Eulogy for Rick Herreid

This is an eulogy delivered for Rick Herreid at St. Olaf Lutheran Church on Saturday, November 9, 2019

I last saw Brother Herreid upright at a dinner party in his home.  This was six days before he was struck down.  Rick fed 20 people that night: pork loin with sweet apricot sauce.  After the meal, Julie and I went out into the chill night, walking down his steep, black driveway.  We were a little flushed with wine and shots of Jaegermeister and Aquavit.  And, then, I thought surely there will be many, many nights like this in the future.

But, now, we know in bone and marrow that no one has tenure here.  For a brief time, we dig our toes in to the clay of this rapidly warming ball of earth, but it is all temporary and will pass in the blink of an eye.

Now, I’m conscious that what I say is insufficient.  To be truthful, I don’t know what to tell you.  This morning I am dismayed, disheartened, and downcast.  Honesty compels me to admit that I am baffled, astonished  – shaken to my core.  Rick’s death opens a crack in creation, it creates a void that no words can fill.  How is it that someone so vibrant, so impressively alive, can be snatched away from us without warning or premonition?

Although there’s nothing I can say sufficient to this loss, I will tell you this: first and foremost, Rick was an explorer, an adventurer.  This may seem odd for someone whose life was so well-ordered.  But Rick was the consummate traveler.  Curiosity was his passport.  For more than 35 years in our Great Books group, we read authors from Iceland to Japan, books written in Sudan, Peru, Mexico and Russia as well as many other places.  Rick’s curiosity spanned not only the globe but the ages.  We argued about Gilgamesh, the Bible and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, studied everything from Beowulf to David Foster Wallace and, most recently, George Saunders Lincoln in the Bardo.  (This was only three weeks ago.)

Brother Herreid read with attention, good sense, and generosity.  He didn’t condone nonsense and on more occasions than I wish to remember, he called me out on my improbable or fanciful hermeneutics.   But here is the remarkable thing – his criticism wasn’t harsh or malicious.  Rick simply didn’t have the DNA to be nasty to anyone.  In more than 35 years, I never heard him say anything derogatory about any one that he knew.   And without fail, he was kind, polite, civil, and well-spoken.  To both literature and life, he applied his scientist’s powers of observation to regard the world honestly, with neither cynicism nor wishful-thinking.

Rick’s far-flung interests, his intellectual citizenship of the world, was matched by his actual travels.  He seemed to have been everywhere: France and Belgium’s World War I battlefields, Norway’s fjords, gloomy Russia and the sunny beaches of the Philippines and too many other places to list.  With Karen, he made the necessary pilgrimage to the hallowed places in American history – the bridge at Selma. Birmingham, the Delta and Memphis.  This was part of his unerring commitment to justice and equal rights for all.  He traveled easily, as if it were no big deal.  Somehow, he made things seems obvious and simple.  Whenever possible, he ate memorable meals in remarkable places.  In every picture from every faraway city or village, he is grinning at the camera.  Travel intimidates me – it makes me anxious and afraid.  But Rick was fearless.  I will tell you that  once, he sailed around the turbulent and storm-vexed Cape Horn.  I like to think of him on that vessel, under white sails and amidst the glacial fjords of Tierra del Fuego, the fabled land of fire.  In my imagination, he is the fortunate traveler:  resourceful, courageous and determined to make the best of the fearsome squalls at the very ends of the earth.  There he is: a peerless human being – in every photograph, he flashes his warrior’s smile into our memories.  Of course, his ancestors were Vikings.  Then, a gust makes the sails billow and the little ship takes wing, surging across the whale-road, prow pointed toward the undiscovered lands ahead.

On Rick Herreid

1.
My friend, Rick Herreid, died on Friday, November 1, 2019.  Four days earlier, on the evening of the 28th of October, Rick collapsed in the YMCA locker room in Austin, Minnesota.  He could not be revived despite the use of a defibrillator and CPR.  Rick was transported to St. Mary’s Hospital where he was treated in Intensive Care.  After several days, it became evident that Rick’s brain was badly injured and he could not be revived to any semblance of his vibrant personality and penetrating intelligence.  When the respiration tube was removed on the morning of November 1, he died almost immediately.

2. 
Rick was tall and slender. He enjoyed excellent health before the cardiac attack that destroyed him.  There were no harbingers warning that he was about to mortally stricken.  His passing was an evil marvel – in the few days before he collapsed, Rick had hosted an elaborate dinner party and spent much time with friends and family.  His last illness was a sort of nightmare, a wholly unanticipated, paralyzing shock.  It’s dubious to draw morals from the death of a fellow human being, but Rick’s demise surely stands for one important proposition: no one holds tenure on this earthly existence and death lurks always amid the living.  If we were capable of holding this truth close to our hearts, perhaps, all of us would live our lives in a radically different way.  But the cruel paradox of human life is that those notions most integral to grasping our precarious toe-hold on existence are also the most difficult and painful to grasp.  An idea that should give our lives meaning and urge us to daily acts of kindness and devotion is also one that could leach away our courage and make our days barren.  The thought of death is like gazing into the sun: mortal eyes are unable to bear its profundity and awful radiance. 

3.
I met Rick more than 35 years ago.  A few months earlier, I had become friends with Terry Dilley, an instructor at the local Community College in Austin.  Terry was a lifelong companion and someone that I deeply admired.  He led a Great Books group, offered through Community Services, and modeled on the discussions encouraged by Mortimer Adler, the professor at the University of Chicago.  I had come to Austin to practice law and was, more or less, alone.  At first, I was skeptical about the benefit of attending Terry’s Great Books discussions but, at last, I overcame by bashfulness and doubt and joined the group.  In those days, the group met in a classroom at the Community College and sat in circle at desks that we dragged into that formation.  The group was studying the short fiction of Thomas Mann, preparatory to reading Death in Venice. 

I had studied German literature in college and had a degree in English literature.  I was arrogant and brash in those days, disrespectful, I’m afraid, of the opinions of others.  At the first session that I attended, I spoke a great deal and dismissed what others had to say.  I wasn’t confident that I was much of a lawyer and was still learning my craft at that time, but I knew a lot about literature and, after accustoming myself to the group, wasn’t hesitant to express my opinions.  Needless to say, I came across as a boor and bully: Rick Herreid, who attended that discussion, later told me that he and his wife resolved that they would quit the group if I persisted in coming – I was an irritating member dominating what was supposed to be an informal group conversation.  I guess that they decided to grit their teeth and see if they could bear my company because they stayed with the group – indeed, for more than 30 years.

Rick Herreid was a couple years older than me and worked as a chemist at the Hormel Company in the firm’s research and development department.  My first impression of him was that he was skinny and very blonde with pale skin, a tall, bony fellow with an attractive, voluptuous wife.   Rick and his wife, Karen, were polite, well-spoken, obviously highly educated – it seemed to me that they were quintessentially suburban, the sort of college-educated people you might meet in Edina or Plymouth or Woodbury.  There was something conventional about them, an aspect of conformity that you meet in people who have gone to good schools and are now working for big corporations.  At that time, Karen was a stay-at-home mother.  Both of them seemed to be working to make a happy home for the children in their family.  They were churchgoers, polite, even welcoming to me, although I understand, now, that the initial impression that I made on them was a poor one.  I was very full of myself in those days, a necessity, I suppose, for one embarking on the practice of law in the field of litigation.  I didn’t know, then, what I didn’t know – in other words, I thought my wisdom was sufficient to all things, but, of course, I wasn’t wise at all.  At first, I mistook the suburban virtues that the Herreid’s embodied for dullness, a stolid, unimaginative stance toward life.  Objectively, Rick was already a better man than I – he had a better education at a private school (I had attended the University of Minnesota), a better, more stable and highly paid job, an attractive wife who doted upon him, a nice house and the outlook for a good future.  I was unhappy, lonely, fearful of the requirements of my job, and defensive about my shortcomings.  And I was, also, secretly and deeply suburban myself – I had been raised in Eden Prairie and the way that Rick led his life was intimately familiar to me, something with which I had grown-up: the mother as homemaker, father as bread-winner, children precocious and, even, artistic, everyone comfortable exactly as they were.  I fancied myself an intellectual explorer, a kind of Byronic hero, but I was really just a scared boy.  The fact that Rick and Karen were suburban in their fundamental outlook, ultimately, made them attractive to me.

4.
I don’t know what my life would have been like if my rude arrogance had destroyed the Great Books group.  (After all, I met my second wife, the source of all my happiness, in that Group.)  But the group persisted notwithstanding the insult I posed to its integrity and, in fact, we have resolved that the Great Books will continue in Rick’s honor now that he has passed away.  This Fall, we read Whitman’s “When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and, then, some stories by George Saunders preparatory to discussing Lincoln in the Bardo.  Since we had a couple of nights open, I suggested that we read Juan Rulfo’s spectral Pedro Paramo.  The book jinxed our group.  One important member took a job three-hundred miles from Austin.  For his farewell, Rick hosted a meal for all group members and their spouses.  Because he was a food scientist, Rick was skilled in the culinary arts.  The meal was very fine, featuring pork loin, cooked to perfection (he was unafraid to serve the meat pink at its center) with a sweet apricot sauce.  The feast was memorable, served in Rick’s beautiful house located on a hilltop at Seven Springs outside of Austin.  His home is filled with elegant mementos of his travels abroad, including a beautiful painting from Bosnia showing the bridge over the Drina – we had read Ivo Andric’s book of that name in our Group a few years earlier.  Near the kitchen, there were photographs of Rick on a beach near Manila in the Phillipines, canvases of Norway and the harbors of northern Germany, and over the couch in the living room, a splendid painting of prairie in western Minnesota or the Dakotas, a shack on a slope bright with wildflowers.  When it was light outside, deer could be seen in Rick’s backyard together with big, russet-colored wild turkeys.  After dinner, Rick served us liqueurs – shots of aquavit, Jaegermeiser, Grand Marnier.  The dinner was a great success.  A week later, Rick collapsed at the YMCA.  At the hospital, Karen told me that she still had leftovers from that meal in her refrigerator.

