transformed by red lights into veils of blood, behind which a sinister silhouette appears in the middle of night – not wielding a knife or sprouting tentacles, but something far more unnerving – sleeping. Unnerving because the lighting tells us that the figure has sinister intent, yet our minds boggle as we wonder how it will achieve that intent through an act of such passivity.

Adding to the atmosphere also is the crashing soundtrack by the progressive rock band ‘Goblins’ which sounds as though it is trying to pummel the film into submission. The music has a life almost of its own, and the blind music teacher, a character who lives in a world of sound, reacts at times as though it is the source of terror itself. The music appears out of nowhere and disappears when you least expect it, shifting the film’s gear dramatically, and accentuating moments of tension tremendously.

‘Suspiria’ is evidence that sometimes atmosphere can be more than just a way of conveying mood. Sometimes it can successfully be the focus of an entire film, its raison d’etre.