Friday, December 18, 2020

On the Coronavirus (IX)

 






1.

After the election, the ballot-count stalled.  For several days, the results shown on the Cable News were always the same – Biden at 254 electoral votes and Trump with 213.  (As you know, 270 electoral college votes are required to win the presidential election.)  There was nothing to report and the media reported it, simply repeating projections and election arithmetic.  Trump seemed ahead in most places on election night itself, but this was deceptive.  The candidate had told his supporters not to vote by mail but to cast their ballots only on the day of the election.  Therefore, people went to bed on Tuesday night with the ominous sense that the debacle in 2016 was repeating itself.  Florida was announced early: a solid win for Trump.


But during the next few days, election officials caught up with the flood of mail-in ballots and, slowly, but steadily, the tide changed in Biden’s favor.  Then, Nevada and Pennsylvania seemed to slip into some kind of paralysis and the vote counts – called “dumps’ – occurred only intermittently and, then, in relatively small caches of ballots.  This led to the sense that the whole mighty system had somehow ground to a halt and that wheels were spinning ineffectually in the strange-looking windowless sorting factories (they look like what you see of a post office when you look behind the counter) where anonymous, masked bureaucrats were counting the votes.  


Throughout this eerie stasis, the weather was unseasonably warm.  The days were moist and soft, with bright sunlight and scarcely a cloud in the sky.  Normal temperatures in Minnesota were exceeded daily by about 30 degrees Fahrenheit – there were several days in which the highs were around 75 degrees, warmth breaking previous historical records.  The sun seemed to not have much force – but, its light was sufficient, if gently applied, to make everything glow with a strange, supernatural radiance.  


2.

The mild warm days and the breezy nights, together with the stalled vote count, made people restless.  They wanted to get out of their houses.  But the Covid virus was everywhere – people were sickening and dying in record numbers and many hospitals were overcome with casualties.  Daily, infections increased at a rate exceeding 125,000 – mortality was also climbing at about 1140 deaths every 24 hours.  Despite the fine weather, everything counseled caution – stay home! keep out of harm’s way!


But there is nothing more seductive than the last days of warm, fine weather before winter storms bury everything in ice and snow.  So I drove ninety miles to Great River Bluffs State Park in order to walk in the woods overlooking the Mississippi.  I listened to the radio as I drove and heard that, at last, Biden had been named as the winner of the election, on November 7, 2020 – that was around noon CST five days after election day.  


3.

Wisconsin’s Black River spills out wooded hills into a complex delta of swamps and islands at its confluence with the Mississippi.  Viewed from high on the forested bluffs, the wetlands below are comprised of lagoons like elongated cells closely crowded together, each body of water walled off by sedge marsh that is the bright yellow-brown color of sunburned prairie.  In some places, the marshes encircle sand reefs or small islands dense with brush and scrub, willows growing in thick gardens on the higher points in the flood plain. In some places, whole glades have been flooded and dead trees stand like pale, crooked stakes pounded into the swamp. The main channel of the river is hidden behind its moat of ox-bow lakes and small islets, although downstream a few miles, the water-bore of the Mississippi pushes hard against some locks and dams, big piles of square concrete, heavy and blunt like the tombs of ancient pharaohs.  Perhaps, there is some occult order to the river valley but from the top of the bluffs, the lagoons and channels are all entangled and chaotic, water prairies slit with oval lakes, each rimmed with sun-burned brown reeds,   On the Minnesota side of the river valley, here about six or seven miles across, the plains are dissected into steep, narrow valleys, more like ravines – or, as they are called in this area, “coulees” – that slope upward away from the river.  The valleys are bordered by lofty ridges and, in places, the soil has slipped away to reveal crumbling cliffs and overhangs.  The sides of some of the bluffs are too steep to support woods and so appear as grasslands hung like blonde, sun-bleached pennants over the sides of the hills.  This liminal country between the farmland stretching out above the hills and the wetlands in the valley is wild and seems uninhabited and many of the coulees are too steep and deeply cut to have roads running into their depths.  Except where hillsides show hanging prairies or cliffs, the ridges and ravines are all densely wooded.  