5.
It was my impression that Rick’s courtship of Karen involved treks in the wild, camping on rocky ground and canoeing across turbulent lakes in the Boundary Waters.  In his own way, he was an adventurer, although modest about his exploits.  For a time, he owned a sailboat and, like many men who are scientifically inclined, was probably fascinated by the geometry and physics that allows a sailing vessel to tack against the wind.  After his retirement, Rick traveled to Patagonia and rounded Cape Horn, sailing the mountainous seas off Tierra del Fuego on a sailing ship owned by a French couple.  (He said that he didn’t know French but quickly understood the commands shouted at him in that language – when you go sailing, the skipper of the vessel is always screaming at you to do this or that and, if you ignore his orders, a boom will likely crack you in the skull or sweep you overboard.)  The sailing ship explored the glacial fjords and cruised near the twisted dwarf forests in the sheltered inlets.  Sometimes, savage gusts of wind would roll through notches in the sawtooth peaks overlooking the fjords and crash against the ship’s sails.  It must have been a wonderful and fearsome adventure, although Rick was the soul of modesty and had that profound reticence as to speaking about himself that characterizes many people of Scandinavian heritage.

With friends, Rick explored World War One battlefields in France and Belgium, traveled in Mexico, visited the Philippines, and toured Moscow and Leningrad – the difficulty in Russia, he told me, was that the subway signs were all in Cyrillic and it was hard to decipher destinations in that script.  He explored Budapest and central Europe and, once, hiked on trails in the mountains in what was previously East Germany, searching for prospects that Casper David Friedrich painted.  Once, Rick’s wife, Karen, went on a church mission trip to Tegucigalpa in Honduras.  I probably don’t have the details of the story right but, as Rick told me, he flew to Honduras (or wherever this happened) and, then, set off on a hike up the slopes of a steep and slippery volcano.  He had a guide, an Indian girl, I think, and, of course, she was well accustomed to the altitude, the suffocating humidity in the cloud forests, and the slick, muddy trails.  She lead the way up the mountain at a lethal pace and, before they reached the top, Rick was too tired to continue – of course, he was jet-lagged and working in a sedentary job at that time and probably not in his peak condition.  (In fact, I expect he had more stamina after he retired than before –simply because he had more opportunities to exercise.)  It was typical that Rick told this story about his travels, an anecdote that is mildly self-deprecating – but I would maintain that if he couldn’t complete this arduous ascent, pretty much no one else that I know would have had any greater chance of success.  (He was built like a long-distance runner.) 

A photograph recently posted on Facebook shows Rick with Karen in rain gear squatting next to big wet boulders that are adorned with diadems of green and blue lichen.  The hikers are alone on a vast moor covered with reddish-brown heath.  The moor stretches down to a icy-looking finger of water, the inlet of a cold northern ocean.  It looks like an arduous, even scary hike.  Rick is grinning.  In photographs, he is always grinning.

6.
Rick was a chemist.  He spent his entire career, so far as I know, employed as a scientist in the Research and Development laboratories of the Hormel Foods Corporation.  His work was proprietary to this employer, I suppose, and, therefore, a little mysterious.  I know that he worked on removing the flatulent properties from certain sausages manufactured by Hormel.  Sometimes, he labored in the plant, perfecting industrial processes involved in meat packing.  I think he may have been marginally involved in Hormel Foods efforts to market catfish products – an enterprise that was almost comically disastrous.  Toward the end of his career, Rick worked with the formulation of a product called SPAMMY.  This is described as a “fortified poultry-based spread”.  The product, compounded one supposes from beaks, legs and other turkey byproducts, is pink, a granular paste; I’m not sure what it tastes like, although the potted meat is said to be highly salubrious, rich with vitamin B12 and D, important nutrients that are lacking in the nutrition of poor children living in Central America.  With the assistance of the USDA, Caritas and Food for the Poor, many thousand cans of this product were distributed in Guatemala to alleviate famine in that country. 

After he retired, Rick’s brother, an accomplished architect, designed a separate, free-standing laboratory building located about a dozen yards from the Herreid home.  In the laboratory, there are maps of Tierra del Fuego and pictures of sailing vessels.  The central conference room has the floor-plan of a Kekule structure, that is the benzene ring that is the fundamental generative form in organic chemisty.  (A Kekule ring is six-sided with covalent bonds to hydrogen extending from each of its corner carbon atoms.)  Friedrich Augustus Kekele was a German organic chemist who specialized in the study of aromatic hydrocarbon compounds.  For many years, Kekule worked to identify the matrix of atoms that establish the resonant characteristics of these compounds.  Keklule gave different accounts of the process that led to his description of the Benzene Ring that now bears his name.  Most famously, when honored in 1890 by the German Chemistry Society, Kekule said that he had dreamed the ring, envisioning while asleep the worm Ouroboros devouring it’s own tail – this dream led him to postulate the six-sided carbon matrix that is the basis of all of the aromatic hydrocarbons.  By Kekule’s account, he probably achieved this insight in 1862 and first published his findings in a French journal of chemistry three years later.  Many commentators suggest that the picturesque anecdote is a legend invented by Kekule, a kind of origin story. In any event, the template of Kekule’s benzene ring provides the floor plan for Rick’s laboratory building.

On a couple of occasions, Rick ushered me into his laboratory.  There were big hooded ovens, several spectrometers and chromatographs for qualitative/quantitative analysis, scales, centrifuges, and various burners.  Chemistry is descended from alchemy and the place had a hushed mystic aura about it.  I have no idea what experiments Rick conducted there.  As my readers will conclude, many aspects of this story are more than a little unclear to me.  There were aspects of Rick’s interests and pursuits that are unknown to the world.  I suppose that this is true of everyone.  I should have made closer and more detailed inquiries when he was alive, but, of course, like all of his other friends, I suspected that he would survive to a ripe old age.   


7.
He cooked for people.  He made sausage at home.  He worked with the church ladies on Wednesday night to serve food to families whose children were attending confirmation or who had come to St. Olaf for choir practice.  The meals served at the church were without charge to the public and, in fact, many times, the children of Sudanese refugees to Austin were present at the table.    A free-will offering supported the venture.  Mysteriously, there was always enough money donated each Wednesday to continue serving free meals to those from the community who came to the Church.  I will leave it to your imagination to consider how it was that money was always provided in sufficient amounts to continue this community service.

Once, when I was in trouble, I needed friends to help me move my books – it was mostly books – from the miserable apartment where I was living.  Rick spent all day lugging the boxes of books between the apartment and my new house.  (Others, including Jim McDermott, also helped and they deserve credit as well.)  As a reward for their services, I baked two racks of ribs in the clean oven of my new house.  The ribs were pre-cooked and slimy with barbecue sauce, probably packaged in this way by an affiliate of the Hormel Company

I shudder now to think of how I mismanaged that meat.  Rick would have known better.  In the summer, he served at the cook-shack on the County Fairgrounds, a primitive café with screen doors and white-washed walls like something at a summer camp in the North Woods.  Although the Men’s Brotherhood is supposed to operate the fairgrounds’ dinner hall, it always seems to be run by big, bossy post-menopausal women.  Rick worked there, sometimes 10 or 12 hours at a time.  People said that he was an honorary “Church Lady” because of his willingness to labor hard and long in the Church kitchens. 

One Summer, I saw him there.  I think he had given me meal tickets.  The Mower County Fair takes place in the first or second week of August and it is always hot as blazes.  The cook shack was sweltering with some elderly farmers nodding over cups of coffee in white porcelain mugs.  It was after the noon rush and the air in the shack smelled of roast beef – the most popular thing on the menu was beef with gravy slopped over two slices of white bread.  I think I ordered a hamburger.  Rick brought the food to my table.  He looked warm, but wasn’t sweating profusely.  I guess he was acclimated to heat.  Big, drowsy flies butted their heads against the screens on the doors and windows.  Air was supposed to draw through the windows but it was still outside and stagnant in the white-washed dining room and, when the breeze stirred, it reminded you that there were pig barns nearby and stalls holding white-faced steers. 

Rick was carrying a dishrag.  He sat the table with me for a few minutes and we chatted.  Then, he went off with his rag, swabbing down the tables where people had finished eating.

8.
His mother died when she was 59 and so Rick thought it prudent to retire at 60.  He was well-off and could do what he wished.  Sailing around Cape Horn at the uttermost tip of South America must have been one of his lifelong dreams.  In the dead of Winter (which is Summer in the Antipodes), he flew to Buenos Aires and, then, Ushuai, the Patagonia port from which ships embark for Antarctica.  He had booked a working vacation as part of the crew of a French sailing boat.

Under sail, the vessel rounded Cape Horn and, then, explored the glacial fjords of Tierra del Fuego.  Rick later told me that he didn’t know French and, of course, the French are too proud to admit that they know English.  He said that he was sworn at daily in French, this sort of abuse characteristic when one takes passage on a sailing boat – there is icy rigging to manage and booms that swivel perilously and, of course, the seas were fearsome.  At night, the people on the boat cooked elaborate meals and drank red wine.  Sometime, the little vessel entered channels dissecting the mountains, rocking on cold waves between glaciers.  Rick said that the greatest peril came from the saddles or low places in the rocky spines of the mountain ranges.  Sometimes, wind would find its way through those passes and a sudden titanic squall would rush like a banshee down into the fjord and, almost, set the ship on its side in the frigid sea.

After this adventure, his journeys were a bit more conventional.  But I’m told he had booked passage on the Queen Mary and planned to cross the sea in style – he liked to be on the water; after all, his forebears were Norwegian, Vikings, I suppose.  He had plans for a trip to Italy as well at the time that his heart went lethally haywire.  From evidence posted on Facebook, he spent each weekend with his grandchildren in Minneapolis or Madison, Wisconsin.  Now this is all ashes and dust.

