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Small miracles from distinctive voices

Film

Wanting only to see and to touch

In his poem ‘Lock-step’, John Barnie wryly observes ‘the disciples of iPhones’ taking endless selfies, lost in the images crowding those tiny screens. As the majority walk to the lock-step of technology and the virtual worlds it conjures, John feels he’s walking in the wrong direction, ‘wanting only to see and to touch’.

There’s a resonance here with John Irving’s The World According to Garp. Garp writes a short story about a man who owns a pair of magic gloves. Wearing them, death cannot touch him and he can do anything he desires. But life lacks meaning as a result — the gloves make it always slightly distant, always out of touch. The man throws away the gloves and death finds him. But in that moment he is truly in contact with life — he sees and touches for the first time and, in the last, his life gains texture and meaning.

From certain gnostic sects to René Descartes’ famous declaration that proof of his existence rested solely upon his mind and his thoughts, there’s a history of turning away from the body and favouring the cerebral. As the exercise craze of CrossFit weirdly echoes the extremities of a Medieval flagellant’s mortification of the flesh so that the spirt might be set free, so our culture’s increasing interaction with the physical world through apps and mobile computing devices mirrors those approaches to mysticism that turn away from the body to search for experience that are pure, immaterial… virtual.

The guitarist, Robert Fripp, has spoken of the difference between an LP or CD recording and a live gig as being like the difference between a love letter and a hot date. The letter brings back memories, even memories of having had strong emotions, but it doesn’t create emotion with the intensity of present, physical, carnal experience. It’s a difference in qualia, the textures and properties of experience that vary in the moment — or the ‘pressant’ as James Joyce calls it in Finnegan’s Wake. As Fripp has also pointed out, no drum roll experienced in the moment has ever swirled mightily around from left ear to right as they so often do in a stereo mix. That’s a conceit, an artificial experience that substitutes for being in the same room as the drummer, sharing the same ‘pressant’. It’s drumming while wearing magic gloves.

Fripp is touching on a theme drawn out further in Zoltán Huszárik’s dazzlingly sensual 1971 film, Szindbád, that it’s in the sensory, in the incarnate and bodily, that we truly anchor ourselves not in the shifting and untrustworthy landscapes of rolling news and social media. Descarte’s philosophical position is undermined by the advance of technology — in a virtual world, in which fantasy vies with direct experience and wins out more often than not, our minds become the worst foundation on which to build anything solid.

In contrast, for the eco-philosopher, David Abram, it’s only when we see and touch the world directly that we’re fully alive, fully human. To live as we are being encouraged to do, through the medium of human-made technology, Abram says, is to forget our past and our origins. If the ingrained notion that humans stand at the apex of creation and evolution would set us apart from the natural world, the truth is our bodies, our senses, our very being has been shaped by and has developed in intimate relation to the same planetary environments and forces as every other creature, plant and landscape feature we see framed in a smartphone’s screen.

Descartes argues that mind is the bedrock of reality, the only certain point in the otherwise uncertain welter of stimuli that constitute the ‘pressant’. There’s a separation here as misleading as the notion that humanity is a species different from all others. What happens when the ‘pressant’ of messages, notifications, news headlines, adverts, phone calls, images, zip-panned videos, clickbait, deadlines, popup events, flash sales, and all the rest reaches overwhelm? We feel anxiety not as an abstract but as a bodily reaction. Muscles tense, breath comes shallow, blood pumps faster, pupils narrow, adrenaline and other chemicals are released. Mind and body respond together. Culture might encourage us in the belief that technology’s mediation keeps the world manageably ‘out there’ but visceral experience argues otherwise.

Likewise, the imagination itself seems protean, boundless and, most importantly, separate from the brain that it haunts, ghost-like and untouchable except through the artefacts it brings into being. But, as David Abram has argued, our imaginations also spring from the body — from our senses, in fact. The taste of a madeline dipped in tea, the smell of a bonfire on an autumn afternoon, the caress of a lover, a child’s laugh: all are as intimately linked to the senses as they are evocative to the imagination. To see and to touch is to imagine.

Cover of a book
John Barnie’s latest collection, A Report to Alpha Centauri

Sometimes, there’s no choice but to listen to a record of a concert, read through old love letters, or wander the streets of a faraway town through the medium of digital images. But to only experience the world in this way — through magic gloves — is to loose a little of ourselves, to forego something vital, visceral, integral to who we are as incarnate beings. The word ‘human’ itself comes from a Latin word meaning ‘earthborn’, a word rooted in older words relating to the ground and to the earth. To want to see and to touch is part of who we are.