At the State Park, a mile long trail, entirely level, follows a ridge that narrows to a tree-lined corridor about 50 feet wide between two deep valleys.  The path dead ends atop King’s Bluff where the high jetty of the ridge crests, cliffs invisible from the hilltop somewhere beyond the place where the trail is blocked by a barricade of stacked logs.  From this overlook, the hiker can see across the pit of a deep, dark valley to the scimitar-shaped ridge of Queen’s Bluff, that hill’s flanks and top bald with steep, plunging patches of prairie.  Beyond, the river valley with its procession of small oval lagoons extends toward a distant highway bridge crossing to Wisconsin, the parallel trestle of a railroad span, and a blue plain of water impounded behind the lock and dam, that expanse of water dotted with herons that appear as white pinpricks in the bright lake.  Politics seems remote from this vista but, of course, there is no place exempt from the burden of human debate – the river crossings and dams here were once a subject of controversy, railroads made the old Northwest and destroyed its terrain as well, Lincoln, as a volunteer in the Illinois militia marched with troops chasing the Black Hawk Indians into this valley in 1832 – the massacre at Bad Axe occurred on the Mississippi fifty miles south of these heights. I am here on this windy hilltop, dead leaves skittering under foot, on a day of some historic import.  But, then, all days have historical import, although always comprehended in those terms only many years later.  

 

I make my way back to the parking place, passing happy groups of people walking the trail to the overlook.  Most of the hikers that I encounter have little dogs either running in front of them or tagging along behind.  The parking lot is now entirely occupied by vehicles and, indeed, some cars are now parked parallel to the narrow state park road next to the spaces allotted for visitors.  I drive farther down the winding lane to another larger parking spot, access to a picnic ground where tables stand scattered among tall trees on the bluff-top.  There’s a north and south overlook here, both perched on cliffs towering over the woods falling away to the river valley.  


Two connecting trails link the paths in the picnic grounds to a quarter-mile walk from some cart-in campsites to the Kearn Valley overlook.  Oddly, the first connecting trail from the picnic area to the loop road is quite difficult – the path drops steeply down into a ravine, descending 150 feet or so, and, then, climbs steeply back up to the road-grade.  The trail is narrow and buried in deep windrows of fallen leaves and so it’s hard to see roots and stones protruding under foot.  Beyond the road crossing, the next leg of the connecting trail is equally difficult – this path is even more narrow and steeper, descending into a grim, tangled ravine and, then, climbing to a densely wooded hilltop by a ladder-like ascent made over railroad ties terraced into the hillside to keep the trail from eroding into another trench-shaped gulch under the big trees.  As I start down the trail, I stub my toe on a root buried in leaves and fall forward, ultimately dropping hard to my knees and, then, rolling to the side.  I don’t like to fall and, at my age, it’s hard for me to get up when I have skidded to the ground.  My phone has slipped out of my pocket and, on the facing hillside, a couple of hikers are cautiously slipping and sliding down the opposing slope.  It’s embarrassing and I feel that it’s necessary to get up before these people come close and have to haul me to my feet and so I scramble around on hands and knees, find some footing and, then, try to stand – at first, it doesn’t work and I fall forward again and I can’t see anything nearby to grip for support.  I make another effort, breathing heavily, and succeed in getting to my feet although I’m overbalanced and stagger forward down the steep hill as if about to fall again. Somehow, I keep my footing and am able to continue down to the crease in the hillside where the trail, after about five steps over level ground tilts steeply upward.  The oncoming hikers are right above me and I am panting for breath and almost unable to greet them, but I feel I have to make the transit, get past them as they stand alongside the trail politely waiting for me.  I mutter a couple words, forge past the hikers and, then, a thirty feet uphill, take hold of a nearby tree trunk, clinging there as I catch my breath.


Kearns Valley is another deep slot in the bluffs, wild and shaggy with trees and showing no sign of any human presence in the wooded gorge.  I’m afraid of the trail that I have traversed to get here and so, beyond, the cart-in campsites, of course, deserted this day, I walk to the access driveway, hike up to the barricade and, then, follow the road back to the first connecting leg, the path that drops into the ravine and, then, climbs up to the picnic ground.  I have a little pain in my knee.  It’s terrible to be old and unsteady on your feet.       


4.

Of course, President Trump doesn’t concede the election to Biden.  This enrages Anderson Cooper and he says that Trump is “like an obese turtle flat on his back in the hot sun flailing around as he dies.”  This simile doesn’t seem particularly apposite to me and, as an obese turtle flailing around after falling on the hillside trail, I don’t exactly appreciate the implications of the CNN newscaster’s words.  


5. 