There is a Mexican saying: God laughs when men make plans.   

9.
It’s hard to write about Rick Herreid for two reasons. 

First, I knew him for 35 years.  Time and familiarity have blurred his figure.  He is like the weather or the streets in my town, something that I have know for most of my life and, therefore, taken for granted.

Second, Rick was almost perfectly virtuous.  Descriptions of his goodness slip into maudlin hagiography.  He was even-tempered, highly intelligent, disciplined, kind, and generous.  Favorable adjectives can be heaped in mountainous piles without really being sufficient to the man.  I never heard him say anything bad or unfairly critical of a friend.  (He had no enemies.)  In a small town like Austin, a rude or cruel remark travels on the wind.  Rick didn’t conduct himself except with the highest honor.  Any unpleasant memories that I have about him arise from my own conduct, my own foul tongue, stupid things that I might have done or said in his presence.

10.
Once Rick and Karen gave a party.  The theme of the party was how completely boring they were.  Simple goodness is boring.  Doing good isn’t a successful theme for a writer.  The reader will soon conclude that the author of a treatise about a good man is either lying or ignorant.  But this would be incorrect.  Some highly intelligent people are arrogant – Rick was not.  Some people do good in the hope of a reward – this was never Rick’s motive.  Most highly disciplined and accomplished people are driven by fear – but Rick was fearless.

11.
When his children were little, Rick prepared home-made pizza on Friday nights.  He brought home fresh pepperoni and made the dough from scratch to delight his kids.

Once, with his brother, he took a class about building wood-fired grills for cooking bread and pizza.  He applied his learning to build a wood-fired oven at his family’s cabin on the St. Croix.  The oven is fantastically over-built, comprised of massive pillars of masonry on an immense concrete base.  It is sheltered by a heavy, gabled roof.  Every part of the structure is huge, even, ominous. 

The cabin on the river sits on a wooded terrace above the water. The view is extraordinary, the great reach of the river, the bluffs on the Wisconsin side towering over the blue flood, steep slopes cloaked in impenetrable woods.  The property abuts a State Park and so no one can encroach upon the land’s southern boundary.  A steep, sharply twisting gravel track leads down the cabin.  Although the place is only a mile or two from the summer cottages and restaurants of Afton, and, maybe, 10 miles from downtown St. Paul, the site feels primeval, a remote clearing in an undisturbed forest guarded by mountainous terrain and the vast, surging river. 

A thousand years from now, someone will discover the wood-fired pizza grill, the huge concrete pad and the pillars of brick and the heavy masonry vaults comprising the oven.  The archaeologists will surmise that ancient people conducted strange religious rites at this place.  What was the huge oven used for?  Were there human sacrifices?

We used to gather at the cabin in the first weekend in November.  It was a stag party and the purpose was watch what might be called examples of extreme cinema.  This meant soft-core pornography and ultra-violent Japanese films, Asian horror pictures, old monster movies and Westerns.  Two films were particularly memorable: Audition by Takashi Miike and Michael Haneke’s disturbing Funny Games.  The films began mid-afternoon on Friday and continued until exhaustion ended the exercise, usually around 3:00 pm on Sunday.  Rick used his wood-fired grill to make pizzas for the party.  I recall those pizzas as the best that I have eaten.  The crust was light and flaky, almost like pastry, with a faint flavor of sweet wood ash.  The oven was shockingly hot – it would bake a pizza perfectly in about 90 seconds.  After firing the oven, it remained hot enough to cook food, even without adding additional fuel, for about 48 hours.  The heavy masonry walls and vaults retained heat long after the fire was extinguished. 

12.
I came to St. Mary’s Hospital about an hour before the cardiologist removed the tube that was breathing for Rick.  Rick was inert.  He had become a graven monument to himself.  Like a knight of the faith in some Gothic cathedral, he seemed to rest on the hospital bed like a stone tomb.  The respirator apparatus was like a chivalric helmet somehow shifted down from his pale brow to guard his jaw and throat. The family was present and, then, a chaplain entered the room to lead a brief prayer.

Until that morning, I had never really grasped how tall Rick was, his sheer size.  He rested on the sepulcher of the bed like a fallen oak tree and his motionless hands were like great mallets.  For the first time, I noticed that he had the powerful hands of a blacksmith.

13.
Before the technicians removed the respiration tube, I leaned close to Rick and whispered in his ear.  I touched his forehead.  He brow was cool and his flaxen hair felt silky.  Of course, I had never touched him before, except to shake his hand.  Men must keep their distance.

14.
Driving home from the hospital, the water in the air changed to snow.  The freeway roamed over the grey, empty land.  The falling snow was immaterial – it made transparent veils and shrouds that flickered in the air, evanescent disturbances gone almost before you could see them.

15.
On the afternoon that Rick died, I took my dog for a long walk.  We went along the boulevard to the bridge over the dull lead-colored river and, then, along the path between the Catholic cemetery and the stream.  Gravestones glistened in the mist and the little bronze statuary group of Jesus blessing the children looked particularly forlorn against the grey, lightless skies.  The day was monochrome, its only color supplied by Halloween decorations, orange pumpkins and witches with green haggard faces, black cats and the ice-white apparitions of skeletons.  Frolicsome Death was near, carousing in the trees and falling leaves.  Sidewalks were littered with brown-gold maple leaves.  Each shapely leaf was marked by some kind of blight – hectic black marks on the upper sides of the leaves, sometimes doubled like a Rorschach pattern.  I brought several of these leaves to my office.  They sit on my desk as I write these words.

16.
On the morning of Rick’s funeral, I dreamt that I was driving to a city on a river.  On a map, a pin had been dropped at the lodging where I planned to spend the night.  I took a short cut and found that the road suddenly dropped away below me, making a descent steep as a roller-coaster to the river.  Perhaps, the city was Pittsburgh, the place where Rick was born, a tongue of land overgrown by skyscrapers between rivers and bordered by high, brown bluffs.  At the bottom of the hill, there was no bridge but it didn’t matter, my eye now was carried across the churning water.  I wanted to turn my head to see if I was on a ferry, but I had no head to turn.  I was now nothing but vision.  The opposite bank of the river loomed ahead, a ravine silver with a tiny cascade.  The hillside arrested my forward motion.  My dwelling was beyond the hill.  Above, a mountain was eroded into strange pinnacles and there were trails amid the steeples and turrets of limestone where people were strolling.  I wondered where I had left my car, my luggage, my body.  Then, I was awake and opened my eyes and saw the white Eastern sky, a pale, luminous void, the morning of the day of my friend’s funeral.

Saturday November 9, 2019

On the Soot-of-the-Sea

On the Soot-of-the-Sea




Kennings are word-formations common in Skaldic or Old Norse poetry.  This rhetorical device substitutes attributes of a thing for its name.  Thus, “blood” becomes “sword-sweat”.  “Battle” is “spear-din”.  Kennings serve several purposes: first, they allow alliteration, a characteristic element in poetry of this kind; second, kennings are difficult to decipher and, often, occult – they emphasize the incantatory nature of this kind of verse.  Skaldic poetry is intentionally daunting – it uses code known only to those who have studied not only the verse form, but, also, the mythological underpinnings to the poems.  Kennings, like runes, are a kind of word-magic.

Here is a famous group of kennings in which descriptive phrases migrate toward proper names.  The context for the verse is this: Odin, the King of the Norse Gods, learns that a ruler, Geirrod is behaving tyrannically.  Geirrod, with Agnar, are royal brothers lost at sea.  Each has been rescued by a different fisherman and “fostered” or raised in a peasant family.  Upon being returned to their homeland in Norway, Geirrod betrays Agnar, who is the oldest son, by pushing him out to sea, so that he can seize the throne.  Odin is upset by this misconduct and takes on the disguise of Grimnir (this means “masked”).  Grimnir goes to Geirrod’s court where he is mistreated by Geirrod.  In fact, Geirrod sensing that the stranger is a repository of occult wisdom tries to wrest those truths from the traveler by torturing him.  He roasts the God between two fires.  Agnar, who has returned to the kingdom, is present and he offers the tortured stranger a drink of water.  In exchange, Grimnir tells his wisdom to Agnar. (Later, Geirrod trips and falls on his own sword, skewering himself and the true heir to the throne, Agnar is restored.)  The majority of the poem consists of Odin disguised as Grimnir telling the secrets of the Norse gods.  This text is called the Grimnismal.

At stanza 18 of Grimnismal, these words appear:

Andhrimnir in Elhrimnir / Has Saehrimnir boiled / Best of pork, yet few knew / on what the einherjar are nourished.

The text solves the puzzle of how Odin nourishes his retainers, the einherjar (“lone warriors”)  at Valhalla.  800 of the best fighters, selected by the Valkyries from those slain in battle, live in Valhalla.  This retinue, selected to serve the gods on the day of the apocalypse (Ragnarok) spend all day fighting, literally hacking each other apart, to be reassembled for feasting each night.  But feasting on what?  Andhrimnir means “Sooty front” or “Sooty face” – this is the name of Valhalla’s cook.  Eldhrimnir means “fire-sooty” and refers to the massive pot used to boil the victuals of Odin’s fighters.  Saehrimnir means “Sea Soot” or “Soot of the Sea” – it is a kenning taken to refer to a magical pig.  Saehrimnir, “best of pork” has the efficacy of being butchered each day, boiled in Eldhrimnir to be served by “Sooty Face”, the cook, to the hungry multitude – Saehrimnir is inexhaustible; the huge pig revives each morning, like the warriors he survives multiple slaughter and butchery to be available each day for the evening repast. 