Szindbád and the presence of memory

At the beginning of Zoltán Huszárik’s film, Szindbád, a dying man is bundled into a driverless horse and buggy. The horse sets off at a trot to wander through a deepening twilight. Voices on the soundtrack make it clear the man is Szindbád himself, an ageing Lothario abandoned to his fate and to his memories.

Huszárik’s 1971 film is a beautiful — sumptuous, even — adaptation of Gyula Krúdy’s stories about a man addicted to romance and nostalgia, dapper and urbane in his wanderings around a Budapest transitioning out of its 19th Century, Imperial heyday, into a much less certain dawning of the 20th Century, troubled by a deepening melancholy and returning, more and more, to memories of past loves, past times. If Krúdy’s stories — poignant, sometimes witty, oft-times wistful — are steeped in the ever-presence of memory, Huszárik’s Szindbád deals more directly with the process of memory, especially the long memory of a life that’s been full of incident and regret.

We follow Szindbád on trysts and assignations, on visits to old loves, on attempts to make peace and sense of this life he has lived out of step with society, both in terms of his pursuit of the sensual and the sensory but also in his desire to keep hold of a past age now itself little more than a memory. Throughout, Szindbád is in late-middle-age, just as we first meet him. Only one past love shows the same passage of the years — and, perhaps significantly, she is the one person who knew him best, for all that she allowed herself to be taken in by his charms. For the rest, they remain youthful, as young and as beguiling as when Szindbád first saw them — even when decades separate the encounters we witness in the film from the time they originally spent together. His past loves are forever young. It is Szindbád who is old.

Huszárik is showing us the past from Szindbád’s perspective, wandering old haunts, reminiscing, an old man who sees his lovers as they were. They are present in him, in mind and thought. They cannot age. Time can only touch Szindbád himself, the repository of those precious memories.

It’s a convention in writing, one that’s often mimicked in cinema’s hazy, sepia-tinted flashbacks, that the past should be in past tense. It’s gone. It’s behind us. In contrast, the present, this moment, is often presented in present tense: She is remembering the past and the past was so much more than now…

Is this how things are, though?

In the Coming of Winter

At the recent launch for his collection, In the Coming of Winter, the poet Frank Dullaghan argued that memory is a thing not of the past but the present. It lives alongside us. We curate it and tend to it during the course of our days. We reach to it. We keep it close. As Szindbád’s memories are changeless and yet all around him, so are our memories. Memory, Frank maintains, is something that is now, in this moment, alive and interacting with us as we interact with it. The literary convention is upside down: when we think of a memory it plays out in the present tense, immediate and incarnate within us. This is the world that Huszárik’s Szindbád strolls through. This is the world that we find ourselves in, going about our daily lives to be transported, in a moment, to a different present by an association or a thought that connects us to memory. In contrast, the present is very often unfixed in time. It gets missed because we’re distracted. It’s conjured into being when we think ahead to something that’s yet to happen. It gets recreated in retrospect as we replay what was has just happened, the gaps in recollection filled in by supposition or fantasy. The present, unlike memories of the past, isn’t chronologically fixed. If anything we live in past tense, retailing events in the seconds after they have gone by.

This is the position of us in respect to memory and time that Proust explores, of course. It’s also the position of the traditional folk tale and the fairy story, where the story teller announces, ‘Once upon a time’, and then switches to present tense — the story sits beside us, it runs around us, it lives in the moment, not the past.

There’s a broader point to this, as we negotiate the fast-moving and treacherous media landscapes of the 21st Century, itself a time of nostalgia and reminiscence, an age where there’s as overwhelming sense of possible futures missed, of a present that we might want to avoid or escape altogether. At one point, Szindbád announces, ‘Death has no light, no shade. But it has a slight scent of rosemary.’ It’s in the sensory that we anchor ourselves, in the body, not in spite of the body nor in the hazy present of rolling news and the imperatives of advertising.

In one of the most celebrated scenes in the film we watch Szindbád eating a meal, taking delight in each savour and taste, each detail of each course. The camera lingers over the dishes. It moves in for close-ups that are as vibrant and vivid in their colours as we can imagine the flavours of the food on display to be. It’s not gluttony. It’s a celebration of being.

In many ways, it’s loosing touch with this connection to the now of the senses that leads to Szindbád’s lonely final journey in that buggy. The horse is still trotting at the end of the film but we know by then Szindbád is no more. The present of memory has given way to the past of a hazy, transitory present in which the mind, as alone as Szindbád on that final buggy ride, wanders through a twilight that grows murkier with each passing moment.