Despite the full fury of the Covid, Biden’s supporters crowd together in Wilmington, Delaware to listen to the President-Elect’s speech.  Kamala Harris also says some words, introducing Biden.  Fireworks, apparently delivered by aerial drones, burst overhead.  To prove his fitness, the 77-year old Biden trots on stage.  He seems to have miscalculated the length of the jog – it’s a long runway that the old man has to navigate and I feel sorry for him.  I hope he doesn’t collapse while we are watching.  Most of the crowd seems masked, but they’re not socially distanced at all, and, in several big cities, mobs of people dance in the streets, also jammed together on urban blocks from which auto traffic has been diverted.  Of course, if this were a Trump rally, the TV commentators would be censorious and disapproving – but no one criticizes these recklessly ebullient crowds.  The double standard, I’m afraid, is in full view for anyone with eyes to see.


6.

The weather changes.  The only thing constant is the torch of the Covid perpetually burning under every change in skies and temperature.  People whom I know well now have the virus.  


In the morning, a brisk wind tumbles out of the Northwest and the temperature drops.  Five hundred feet above the ground, tatters of cloud torn by the wind, whip by overhead, moving with alarming speed under a backdrop of high, turbulent clouds that appear motionless, sculpted out of marble.  The shredded clouds zooming by overhead seem somehow panicked and damaged.  Honking, a flight of geese moves against the wind, vee formation battered by the gale and asymmetrical.  It’s dizzying to see the clouds in the middle air sweeping by like freight trains overhead, the birds flying in the opposite direction to that motion, and far away the tilted towers and columns of the big storm clouds that seem to be entirely still.  This seems to be some kind of puzzle in relativity theory, airborne objects moving with different velocities with respect to one another, and the covid ueber alles rising as a hot dome above everything else.    


7.

Grocery stores show empty shelves again.  Apparently, people are hoarding.  Each day the number of people diagnosed with Covid increases – it’s now over 200,000 daily.  Refrigerated semi-trailers have been sent to El Paso to serve as temporary morgues.  In many places, the hospitals are reported to be nearing capacity and there is fear that people will die in corridors or waiting rooms for want of a bed.  In the midst of this chaos, thousands of Trump supporters converge on Washington D.C. to fight counterprotesters.  TV news shows mobs of screaming people none of them wearing masks.  125 Secret Service officers who traveled with Trump and guarded him at political rallies are sick with the virus.  The President has yet to cooperate in any way with the Biden transition team.  Indeed, the news is that Trump’s Covid team, such as it is, refuses to share information with Biden’s infectious disease advisors.  And, so, the nightmare continues.   


8,

On both the left and right, arrant nonsense is spouted on the airwaves.  Outlandish claims are made with no evidence.  The Right is more prone to farfetched, even fantastical, conspiracy theories.  But there are smug and pervasive claims to cultural superiority made by men and women of the Left as well.  These can be equally bizarre and, perhaps, more irritating because there is no one credible to call out liberal bias: all the media opprobrium is aimed at the crazies alleging Trump’s landslide victory, folks who seem to be self-evidently mad, fanatics of whom 70% assert that there is literally nothing that Trump could do that would cause them to withdraw their support.  This madness is more or less complementary to the arrogant disdain shown by the Left.


An example of liberal condescension is an interview that I heard on the radio with the ever-winsome actress, Kate Winslett.  The ostensible basis for the conversation was Ammonite, a 2020 film purporting to be about the life of Mary Anning, an early 19th century paleontologist.  In the movie, Anning is given a lesbian love-interest, a plot point for which there is literally no evidence in the historical record – Miss Anning wrote to several women with whom she was very close; her letters have survived and, although warm, they aren’t passionate; she writes about her dog Trey and espouses conventionally pious religious beliefs.  Winslett notes that the film is not a biopic and that it has taken liberties with the historical facts.  However, Winslett argues that these liberties are, in service, of “normalizing” GLBT relationships – something that may well be praiseworthy although one wonders whether devising a bodice-ripping Victorian lesbian romance is the best vehicle for such an objective.  


Of course, Winslett doesn’t acknowledge that only 15 years ago, President Obama, for instance, announced his undying enmity to granting the right to marriage for same-sex couples.  The consensus approval that she claims with respect to such unions, therefore, may not be all that solid even today.  Winslett nods to feminist thought when she claims that Mary Anning is unknown today because she was a woman working in a man’s field – that is, paleontology.  This is absurd.  Quick! Name your favorite male paleontologist living in Great Britain during the Victorian era.  Further, Mary Anning was much celebrated during her life-time – she was praised by Charles Dickens and various scientists.  Upon her death, the English Geological Society installed  commemorative stained glass windows in a church near the fossil fields that she hunted and, in 2010, she was cited as one of the ten most influential women in science in the U. K.  