We know Saehrimnir names a pig – otherwise the appellation “best of pork” makes no sense.  But why is beast named “Soot-of-the-Sea”?  Hrimnir is cognate with the English word “rime’ used to mean hoar-frost or the coating of fine ice crystals where vapor has condensed and frozen on a cold object.  The Old Norse word for “soot” is normally “sot” – a term related to “settle down upon” or “deposit.”  Therefore, the use of hrimnir for sot is already poetic.  The primary meaning of hrim and hrimnir is hoar-frost.  The efficacy of this term’s poetic use in the Grimnismal is to combine in a single word images related to fire and ice – the hrimnir in this setting is a compact oxymoron: it denotes the “rime” or hoar-frost that is created by fire.  In effect, the word has a sense of both fire/burning and ice/freezing entangled together in a single term – the effect is baroque and well-suited to the poem’s context, the tyrant’s torture of the stranger between the two fires. 

But what is the connection between the hrimnir (or hoar-frost soot) and the sea?  This is obscure – there are certainly a number of usages in which nautical terms or sea creatures are metaphorically linked to hogs.  (In the First Law of Helgi, Hunding Slayer at stanza 50, a seafaring ships are described under the kenning “blue-black-briny hogs”.  Ships are also sometimes referred to as “unnsvin” – that is “wave swine” and this word also is used for a sea-creature, likely a porpoise.  In English, a dolphin is a “herring-hog” and Danish calls the animal “marsvin” (“sea-swine”). But the analogies here run in the opposite direction of Saehrimnir which does not describe a sea beast but a land animal.)  Why would you name a pig “Soot of the Sea” or, for that manner, “hoar-frost of the sea”. 

The only conjecture that I can draw on this subject is that “Sae” (sea) may be related to “sow”.  The word Saehrimnir may be a pun – “sow”- soot or the soot that is deposited when a hog is roasted.  The connection to the sea may be that the pig is inexhaustible – like the vast and endless sea, the magical pig is boundless, has no limits, it’s flesh is oceanic.  Thus, the animal is named “Sea/Sow – soot”.  The Icelandic scholar, most likely the redoubtable Snorri Sturlason, who transcribed the verse from Grimnismal in his Poetic Edda undoubtedly knew Latin.  This leads to an additional surmise: the Latin name for pigs is Suidae (“swine”) – the word is pronounced like “soo-day” and sounds in English, at least, like “sooty”.  (Some etymologies claim that the pig call: “Sooey!” is related to the Latin name for the animal.)  Thus, Sturlason may have thought “suidae” for hog, heard a pun on “sooty” in Old Norse, and, then, thought of the prefix “Sae” as meaning both “soot” and “sea” – hence “sae -sot” for sea/soot then translating the “soot” into hrimnir for poetic effect.  Another idea that occurs to me is that pork may have been salted for preservation – was pork preserved in brine made from sea-salt?  So, does, Saehrimnir mean “sea-rime” or salt, perhaps, a kenning for “salted pork”.  “Salted pork” in the form of ham is often regarded as more or less inexhaustible.  There is a modern aphorism on this subject: in her Joy of Cooking, Irma Rombauer says “Eternity is two people and a ham”.  (The origin of the aphorism may be Dorothy Parker.)  The point may be that a pickled ham may seem inexhaustible to those eating it.  Saehrimnir may just mean “brined pork” or ham. 

I am skeptical about my own theory here.  It relies too much on the meaning of “soot” in English.  If any of my readers has a better surmise as to why “best of pork” is called “Soot of the Sea”, please let me know.

On the Anniversary of that Inevitable Day


*** **
East and West reach across to touch at the freeway.  On both horizons: windmills so far away that look like toys, whirligigs gesturing at the edge of the earth.

*
I read a poem once premised on the idea that once a year we live through the day on which we will die – a date just as real and distinct as the date on which we were born, but unknown to us.  I think the poem may have been by W.S. Merwin.  That day is like the prime meridian, a silent, featureless landmark accessible only to the imagination (if accessible at all) – as our lives revolve, we pass over that line unaware.

**
I bought tickets to see the Des Moines Opera Company perform Alban Berg’s Wozzeck.  My companion was unable to attend and, so, I went alone.

***
Perhaps, I have driven around Des Moines twenty times in my life.  The capitol building with its taut, constricted dome is the first thing you see.  The freeway makes a loop to the west and, then, south.  Empty zones full of jungle and gravel pits with aggregate pinnacles and tilted, ladder-like conveyors funnel inward from the north toward the city.  Huge brown rivers are coiled in those empty spaces, fetal-shaped oxbow lakes and marshes full of white birds with long stilt legs flank the muscular streams – it floods in these places and, once, I drove past Des Moines when the city was a mere island, surrounded on all sides by enormous expanses of glittering water, rivers hidden under the vast bland lagoons made by the deluge.

****
Three or four times, I have exited the freeway and gone into Des Moines.  Once, I was with a law partner and we met with claims representatives in a downtown tower to discuss our firm defending liability cases brought against the insurance company’s policyholders.  The chief claims manager was a little bald man who smoked a pipe and had owl eyes under thick glasses.  On another occasion, I was going to Kansas City, but was ahead of schedule and so searched the downtown area for a used bookstore – without success if I remember correctly.  Once, I went to the art museum in a renowned building by a famous Finnish architect.  After a long drive, one evening, I pulled into Des Moines and ate spaghetti and meatballs at a restaurant at the edge of the modest skyscrapers downtown.

*****
I was surprised that the opera tickets were for a performance space in Indianola, another river valley town 15 miles to the south of Des Moines.  Indianola has about 14,000 residents but there is a college there in a leafy residential part of town and the opera was sung at the concert hall on campus. 



*** **
I was born in Chadron, Nebraska.  I can tell you my birthday.  I will leave it to my readers to research my deathday.  My father attended Iowa State University at Ames, 33 miles north of Des Moines.  As a baby and, then, toddler, I lived with my parents in Ames.  My father studied mathematics.  We had a German shepherd dog named Frieda.  The dog had to be put down for some reason that I don’t know.  I was relieved when Frieda went away because the dog was big and, when she jumped on me, I went sprawling to the ground.  The vet station was part of the college.  The floor was concrete, incised with gutters in which water was running. 

*
I have a Labrador Retriever named Frieda now.  I walk my dog every day.

**
On the road to Indianola, I listened to a compilation of ballads called “People Take Warning”.  These were songs, mostly recorded between 1925 and 1933, about natural disasters, fires and floods and great ships sinking at sea, locomotives hurled off the tracks, bridges collapsing into rivers, droughts and celebrated murders.  The music was sizzling in a hot grease of static.  I listened as hard as I could, giving my ears good exercise, but could only decipher about half the words yowled by the old banjo players to guitar and jug band accompaniment. 

***
The Rest Stop midway between Des Moines and the Minnesota border was dedicated to Iowa boys killed in the Civil War at some forgotten battle in Louisiana.  Strange black bulbs, like the heads of asparagus, germinated from the hot field behind the toilets.  It was some sort of art work wrought iron sculptures around a small slab of limestone carved with these words:  On Fame's, camping ground / The tents are solemnly spread / For here will be found / The silent bivouac of the Dead.

****
Off Interstate 35 at the second Ames exit, west-bound on 30 toward Boone.  Grey buildings nudging one another and the deck of a big stadium cantilevered over a lower slope of seats, all empty now: Jack Trice stadium.  Jack Trice was a black athlete, an animal husbandry major.  He played football as a tackle for the Iowa State Cyclones.  On October 6, 1923, he was badly injured in his first football game, stomped and punched by members of the Minnesota Gophers.  Minneapolis doctors thought Trice was fit to return by train to Ames.  But he died of a collapsed lung and pulmonary embolism two days later.  Accounts vary as to exactly what occurred in the game.  It is clear that Trice stayed at the downtown Radisson Hotel in Minneapolis the night before the football game but was not allowed to eat in the restaurant with his all White teammates.  ISU didn’t play Minnesota again for fifty-two years in protest of murderous behavior by the Golden Gophers.

When he was dressed to be put in his casket, a neatly folded sheet of paper was found in Jack Trice’s suit pocket.  The paper contained words written Radisson Hotel stationary:

My thoughts before the first real college game of my life.  The honor of my race, family, and self is at stake.  Everyone is expecting me to do big things.  I will!  My whole body and soul are to be thrown recklessly over the field tomorrow.  Every time the ball is snapped, I will try to do more than my part.  On all defensive plays, I must break through the opponent’s line and stop the play in their territory.  Beware of mass interference!  Fight low with your eyes open and toward the play.  Watch out for cross-bucks and reverse end-runs.  Be on your toes every minute if you expect to make good.  Jack

*****
Is there a Ballad of Jack Trice?


*** **
There are many ballads about train disasters.  One of the most famous is “The Wreck of the Old 97.”  The Old 97 was a mail express that derailed on the Danville line.  The song refers to a real crash that occurred in 1903 on a curve uphill from the Stillhouse Trestle.  In the ballad, the engineer is pressured to speed in order to make up for earlier delays.  When he loses his air brake, we learn: He was goin’ down grade makin’ 90 an hour / When his whistle began to scream! / He was found in the wreck with his hand on the throttle / All scalded to death by the steam.  Ballads of this sort must point a moral and, so, the balladeer ends with these lines: So come you ladies, you must take warning / From this time on and learn / Never part on harsh words from your true lovin’ husband / For he may leave you and never return.

*
Kate Shelley (or Shelly as she sometimes wrote her name) was shanty-Irish born to a tenant farmer in County Offaly, Ireland. When she was 1 ½, Kate came as an immigrant to the United States.  Her family settled on the frontier, in Iowa near the village of Boone, in 1865.  The country was wild then, with Indians and wolves, and the Shelley family homesteaded 163 acres near Honey Creek, a little stream that runs in a deep ravine down to the much larger Des Moines river.  Farming was difficult and the crops failed several years and Kate’s father, Michael, went to work on the Chicago and Northwestern railroad, then, laying track and building trestles over the rivers near the homestead.  Michael died of consumption in 1878.  Kate and her mother worked the farm, plowing and harvesting, often without the labor of draft animals.  Kate had four siblings, but her youngest brother, James, drowned swimming in the broad muddy waters of the Des Moines River.

