Thoughts in Progress

In life sometimes we are torn between using our head or our heart when faced with certain events. Pragmatism may be my default setting, but the romantic in me also takes hold occasionally. Especially when it comes to good art.

One of the more poignant and difficult to watch movie scenes I have seen in my life is the opening of Saving Private Ryan. In its sheer, brutal brevity (almost half an hour of a 169-minute-long film) lie many of the unpalatable elements that make me hate war. Yet, this graphic, unforgettable sequence is a magnet to which my artistic sensibility is drawn like a hapless moth trapped in a spider’s web, watching its hungry host(ess) getting ever so closer, knowing its fateful dénouement and yet, being unable to do anything about it.

Until recently I had never managed to go beyond that opening scene. I usually left the room afterwards. The footage is too real, like war archive material. Were it grainier and more worn-out-looking, it could pass off as a documentary. This was not, however, the only reason why I refused to sit through the almost-three-hour-long film. The artistry of it is too enticing, too alluring. This is not cinema-cinema, but cinema-as-dance. These men are not at the mercy of Ares, but Terpsichore. The only sound we hear at the start comes from the untamed sea, waves crashing on the shore of Omaha Beach. The first sign of human life to which we are exposed is not the myriad helmeted heads bent down on the boats but a trembling hand trying to uncap a bottle of water. The camera pans out slowly, revealing lines of soldiers, a couple of them being sick. This is not a regiment but a corps du ballet and Spielberg is monsieur le choreographer.

Dance carries poetry within and so does Saving Private Ryan. It is hard for me, though, to accept this verse-inspired narrative. To equate the carnage of human beings (even when the motives for the killing are noble) to one of the most beautiful literary genres feels wrong. And yet, as I watched the movie recently I thought of other war-themed works of art that had inspired in me a similar love-hate dichotomy. One of them was also a film, Waltz with Bashir, an animation about the Sabra and Shatila massacre. In a scene I can only describe as surrealistic, one of the Israeli officers grabs a submachine gun and begins dancing a waltz (hence the movie title) in the middle of the road as shots rain down on him from nearby buildings without killing him. The gun in his hands never stops releasing bullet after bullet but the effect of the whole setup is hypnotic. You cannot take your eyes off this daring figure, moving almost en pointe down the street and surviving.

Another example is Picasso’s Guernica. It never grabbed me as much as it did other people. I wanted to see what they saw but all my eyes were able to capture was muddledness. Until one day in my late teens when I saw the picture again and all of a sudden each figure in the composition fell into place like a jigsaw puzzle. I saw chaos, but the chaos provoked by war. In its mouths, fully open and skywards pointing, there was a cry for peace.

Michael Longley’s poem Wounds was also on my mind as I watched Saving Private Ryan. Especially the lines: “Now, with military honours of a kind/With his badges, his medals like rainbows/His spinning compass, I bury beside him/Three teenage soldiers, bellies full of/Bullets and Irish beer, their flies undone.” Go back to Spielberg’s movie and watch how the camera zooms in on the men’s faces as they are about to land. It picks them up, one by one, stopping no longer than two seconds. Two seconds. That’s all it takes to provide the viewer with the real experience of war. War as a killing vehicle. War as an act of defence. War as cinematography. As dance. As art. Even though I hate it, still, war as art.



© 2017

Next Post: “Killer Opening Songs”, to be published on Wednesday 1^st February at 6pm (GMT)

Thoughts in Progress

I recently thought of an Alan Bennet’s quote, which I first came across in a column by Laura Barton, music writer at The Guardian: “The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.” The reason for that pensive moment? Seamus Heaney.

The Irish poet, who died in 2013, left behind an extensive and rich body of work. Yet, I had never “got” Seamus. No matter how many articles and essays I read, including a nostalgia-tinted eulogy by his fellow poet and long-time admirer, Andrew Motion, I failed to connect with his poems.

Until “his hand came out and took mine” a few weeks ago. We had our annual Christmas Bazaar at my school which, as a fund-raising opportunity, always delivers the goods. This time I was put in charge of the teddies’ tombola. Next to me was the “second-hand bookshop” stall. During one of our breaks I nipped over for a quick browse and left with a copy of Contemporary British Poetry. And which author was the first one to be featured? Our Seamus.

"Where finally gold flecks began to dance"

I left work a bit later that evening on account of all the tidying-up. By the time I got home it was dark. With my bike still outside the open front door and my helmet on, I read the first poem in the collection.

Reader, I married Seamus Heaney that night. And no, I don’t care that I am misquoting our lovely and talented Charlotte. The first three lines of Churning Day have stuck with me since: A thick crust, coarse-grained as limestone rough-cast/hardened gradually on top of the four crocks/that stood, large pottery bombs, in the small pantry.

I thought of the hand that was being offered to me. I took it. I dared not hesitate, nor reject it. The fullness of those three lines hit me like a heavyweight boxer’s uppercut in my sternum. They spoke not only of the alchemy-like process of making butter in a farm. They became melodic madeleines that took me back to the Havana of my childhood. No, we didn’t make butter at home. But we did our washing on a Saturday and called out to our neighbours who lived in the flat below ours to warn them that our clothes might drip a bit and “would it be all right if they could put out their washing after?”. Of course, we would let them know when we were done. The delight of feeling this connection with a culture - the Irish - that is as strange to mine as mine is to it is the familiarity Seamus' verses breed. Churning Day was not the only poem of his that made me feel this way but it is the one that has stayed with me the longest.

It is a theory of mine that this is one of the advantages of middle age. The lack of rush and abundance of patience. If you have been reading this blog for a long time, then, you know by now that I am not in the habit of chasing after the latest bestseller (although I am one third of the way into Zadie Smith’s latest novel, Swing Time. Then, again, Zadie is an exception) or the newest music releases. It is almost a rule I live my life by that the more people hype up an author or musician, the less I want to know about their work.

The literature I read, the music I listen to, the art I enjoy, they all come from a similar place: closeness, intimacy. I want to believe that Churning Day was written for me. In fact, I believe it was. Poems like the ones Seamus wrote (yup, you guessed it, I have read a few more, I am catching up very quickly), nuzzle up to your ribs. They fill the space in which you are.

In times of ugliness, as the ones I think we are living through now, I take refuge in art, be it literature or cinema. Art connects me to other human beings, hopefully less interested in pussy-grabbing than in bridge-building. Art knows no boundaries, arrives unbidden and undemanding. But once you acquaint yourself with it, it asks to be fed. Your brain, it wants your brain, your full attention, your senses, your feelings and emotions. Seamus has showed me that recently. I did not “get” him at first because I was looking for him. Sometimes it is better to let that which we are trying to understand, find you instead. Even if it means that your house will “stink long after churning day/acrid as a sulphur mine. The empty crocks/were ranged along the wall again, the butter/in soft printed slabs was piled on pantry shelves/And in the house we moved with gravid ease/our brains turned crystals full of clean deal churns/the plash and gurgle of the sour-breathed milk/the pat and slap of small spades on wet lumps.” As for my hand, it feels a bit greasy. It must be the butter.

This is my last column this year. See you all in the New Year. I hope you have a fantastic holiday period wherever you are and with whomever you spend it.