Winslett goes on to say that she regrets working with sexual predators such as Roman Polanski and Woody Allen.  This is obviously and purely opportunistic.  She filmed Carnage with Polanski in 2010 in Paris.  Of course, Winslett had to travel to Paris to work with Polanski because he was a fugitive from American justice in that city, hiding out in plain sight there because of charges of child-rape pending against him in Los Angeles.  Similarly, she made Wonder Wheel with Woody Allen in 2017, many years after the sexual abuse allegations against that director were well-known and had been much publicized.  So, it appears that Winslett’s recent contrition about performing for these men is little more than an attempt to capitalize on a recent wave of indignation against sexual harassment and abuse by powerful men.  It won’t do for her to play the poor, misled naif with respect to these directors.


Ms. Winslett seems to regret some of the sex and nude scenes that played a role in making her famous.  “I shouldn’t have allowed myself to be objectified,” she says to the interviewer.  She is married to a former employee of Richard Branson, a man she met at one of the tycoon’s parties.  He is named Ned Rocknroll.  Ms. Winslett named her son by Mr. Rocknroll, Bear Blaze – the child protested being called Bear Blaze Rocknroll (a wise infant) and is now called Bear Blaze Winslett.  


As might be observed by this screed, listening to Ms. Winslett for five minutes on public radio is enough to convert one into a rabid Right wing ideologue.


This conversion, however, will be reversed by considering the curious case of Tommy Tuberville, a hick from Alabama who is now that State’s Senator.  Tommy Tuberville’s claim to fame is that he was a successful football coach for the University of Alabama’s Crimson Tide.  Exactly how coaching a college football team qualifies one for high office is unclear to me.  (I should confess some partiality here: my nephew Dr. John Frederick Beckmann, an entomologist at the U of Alabama in Auburn, announced that he was interested in the Republican senatorial seat.  Of course, he was thought to be unqualified since he was a mere bug doctor – exactly, how being a bug doctor prepares one to serve on the Senate is worth considering, but, certainly, he would have been a better choice for the office than this red-neck football coach.)  Senator-elect Tuberville spoke his disciples.  He recalled vividly how his own late-lamented father enlisted in the Marines at 16 and, then, drove a tank through Europe after Normandy.  Tuberville said that his father was always proud that he had liberated Paris from the “socialists and communists.”


This remark displays such breathtaking ignorance as to achieve a certain sublimity when it comes to idiotic declarations by public servants.  Not only is Tuberville, a man who seems to be about sixty, completely unaware of what was at stake in World War II, he, also, inadvertently displays his own father as either an incredibly stupid rural rube or a liar.  Perhaps, he has just misremembered what his pa told him.  In any event, to make this assertion also demonstrates an astonishing ignorance of pop culture – this guy has apparently never seen Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds let alone any one of a thousand World War Two war movies.  He hasn’t watched (or read) A Bridge too Far or the thriller Paris is Burning (1966).  Maybe, by accident, he saw the documentary Paris is Burning (1990) about transvestites in the Queens in New York – possibly this is the source of this poor man’s confusion.  He simply forgot to mention that his dad liberated Paris from crossdressing homosexuals as well.


9.

The microbe that causes malaria (“bad air”) was hard to study because, for an important part of its life-cycle, it goes underground in the gut of a mosquito.  Nature loves to hide.


On the first day, I walked some paths in the Nature Center near the great white bunker of the Hormel Mansion.  The trails were familiar to me but intersected in ways that I didn’t exactly recall.  Within the sere woods, distances seem to elongate – a looping trail in the forest twists and turns for a mile or more, but, then, emerges from the trees only a few hundred feet where it entered.  A quarter of a century ago when I last spent considerable time in these woods, a plantation of fir and pine stood alongside the boundary to the mansion property.  The trees had been inserted into the earth in straight lines and had grown into colonnades embedded in deep, soft red needles shed by the evergreens.  Several of the stands of trees were labeled on little wooden markers: “Douglas Fir”, “Norway Pine” and so on.  Now, the markers are all gone and a certain entropy has established itself in that garden – the colonnades no longer run true and there are saplings at intervals between the ranks of trees to the extent that, in some places, the artificial forest’s alignments now seem almost natural.  