**
On the night of July 6, 1881, when Kate was either 16 or 18 (her grave’s dates don’t match the baptism records in County Offalay), a savage thunderstorm darkened the skies.  The wind blew down trees and there were torrential rains.  People reported that timbers from a railroad bridge were floating in the Des Moines River.  The station master thought that the high trestle over the Des Moines River might be down and so he telegraphed for a Pusher locomotive to come out and inspect the line.  The Pusher never made it to the Des Moines River – the small trestle over Honey Creek a few dozen rods from the Shelley cabin had collapsed.  The locomotive crashed into the swollen Honey Creek.  Two of the men on locomotive drowned and the other two clambered up on top of the engine, seizing hold of the branches whipping overhead while the warm, muddy flood waters fanged with fallen trees rose up around their ankles.

***
Kate Shelley heard the crash of the locomotive into Honey Creek.  She ran to the side of the swollen stream and saw the men trapped on the engine.  She said that she would bring help and, then, dashed across the wooded promontory where the Des Moines River curves around the point of land.  Through the driving rain, she saw the high trestle, a hundred feet or more above the dark, turbulent river.  Another train was scheduled shortly and Kate was afraid that it would also plunge into Honey Creek where the bridge was down.  In the flashes of lightning, Kate could see that the high trestle, about 220 yards long, seemed to be still intact.  So she started across the rail bridge.   The wind buffeted her and she had to drop to her knees and crawl across the open trestle.  Debris in the river was battering the bridge and she felt the timbers trembling under her.  Wind-driven rain blinded her and, several times, she couldn’t see to go forward.  She clutched at the rail, but, slowly, inched forward.  Of course, if she couldn’t clear the trestle before the train arrived, the locomotive would run over her.  In the distance, she heard the wail of the locomotive’s steam whistle.  She continued her crawl and reached the opposite bank of the river just in time to hail the locomotive and bring it to a stop.  She reported that the bridge was out on Honey Creek.  The train inched across the high trestle, stopped on the other side of the river, and Kate, then, led a rescue party to the creek where the bedraggled survivors of the wreck were pulled out of the foaming flood. 

****
Photographs show a lanky girl with a horsy pig-tail and big teeth.  She has dull, unimaginative eyes.  I suppose that if she had been a person with a vivid imagination, she would never have attempted her crawl across the deadly high trestle bridge.  The Chicago and Northwestern rewarded her with a barrel of flour, 100 dollars, and a lifelong railroad pass. A few years after her exploits, a temperance reformer paid her tuition to college.  She didn’t do well in school and returned to the shanty near Honey Creek.  A Chicago bank paid to have the ramshackle farm improved and lifted a mortgage that was in arrears.  In 1903, she was appointed superintendent of the tiny train station at Moingona, two miles from the farm near the creek.  Kate Shelley didn’t marry and died in 1912 from complications of a ruptured appendix. 

*****
People wrote ballads about Kate Shelley’s adventure on the trestle over the Des Moines but the songs have been forgotten.  In 1991, a children’s book was written about her exploits.  But it is now out-of-print.  The Boone County historical society maintains the abandoned station at Moingona as a museum in her honor.  But the roof leaks and the collections have been spoiled and the museum is never open, even by appointment. 

*** **
You can’t really tell the story of Kate Shelley without falsifying it.  In my account, I describe her crawling across the trestle in the direction of the oncoming train, the Scranton occupied by 200 souls.  In fact, she crawled across the trestle in the opposite direction toward Moingona so that she could alert the station master there.  He sent a telegraph halting the Scranton before it reached the high trestle. She carried a lantern onto the trestle but the wind blew it out.  I imagine the lone girl staggering down the tracks and waving a lantern in the face of both storm and the black iron jaws of the locomotive.  In fact, she crossed the trestle so that the stationmaster could alert the oncoming train to the collapsed bridge at Honey Creek.   A map displayed at the Moingona Station, now the desolate Kate Shelley museum explains the story – but it isn’t really very clear. 

*
Moingona is a tic-tac-toe grid of gravel roads on the hillside over the Des Moines River.  In mid-summer the trees and foliage are thick and you can’t see either the river or the famous high trestle – the old iron girders now doubled by a modern viaduct that runs alongside the old structure.  The station house is pushed into a notch of clearing cut out of the undergrowth.  There are no tracks nearby – either the place was moved or the spur into Moingona is now gone.  Some outdoor exhibits tell the story of Kate Shelley.  The building smells of defeated, collapsing timbers and rotting shingles.  The drive-way to the building ends at the green wall of the jungle.

**
A sign marks the trail to the Mill Creek Bridge.  I follow the trail down hill.  It has been raining daily in this part of the world and the trail in the green shadow is slick.  Mosquitos make a froth around my eyes and my wrist wears a bracelet of them.  The air is steamy, congested, tropical with rot.

***
Below the hill, a turbid stream exhausts itself in deep mud.  Someone has thrown a plankboard bridge over the stream – it’s a couple of parallel two-by-fours spanned by boards, about eight feet long and simply lying in the ooze.  About a third of the cross-members are rotted-out.

****
I venture out onto the plank walkway.  The boards groan and feels spongy underfoot and so I’m afraid to take more than a couple of steps on the little plank bridge.  The forest is tangled on all sides and swarming with mosquitos and the breeze-less air is steamy.  I’m no Kate Shelley – this eight-foot long bridge has defeated me.  I step back onto the slippery mud bank.

*****
The Mill Creek bridge is overhead.  It’s so entangled in vine and underbrush that, at first, my eyes have to adapt to the boreal shadow to detect the structure.  The bridge was built in 1871 from crumbling fieldstone and it is high as a house, a tawny vault of rock that looks like an Etruscan tomb.

*** **
You can’t see the either the Shelley High Trestle or the old Wagon Wheel bridge over the Des Moines from Moingona.  Highway 30 ducks down into the river valley and crosses on concrete piers about forty feet above the tense-looking angry brown flood.  In this area, the river bends sharply in one direction and, then, another. Presumably, the Wagon Wheel bridge, one of the oldest spans in Iowa, juts across the river somewhere around the hairpin bend. 

*
My receptionist, Angie is from this part of Iowa and she’s familiar with the railroad trestles over the Des Moines River.  When she was in High School, kids drank beer on the sand bars sheltered by the big skeletal structures. 

**
About ten years ago, Angie’s brother was with some kids under the Wagon Wheel bridge.  This span was built in the 1870's for cart and wagon traffic.  It was a long deck, just wide enough to support a single lane of traffic, fenced by iron girders bolted together on both sides of the thoroughfare.  The bridge was old by the turn of the century before World War One and clumsy-looking, but it served its purpose.

***
The boys drinking under the bridge in August 2010 found a book bag with some papers, notebooks, and toiletries.  The book bag was lying on the edge of the river under the span.  A few yards away, the boys saw something round, about the size of a chicken carcass, and englobed with flies.  It was someone’s head.  A heap of rags covered a torso with arms outstretched nearby.  The kids were horrified and ran to a nearby farmhouse to call the cops.

****
The head and body proved to be a suicide.  Someone had tried to hang himself from the side of the bridge.  But the drop was too long and the suicide’s neck was pulled apart so that the corpse fell in two parts under the Wagon Wheel bridge.

*****
The suicide wasn’t identified for more than a week.  No one local was missing.  The dead man turned out to be someone from Chicago, a resident of Cook County, Illinois.  Angie told me that her brother still has nightmares about that afternoon to this very day.

*** **
I drove around in the countryside near the brawny-looking Des Moines River.  But I couldn’t find the Wagon Wheel Bridge.  Later, I learned that an ice dam under the bridge’s piers had taken the span down in March of 2016.  Today there’s no trace of the bridge remaining.

*
I took Highway 17 south past Madrid, the location of another renowned high trestle – it’s now part of a bike path – and, then, onto the freeway west of the City.  The opera was in Indianola and so I drove down to an exit in the green, sweltering country and went east through tropical-looking valleys toward that town.

**
Signs by the roadside: When you die, you will meet God and The World will end soon.  More enigmatically: End Eminent Domain Abuse!

***
Out of Oskaloosa or Iowa City, a radio show called Daddy’s Doghouse, broadcast from the VA hospital: “When a Man loves a Woman” and some tunes by Janis Joplin.  My car catches the radio signal only on the crests of the hills.

****
At the Warren County Fairgrounds in Indianola: a Monster Truck Rally.  Girls in bathing suits washing cars for a fundraiser in the Hy-Vee grocery parking lot. 

*****
The opera is performed in a auditorium on a college campus in the middle of town.  The campus occupies a couple of acres in the middle of a residential neighborhood with quiet sidewalks and two-car garages.  I park between some classroom buildings with steeples and mansard roofs.  The sidewalk leads along a greensward under old trees.  Ahead of me, an elderly man forges forward confined in his walker while his wife trudges dutifully alongside.

*** **   
Johann Christian Woyzeck served in the Prussian army until he was 38.  He, then, retired to his home city of Leipzig – this was around 1818.  In Leipzig, Woyzeck began a relationship with a woman named Johanne Christiane Woost.  The former soldier supported himself by serving as a barber and making wigs.  Woyzeck had a son with Fraulein Woost.  But he suspected her of infidelity and beat her up.  The police arrested Woyzeck.  He served eight days in jail for domestic abuse.  Released from jail, Woyzeck had nowhere to go.  He begged on the streets.  On June 2, 1821, Woyzeck cut Fraulein Woost’s throat, killing her.  He was immediately arrested and confessed.  Woyzeck had been hallucinating before the murder and some of the authorities thought he was insane.  A physician, Dr. Clarus, was commissioned to examine him and write a forensic report as to his criminal responsibility for the murder.  Dr. Clarus met with Woyzeck five times and, ultimately, concluded that the former soldier was sane when he killed his common law wife.  An appeal from the murder conviction followed, another doctor saw Woyzeck, and, then, Dr. Clarus met with him again for another five sessions.  Once more, Dr. Clarus affirmed Woyzeck’s sanity.  The criminal was executed by beheading in the Leipzig city square on August 27, 1824.  This was the last execution in Leipzig prior to the Nazi period.

*
Georg Buechner was born in 1813 in Darmstadt.  He is one of the greatest prodigies in German literature.  While studying medicine, Buechner wrote a vehement revolutionary tract, Die Hessisches Landbote (The Hessian Courier) – he was only 21.  The tract calls for immediate revolution and begins with instructions that any person caught with the brochure on his or her person will be imprisoned and, possibly, executed – so readers are advised to destroy the tract if apprehended by authorities.  Buechner followed this political agit-prop with two plays, Danton’s Tod (“Danton’s Death”) and Leonce und Lena, a comedy a bit after the model of Shakespeare’s As You Like It.  Both plays are monuments of German literature and were published before Buchner was 23.  He, then, wrote a harrowing, partly non-fiction account of madness, the prose piece “Lenz” – the novella describes the German poet and dramatist Lenz, who went mad, suffering a breakdown in the mountains.  Buechner also published scientific essays on the cerebral nerves (he wrote in a letter “I spend my days dissecting cadavers and my nights writing plays”) and on the nervous system of the barbel or catfish.  (He also translated two plays by Victor Hugo and wrote hundreds of letters).  During his last year, Buechner became interested in the case of Johann Christian Woyzeck, read the trial transcript, and, also, studied the competing forensic reports as to Woyzeck’s state of mind when he killed Fraulein Woost.  Ultimately, Buechner prepared four manuscripts comprising scenes to a play about Woyzeck.  He died before he could assemble the fragments into a definitive edition.  Typhoid killed him when he was 25.  Woyzeck is a play that exists outside of its time – it is more fierce and didactic than Brecht and more despairing than Beckett.  It also seems a kind of dead end – nihilism has no place to go after Woyzeck.

**
Woyzeck was rediscovered in the 1870's on twelve sheets of paper densely covered with tiny, illegible handwriting.  Various editors have stitched the fragments into different editions.  The play was first performed under the direction of Max Reinhardt in Berlin in 1914 – that is, a hundred years after Buechner’s death.  The avant-garde composer Alban Berg saw the play and forged it into an opera that was first presented in 1925.  The opera is atonal, written according to the 12-tone row system, and requires a large orchestra.  The music is either a whisper or a shriek. 

***
Berg’s opera is called Wozzeck.  This is because no one had reliably deciphered Buechner’s handwriting and missed the “y” in the name.  Because the name was spelled wrong, many years passed before the Leipzig trial records that Buechner used for his material were identified as relevant to the drama. 

****
The question that Woyzeck and the opera named Wozzeck consider is the much-vexed issue of free-will.  Did the murderer act as a result of free-will decision to kill his common-law wife?  Or was he the victim of forces, including the onset of mental illness, that stripped him of any ability to resist the hallucinations and savage jealousy urging him to kill the woman.  Buechner imagines his title character as a kind of automaton or marionette – a man programmed, as it were, by misery of various kinds to commit the murder that resulted in his execution.  The military has turned Woyzeck into a robot designed to follow orders.  Religion has filled his head with apocalyptic imagery.  To earn money, Woyzeck has agreed to serve as an experimental subject conducted by a physician – he has been eating nothing but beans for the past six months and this diet has weakened him.  Sexual jealousy further tilts poor Woyzeck into a state of madness in which he cuts his Fraulein Woost’s throat.

*****
In an early scene in the opera, Wozzeck and his friend, Andres, are gathering sticks in the forest.   They come upon a sinister-looking pond surrounded by mushrooms growing in strange circular patterns.  Wozzeck recalls that someone was wandering in this clearing in the woods once and saw what they thought was a hedgehog.  When the wanderer approached the creature, he saw that it was actually a severed human head.  The head gnashed its teeth and slowly levitated into the air. 

*** **
Strangely bright outside after the gloom of the opera.  Old people on the sidewalks walking in the green shadows cast by the trees.  Even the shadows seem radiant so brilliant is the light. 

*
North to Des Moines through verdant valleys – small farmsteads, fields of corn and soybean, ditches decorated with wild flowers.

**
South of downtown Des Moines, the highway becomes a long avenue running through old, dilapidated neighborhoods.  Most of the signs are in Spanish: Zacatecas Motors and Aztec Car Repair.  The heat has emptied out the streets.

***
Eight-hundred yards from the capitol building, the road runs over a long viaduct.  I expect to see a river in the broad green channel below but instead it is simply an empty space, a kind of campagna, with groves of tattered-looking trees, mounds, a road running below toward a single rotting grain elevator poking up from the fields like a broken tooth.  This area was once, I suppose, lined with many railroad tracks and, presumably, there were a dozen or more grain elevators next to the sidings, switching lots, and rows of taverns and whorehouses next to the huge trainyard.  But the tracks are gone and the grain elevators torn down except for that last structure standing utterly alone in the strange, empty valley where the wind blows and the tall grass trembles along the deserted rights-of-way.

****
My CD, People Take Warning, has ballads about crime: rapes and murders, enraged women killing their lovers, bandits gunned down by railroad cops.  Sudden death is all around

*****
People all take warning / And don’t forget to pray / You may well meet your maker / Before the break of day.

*** **
Floyd Collins died in a lonely sand cave:   Young people all take warning from Floyd Collin’s fate / And get right with your maker before it is too late / It may not be a sand cave in which we find our tomb / But when we go to the Maker we will meet our doom.

*
A school burned down: You could hear the children screaming / As the flames were rising high / Oh Daddy get your baby / Don’t let your baby die.

**
A plane crashed: On a happy-go-lucky flight they went / Alaska’s not so far away / Light-hearted Will Rogers and brave Wiley Post / Never dreamt fate would call that day.

***
I stop for supper in Clear Lake, Iowa.  Signs lead me to the Surf Ballroom, a flat windowless box of pale brick in which the half-circle of a vault makes a cresting wave over the famous dance floor.  After Buddy Holly played here, he boarded a small plane for a flight to Fargo.  The plane crashed in a cornfield a mile or so away and Holly, with most of his band was killed. 

****
When you reach my age, every road that you travel may be your last.  I wonder if I will ever drive to Des Moines again.  Was this trip to the city the last time I will go to that place?  The city will be in its valley surrounded by floods, the highway will run straight and true, people will still await the curtain’s rise in a crowded theater, the fields will remain green and grey with tall corn and soybeans, the brown river will still nudge the concrete pylons, but I will be gone.

*****
An outlaw bold encounters a female sheriff – the woman points a Thompson submachine gun at the bad man: I’ve had my worldly pleasures / I’ve faced down many a man / But it was down in Texarkana / Where a woman called my hand... Young men, young men take warning / Oh take my last advice / If you start the game in life wrong / You must surely pay the price.


July 2019

On the Work of the Critic

In his Laws, Plato decrees:

In regard then to every representation, whether in drawing, music or any other art, he, who is to be a competent judge, must possess three requisites: he must know in the first place what the imitation is, secondly, he must know of its correctness, and, thirdly, that it has been well-executed in words and melodies and rhythms.  (669 a, b)

Several aspects of this declaration deserve further consideration.  In Plato’s dialogues, the work of the artist, particularly the poet, is disenfranchised and, even, regarded as potential inimical to the well-being of the City.  The sensuous world is already a copy of the invisible Ideas or Forms.  Therefore, the artist or poet operates at a second remove from reality – he copies what is already a copy.  His activity is superfluous and a distraction from the political and metaphysical realities that Socrates endorses: human participation in the city as a place in which justice is enacted and the ascent from the shadow realm of every day existence toward the radiant domain of the Ideas.  (In this scheme, the critic would operate at a third remove from the Truth – he contemplates and describes a copy of a copy: that is, his criticism is representation of what is already a representation of a representation.)  Plato’s prescription as to the work of the critic in his Laws seems much more benign.  Unlike Socrates, Plato seems to think that there is a valid place for the arts in the City and that the critic, further, has an important role in assessing the work of artists.

The critic’s first order of business is “recognizing” what is being “imitated” – Plato uses the word gignoskein for this cognitive activity.  Second, the critic must assess whether the representation is “true” – he uses the word “orthos” for this faculty.  Finally, the critic must assess whether the work’s form is beautiful and properly tailored to the thing imitated – the Greek prefix eu is here deployed as in eurhythmic (beautiful rhythm).  Observe that these three canons all relate to “imitation”.  All art “imitates”.  We might question this fundamental assumption: what does music imitate?  What does a painting by Jackson Pollock imitate?  But, I think, these objections can be readily met: music imitates the motion of the soul or spirit as it progresses through various intellectual states and emotions – music imitates, therefore, ecstasy, resignation, sorrow, joy and the various transitions between these states of being.  Similarly, one might observe that an abstract painting is, also, a depiction of the artist’s state of mind, his or her emotional response to physical or spiritual stimuli.  Therefore, the concept of imitation, probably, is elemental to the arts.