On a path near Dobbyns Creek, the stream that meanders through the woods, I saw a strange-looking squirrel, a creature that walked in an ungainly manner, crossing a concrete section ahead of me where a culvert fed ooze from a narrow creek into the little river.  The squirrel was long and narrow and didn’t seem to have much of a tail and it walked with a waddling gait.  After observing the animal for a moment, I realized that it was an otter, black as night and shaped like a quadruped eel.  The otter slipped down to the river bank, but, then, turned to stare at me.  I stood completely still and the otter didn’t move either and, so, for a minute or more, we looked at each other or, in each other’s direction, because I suppose neither exactly beheld the other.  Then, I took a step forward and the otter dropped out of sight.  I hurried to the edge of the river, but there was no sign of the animal anywhere.  The stream’s water was black with the gloom of the autumnal forest and, at a bend, the creek had undercut a tree so that the trunk stood over a writhing tangle of roots dipped in a dark still pool.  


The next day, I took a path far from the parking lot, a trail that skirted the woods for about a mile and, then, passed several glacial erratics, boulders shaped vaguely like altars.  Beyond the grove of trees and the altars, the trail crossed an oak savannah with trees broadly spaced in chest-high, pale-yellow grass.  It was very windy and the bare boughs overhead shook their bony fingers at me.  Thirty-five years ago, this trail led to a marsh where a meadow on a promontory supported a single oak, one the most shapely trees that I have seen, majestic and isolated from the rest of the forest, a great spreading arbor where birds gathered in its branch and squirrels scolded one another.  The tree was blasted by lightning and crumbled into the wreckage of a moldering stump and some big, jagged deadfall, now ghostly gray on the meadow.  A bench commemorating some worthy, also now long dead, sits on the grass where the tree once cast its shadow.  


A hundred yards past the remnants of the lone oak, the air brightens with something like calliope music.  It’s clear and loud enough to startle me, a flute-like sound vibrating in the windy air.  Then, I can hear several voices giggling loudly.  I spin around to look behind me, but the path is completely empty – indeed, I have seen no one this afternoon except a single girl, spectral in black with a very white face, walking alone at the edge of the forest.  The piping stops abruptly and I can’t hear the giggling anymore.  Scanning the horizon, I see storm clouds piled up and trees gesturing at the wind, but no one abroad.


Then, two deer bound out of the tall grass, gracefully leaping over fallen logs or puddles of water hidden in the thistles and reeds.  One of the deer is elaborately antlered.  The animals cross the trail and, then, simply drop out of sight.  I hurry behind them to see if I can track their progress across the savannah.  Where they seemed to fall away, slipping down into some ditch in the grass, the prairie is completely level.  It’s as if the deer have fallen through a trapdoor that is now wholly invisible.  


I walk around the edges of the oak savannah.  On the horizon, I can see the turret of a silo.  I have gone a long way across open country, the prairie here split by little pools of water that reflect the grey, windy sky.  After a quarter of an hour, I find myself approaching several big boulders half-buried in the high grass.  These are the altars.  Somehow, that path has looped and I have apparently come back to where I started.  It is very disorienting.  The directions that I thought that I carried in my mind have switched places.  


On the mile walk back to the parking lot, I walk along the tree-line where the wind has toppled three trees, torn them apart and dropped them on the trail exactly where I was walking an hour ago.  The storm sings in the tree tops.  In this windswept landscape of dark grey and brown and black, everything is alive.  Perhaps, I am the thing least alive in this place.  


10.

In South Dakota now, the covid positivity rate is 60%.  The virus is eating the state.  People in South Dakota were told that the covid infection was a hoax and, so, this summer they gathered in great numbers for a Trump rally at Mount Rushmore and hosted a quarter-million people at the Sturgis motorcycle rally.  A nurse caring for covid victims in Sioux Falls observes that many of the virus-deniers argue with her before they day – “I don’t have covid,” they say, “this is the flu, just the flu, or, maybe, pneumonia.”  People would rather be dead than wrong.  Several people, the nurse reports, claim that they are dying from lung cancer.  “It’s a strange thing,” the nurse tells the TV interviewer, “when people would rather have lung cancer than admit they have contracted covid.” 


11.