Also problematic, I suppose, is the distinction between the first two cognitive faculties that the critic is required to exercise: what is the difference between “recognizing” the imitation and determining if the imitation is “true”?  Presumably, if the imitation is not true, the critic won’t be able to recognize the subject of the imitation.  Thus, on first analysis, the notion of “recognition” and orthos (or truth) seem be so closely aligned that it may be difficult to draw an exact distinction.  But I think recognition has a different broader meaning.  In my view, recognition is categorical.  The critic must determine the category of thing offered to his analysis by the artist.  In a sense, I think this consideration involves genre.  What type of art work are we presented: is the play a tragedy, a satyr-play, or a comedy?  Are we dealing with an opera or a musical comedy?  Is the canvas a nude or a history painting or a still life?  Are we dealing with a lyric poem, a sonnet, or epic verse?  Accordingly, I think, Plato means that the critic must initially discern the generic category to which the art object belongs as a predicate for considering whether the representation is “true” or “orthotic.”

In this context, the final category seems clear and readily understood: once we know the genre into which the art object fits (that is, we understand how it acknowledges and embodies the historical tradition of this sort of representation), then, we can assess the truth of what we are shown, and, finally, how the form and stylistic parameters of the work embody its meaning.  Viewed in this light, the three species of cognition that Plato urges are (1) historical (how does the work conform or differ from previous works of the same general sort) (2) moral – is the work true? Or does it lie in some way? and (3) stylistic – how does the way the work is made embody its genre and meanings?

Let’s apply these criteria to an art work: consider the 1956 Western, The Fastest Gun Alive, a modest and relatively low-budget B-movie starring Glenn Ford. 

If I am right that the first element of criticism is categorical, then, we must ask: What is the nature of The Fastest Gun Alive?  What is its genre?  Of course, the film is a Western and must be understood within the grouping of films (and writings) of that kind.  Westerns share family resemblances – that is, no two Westerns are identical, but many of them will demonstrate similar themes and bear a resemblance to other works of that kind.  Fundamental to the Western is the distinction that these films draw between the wilderness and civilization.  The mountains and the desert, inhabited by outlaws and Indians, besiege the enclaves of villages – in the wilderness, men must be self-reliant and ready to defend themselves and their kin without recourse to the law.  Conflict arises when the wilderness encounters the village – that is, at the intersection between the wilderness and the town.  The settled land represented by the town is peopled by women, children, nuclear families – the periphery is where bands of outlaws and tribes of warriors roam.  Women and children represent civilizing forces.  In towns, people pursue commerce and live according to economies involving money, wages, and exchange of goods for currency; in the wilderness, people forage for gold and treasure and rob one another.  The town represents community; the wild territory is inhabited by nomadic outlaws, stoic, aloof, and dangerous individuals.  Of course, from the outset, the definitions informing wilderness and civilization, and the moralities associated with the two places, are mutable – in fact, in later Westerns, that mourn the passing of the wild country, the values invert: the city is corrupt, dangerous, full of cowardly bourgeois who lack the means to defend themselves (for instance the  in High Noon or the politicians in Peckinpah’s later films); by contrast, the wild places of desert and high sierra are pure, suffused with the old virtues of self-reliance and pioneer rectitude.  It doesn’t matter whether town or wilderness is morally privileged.  The essence of the Western is the clash between the values of the frontier and the self-reliant morality of the wilderness.

The Fastest Gun Alive begins with a shot of a angular peak bisecting a wedge of cloudy sky.  It’s black and white and an image of the wilderness.  Next, we see three bad hombres riding across the desert after emerging from behind the ridge of the mountain.  The bad men enter a town, threaten one of the people there, and the leader of the bandits shoots the man down, after invoking the archaic code of the West to force his victim to draw his gun.  George Temple, the gunslinger in retirement, is a man of the town.  He has been civilized by his wife, a beautiful statuesque woman who announces that she is pregnant in the first scene between man and wife.  Like innumerable frontier hamlets, from the village in William S. Hart’s Hells Hinges (1916) to the mining camp in McCabe and Mrs. Miller,(1971) a church with steeple occupies the center of the town.  The church symbolizes both the blessings and discontents of civilization: the church signifies organized religion and community spirit, but can also represent hypocrisy and the herd mentality of the town-folk.  George Temple precipitates the film’s crisis when he demonstrates his virtuosity with his six-gun – he has become bored with his profession as a dry goods merchant, a job that requires him to sell candy to children and respond to the petty complaints of female customers.  Genre exists so that the artist can reverse polarities with respect to fundamental values and devise variations on well-established themes.  For these ingenious complications and fugue-like reiterations of themes to be effective, however, the critical eyes must recognize that the film operates within the parameters of the classical Western.

One sequence in The Fastest Gun Alive demonstrates how far a film can stray from its genre while still remaining rooted in the Western form.  About fifteen minutes into the film, the narrative pauses to incorporate a spectacular dance number performed by a minor character, really a figure who has no real role in the narration at all, a young man (Russ Tamblyn) courting a woman at a barn dance.  The dance sequence involves elaborate gymnastics, trampoline-like effects implemented courtesy of a see-saw, and a stomping hoe-down executed by the young man perched atop stilt-like shovels.  This sequence can’t be reconciled to the generally earnest and psychologically acute tone of the rest of the film – this was an adult Western and involves speeches in which characters agonize over earlier psychic trauma.  The scene is like an archaeological artifact embedded in the movie – it reminds us that Westerns, even those with pretensions toward seriousness, were intended as entertainment for all categories of viewers.  Thus, the form admits song and dance numbers – anything is admissible, more or less, so long as it entertains the viewers.  In the comedy Western, Way out West (1937) with Laurel and Hardy, there are carefully choreographed song and dance numbers; many Western heroes play guitar and sing around the campfire (think of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers); even some John Ford Westerns feature musical interludes, ballads and lullabies sung to restless herds of cattle.  With their overdetermined and stylized elements, and the generally fantastical mood that prevails in many Westerns, these inserted song and dance numbers remind us that the Western is not fundamentally realistic but, in fact, derives from ballads and bears some kinship to the movie musical – in fact, the athletic dancer in this scene, Russ Tamblyn had earlier achieved fame for similarly muscular dancing in the Western musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954).  The elaborate dance scene in The Fastest Gun Alive reminds us that genre films are never pure:  they can incorporate any number of extraneous elements so long as the basic requirement – that the audience be continuously entertained – is achieved.

Having recognized The Fastest Gun Alive as a Western, we, then, turn to the question of truth.  Is the movie “truthful”?  Since the film is a genre picture, there’s no point in asking whether the movie is true to the historical realities of the old West.  The old West establishes a system of oppositions and clashing value systems that define the film’s narrative.  But no real claim to historical authority or accuracy is made – in fact, this picture remains self-consciously vague as to where it is set.  Nothing really defines the year in which the action takes place, nor does the plot or script tell us where the town is located.  We are shown a map but this is merely to establish that the bad outlaws are close to the village where the story is set and will arrive there shortly.  The imminent arrival of the murderous bandits (and, then, the posse that is determinedly chasing them) set up a “ticking clock” – the action has to be compressed into the time represented by the film (which is essentially an Aristotelian “real time” during the last hour of the movie; in other words events unfold without edits suggesting the passage of time – this is made manifest when a crisis is announced and a threat made to burn down the village “in five minutes”.  The screen time that lapses is, then, in fact, five minutes.)  The need to create urgency that will impel the action to its climax explains the shots showing a map and the progress of the bandits across the open spaces between the little isolated village.  But the map doesn’t tell us where the action takes place or, even, the State or territory where events are happening.  We aren’t shown anything to explain why the town exists in the middle of nowhere or how its economy works.  Details as to date, time, year, and location are left conspicuously ambiguous.  We know generally that the action occurs after Wyatt Earp and other famous gunmen clashed in Dodge City – but, beyond that vague reference, no effort is made to correlate the film to any of the truths that history might establish.

So how should truth be defined in the context of this film?  With respect to The Fastest Gun Alive, the notion of truth has a psychological inflection.  Truth means a truthful representation of human emotion and impulses.  More broadly defined “truth” here means fidelity to group dynamics – the movie purports to show us not only psychological truths but also truths that are descriptive of how men and women in a community act in forming a moral consensus and, then, implementing the values that they proclaim themselves to hold in common.  The truths explored in the film relate to how psychological trauma if not resolved leads to violence – George Temple has witnessed his father’s death and failed to avenge him; he has suffered psychic violence and bears the scars of that trauma, scars that constrict and limit his ability to act.  Even the vicious gunslinger suffers from past trauma – his wife left him for a gambler and the film suggests that the bad man is motivated by sexual insecurity: he has replaced his phallus with a gun.  Those to whom injury has been done, do injury in turn.

The villagers are pious and conventional in their thought processes.  The film shows them swearing a vow to God to never invoke George Temple’s deadly prowess with his gun.  But when the villains threaten to burn down their town, almost everyone reneges on their earlier oath and urges Temple to duel with the villain.  Group rectitude only goes so far before being sacrificed on the altar of the common good.  Groups are fickle – they can be undoubtedly sincere and well-meaning, but, when threatened, the group reverses course and shows itself willing to traduce communal oaths taken only a few minutes before.   This jaded view of group dynamics is one of the elements of “truth” that the film explores.

Finally, the movie dramatizes how competition becomes obsessive and, even, deadly.  The bad hombre played by Broderick Crawford is desperate to show that he is the titular “fastest gun alive” and is willing to sacrifice everything to this end.  Male competition has a dark side – men will compete to the death unless they are prevented by more rational people from killing one another.  The awful logic of competition is that there can be only one winner – and the man who sets out to prove that he is “the fastest gun alive” is willing to insanely sacrifice all of his ill-gotten treasure (the loot from the robberies), the safety of his outlaw henchmen, and, ultimately, even his own life to demonstrate proficiency and superiority in a pointless, even futile, pursuit – pulling a gun out of a leather holster and firing it as quickly as possible.  The bizarre dance number that intrudes on the movie’s first half-hour illustrates the madness of male competition – Glenn Ford reportedly was outraged that Tamblyn was allowed “to do a Donald O’Connor all over (my) movie.”  Tamblyn’s not the hero and has a small part and he doesn’t get to fire a six gun, but for five or six minutes he takes over the film to the complete exclusion of Glenn Ford.  Accordingly, the dance number rips a hole in the fabric of the film – it’s a like shotgun blast tearing open the movie’s narrative.  Who owns this film?  The ostensible star, Glenn Ford, or this upstart kid with the fantastic dance moves?  The notion of competition, accordingly, is highlighted as a truth integral to the film – providing an extra-narrative (or supra-narrative) commentary on the destructive nature of masculine competition.

Thus, the film addresses certain themes as truths: Men are competitive and will compete to the death; trauma makes men violent; sexual betrayal and jealousy can be displaced into destructive and, even, lethal competition; the townspeople are never better than a mob – a mob can be good or bad or indifferent, but it is always sublimely fickle.  (It should be said that Glenn Ford’s problematic performance is inadequate to the film’s depiction of psychological truth.  Ford imitates James Dean, an actor whose style and emoting are wholly inimical to Ford’s stalwart, sober, and staid persona.  Thus, Ford’s performance, designed to highlight the emotional truths that the film presents, fails – Ford seems to be straining for melodramatic effects and pathos beyond his ordinary range and timbre; the inauthenticity of his performance, therefore, undercuts the canon of truth as it applies to the psychological issues that the movie embodies.)

Finally, how does The Fastest Gun Alive embody the ideas that it dramatizes in its artistic form?  The clarity of the film’s fundamental conflicts are established by clear, carefully focused, and authoritatively posed compositions, all lucidly presented in austere black-and-white.  The film is abstract and, even, geometric. in the sense that it avoids any form of expressionism – action is rendered clearly and efficiently by an objective camera placed inevitably in a position with the best, and most informative, perspective on the events staged.  There is nothing colorful, artistic, or, even, particularly personal about the way the film is made – art is a feminine indulgence in a world that is starkly masculine.  Although people behave ambiguously, there is no ambiguity in the way the film is shot and edited – we are not forced to discern events through webwork of shadow or chiaroscuro.   Everything is clearly presented within a clearly defined, even Cartesian framework of space and time.

The psychological grace notes intrinsic to the new adult Western require tight close-ups.  The audience must see the character’s faces so as to scrutinize them for traces of inner turmoil.  Thus, close-ups are interpolated into the shots showing groups of people interacting.  Even the villain, played by Broderick Crawford, is exposed as conflicted, even, fearful at the film’s climax – he is accorded his fair share of angst and the camera focuses on him tightly to show the sweat on his forehead and the worry in his eyes.  Since most of the group shots are prosaic, the score by Andre Previn is over-emphatic: sound cues trumpet conflict and anxiety.  The score dramatizes what the film maker and actors do not.  These cues are particularly excessive with respect to images showing George Temple’s pregnant wife – the actress, Jeanne Crain is profoundly inexpressive, even inert, with a limited range of expression: she’s more a mannequin than a performer and, so, explicit musical emphasis must be used to express emotions that are beyond her range.  The climactic gun battle is intentionally obscured by a flurry of Soviet-style montage – guns being drawn, pistols fired in close-up, with no long or master shot to show us what is happening.  This technique is designed to create suspense about the outcome of the duel and, later, to even misdirect the audience.  Finally, a sweeping crane shot lifts the camera up above the graveyard at the side of the church, providing us with an aerial perspective on the village – George Temple is now just another member of the community, men, women and children that we see walking on the town’s street.  This contrasts with the opening scenes in the film in which George is alone, blazing away at a targets, in the wasteland of the desert.  The film ends with him integrated into the village that he has saved. 

Analysis never ceases.  Works of art, even, rather humble ones are inexhaustible.  Once, the critic has directed his thought about the art work through the three inquiries mandated by Plato – recognition of type, truthfulness, and style – then, the process can (and, probably, should be) repeated.  Our tentative responses to those three inquiries can be cycled back into thought about the art object under consideration.  Hermeneutics is circular – what we have learned or proposed as a hypothesis can now be used to refine our thinking as to genre, an analysis that will likely reveal additional truth-propositions in the work, and, that will more clearly illumine the technical and stylistic devices used to embody those propositions in the art under consideration.

A noteworthy element of this analysis is that, consistent with the New Criticism, the intentions of the artist, his or her quirks and obsessions need not be central to this interpretative work.  In other words, the Platonic system for criticism outlined in this essay represents an alternative to the auteur theory – auteur analysis compares individual works by one “author” or film-director for the purpose of establishing signature traits.  These traits may be linked, then, to the auteur’s obsessions or psychological characteristics.  The Platonic mode of interpretation treats the work as defined more exactly by its genre – that is, the phase of recognition – than by the unique personality of the creator.

In a 1979 lecture at the Museum of Modern Art, Manny Farber comments on his critical practice.  Farber seems idiosyncratic in that, contrary to the auteur analysis then current, he regards film as more anonymous – film, Farber, argues is more the product of the cultural environment of its time, than it is a system of intentional meaning inscribed by a specific auteur.  The film-author’s intentions may are registered on the surface of the work, readily visible and mostly intelligible, but always superficial – the deep strains and stresses in the art work are cultural and historical.  A script may proclaim a timeless truth, but the make-up, hair styling, the costumes, and set design are always rooted in a specific period and, indeed, undercut the claim to timelessness or eternal verity that the dialogue may propose.   The film critic should approach the work as an archaeologist, excavating down through ideology and surface appearance to discover the cultural substrate in which the art object is located.

Considering a lurid crime film from the early seventies, The Honeymoon Killers, Faber says:

(W)hat I’m trying to suggest is that you can read a movie differently.  If we get rid of the aesthetic pursuit, the arty pursuit, finding what is artful and what is continuous in artfulness and read them as though they were something that wasn’t produced by artists.  They’re just products... and all of society is based on building a priceless item and making people feel that they live through products and good products are the things to have, good bodies are the things to have and so everything has been distorted away from reading a movie just plain, reading it the way you would read a sports story in the newspaper, or the way you would see a TV show...The Honeymoon Killers is like a transparency of your own life, a transparency of the period, which was 1970, right on the money.  It wasn’t later than 1970; it wasn’t earlier.  And it was exactly on the money in relation to what other artists were doing at the moment.  In a sense it was too good for its time, but who cares?  I’m not interested in what was good.  It should have been read as a period movie, as what it was sociologically, politically, in terms of women, in terms of sex, in terms of mortality, killing sadism – whatever.  It should have read in that way, and I don’t think it was...

Farber is arguing on the “recognition” axis in the three-fold system that I endorse in this essay.  He says that we must recognize what the film reveals, inadvertently in many respects, as opposed to what it’s creators think that it is telling or showing us.  The Fastest Gun Alive is showing us the exhaustion with the Western that prevailed in the mid-fifties, the anxiety about heroism in the wake of the World War and the subsequent futile conflict in Korea; the film suggests that the generation of men raised on war (and experiencing war through the lens of their own private cowardice) is about to explode, that these men are no longer satisfied with peace and that they are ready, now ten years after the fighting, to turn away from their families and escape into empty displays of virtuosity and alcoholism.  The film uses the Western to express discontent with the life of selling and buying, commerce and advertising.  But the film also demonstrates that this discontent simmers in a highly conventional and ideologically constrained society – the group is omnipresent and governs the options available to the hero.  No one knows whether to duel to the death and dance insanely, ricocheting off the square corners of the box in which everyone is trapped.  What does it mean when the Western quietly goes mad?

On the Katanes Monster

Katanes is a loch, a deep icy lake near the Hvalfjurthur (“Whale Fjord”) on the west coast of Iceland.  In 1874, a monster about the size of a large dog emerged from the lake and trotted around, disturbing the sheep grazing on the heath above the lake.  The shepherds threw stones at the monster and it retreated into the lake.  A year later, the monster was seen again – it was now larger, the size of a calf, and looked more ferocious.  When the sheepherders approached, it again retreated and dived off a boulder into the lake.

The next year, the monster was back, this time killing and half-devouring two sheep.  Many people saw the monster (dyreth) – it was a big as a bull, reddish in color with a crocodile’s jaws and the droopy ears of a beagle.  It had six sharp claws on each foot.

The local farmers sent a representative to Reykjavik, a day’s travel away, and asked that the local Danish governor send them help.  The governor, thinking self-help the best, offered to pay a substantial bounty to anyone who killed the monster and brought evidence of its death to Reykjavik.  The farmers were excited.  They hired a professional photographer to stake out the lake and retained a sharpshooter to patrol the banks of the water. 

This is the expedition to take the monster shown in the postcard that I bought at Iceland’s National Museum in Reykjavik. 

One night, two men were patrolling the lake shore.  It was a very dark night with no moon.  The next morning, the two men were found injured among the rhyolite boulders on the edge of the lake.  One man had both eyes blackened and his jaw was broken.  The other man’s fists were raw and bloody.  The two men had been walking along the lake shore, moving in opposite directions and listening intently for splashing in the water, noise signifying that the monster was up and about.  The men each claimed to have been attacked in the darkness by the monster, but admitted they couldn’t see what was hitting and kicking them.  Since they were found sprawled on the edge of the lakeshore within a few feet of one another, a few members of their party formed conclusions that were not exactly flattering to the monster-attack victims.

The monster refused to show himself.  After a month, the sharpshooter presented a large invoice for his services.  The local farmers refused to pay and a lawsuit ensued.  The photographer went back to his portrait studio in Reykjavik.

A proposal was made to drain the lake.  The lake proved to be too deep.  I saw the lake on the edge of the Whale Fjord when I drove out into the country to visit  Borganes and some of the western fjords.  I didn’t see any monster or sign of any monster.  There were a lot of sheep, however, rambling around the still, cold waters. 

The locals believe that the lake has a subterranean passage to the sea or, perhaps, to a lake in mountins called Skorradalsvatn.  A monster haunts Skorrasdalsvatn too.  I drove by that lake and didn’t see any sign of a monster.