A small plane crashes into a Los Angeles suburb.  The plane skids through a neighborhood of humble white houses, little bungalows on a quiet residential street, and, then, bursts into flame.  On the internet, you can see a video of the plane crash caught on surveillance tape.  The video shows several storefronts and a sidewalk where a man with his back turned to the camera is sweeping the pavement.  To the man’s right, there is a busy street where traffic is passing and, then, a large vacant lot that extends to the circle of little cottages around a cul-de-sac.  The plane enters the frame from the left, very low, only a few feet above the ground and, then, it skids, rolling so that a wing suddenly flashes in the air like a knife-blade before being torn apart.  An orange fire-ball billows up over the bungalow roof-tops.  And while all of this is happening, the cars on the busy street roll by without stopping or, even, slowing, unaffected by the fireball a couple hundred yards away.  And the man sweeping never pauses, doesn’t look up from his work, and just keeps moving his broom over the sidewalk.  


It is trite, but meaningful, I think, to recall Brueghel’s pellucid “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” – the plowman leaning into his labor, the little ship under sail and approaching the harbor, Icarus’ pale legs vanishing underwater in the green-blue water. 

  

12.

The virus amplifies itself.  Grocery store shelves look looted again.  People are hoarding toilet paper.  I suppose the situation scares the shit out of them.  The museums are once more shuttering themselves, closing for six weeks.  Kids from college who are infected with the covid, lie about their symptoms, even to themselves, I suppose, jet home and spread the disease to their families and friends in the towns and cities where they live.  Trump refuses to concede.  The car is careening out of control with no one’s hands on the steering wheel.


13.

Before I went to bed, I read ten pages in Patrick Roth’s Gottesquartett (God Quartet). For several years, Roth was the president of the Southern California Jungian Society.  In this new book, published in 2020, Roth gives advice as to what one should do when he or she encounters a dead person in a dream.  Roth asserts that the dead person is a messenger and, therefore, presents an opportunity to ask questions.  He argues that dreamers should never fail to confront these figures and query them as to conditions on the “other side.”


Not surprisingly, in the hour before dawn, I found myself in the village of Kenyon, waiting in line at a Subway restaurant.  In Kenyon, the Subway occupies a corner store-front next to the public utilities building.  A court proceeding was scheduled for later in the day, an odd thing because there is no courthouse in Kenyon.  I recall that the light in the restaurant was warm and amber and the walls were paneled in soft-looking woods.  


Next to me, waiting in line, was a very close friend.  This man has been dead now for about five years.  He was about twenty years older than me.  He looked compact and healthy and his complexion was rosy.  I recalled Roth’s admonition and, so, I asked him: “What have you come to tell me?”  He seemed mute.  The dead man looked at me with a quizzical expression as if I were the one who owed him an explanation, as if I were, somehow, intruding upon his repose.  “Please tell me, what you have come for?”  Again, he looked at me with a baffled expression.  I repeated my question several times and there was no response and, so, suddenly, I was very angry and I cuffed him hard, hitting the side of his head with the side of my hand. He had a cash register in his head and there was a digital display that flashed some letters at me before spitting out a receipt.  The message showing in the digital display was hard to read, first OR, than NOR.  I didn’t understand these words.  The court appearance followed, a ZOOM hearing with crowds of attorneys showing in a half-dozen separate boxes on my lap-top computer.  The arguments had something to with the recent election.   


14.

A week before Thanksgiving 2020, at dawn, the sky has the patina of old ceramic, pale blues and greens all blended together and luminous as if reflecting light from elsewhere.  The heavens are glazed and glow like the pottery in an ancient Japanese tea service.


Yesterday, 189,000 people tested positive with the Coronavirus in the United States.  About 1800 deaths were reported.  The country is on-track to add a million or more cases every five days.  About ten-thousand people will die every week.


15.

The day is warm and bright and the skies have cleared.  The sun pours down on the brown and grey earth, the fields ravaged by harvest and prickly with stubble.  As I am walking my dog at noon, I meet an old Black man standing at a street corner.  This is a place where the residential streets run between houses and neat lawns, the four roads extending away in each of the cardinal directions.  Although it is entirely level, this street corner somehow gives the impression of being like a crow’s nest, a high place, from which you can survey the world in all directions.  


The old Black man is well-dressed.  He has steel-rimmed glasses and wears a natty tartan beret.  When I greet him, he says: “Sometimes, this town is so eerily silent.”  I know what he means.  Looking in all directions, there is no traffic and the sidewalks are completely empty.  Even the wind isn’t stirring.  


“You’re right about that,” I say.


16.

Rudolf Giuliani, always mentioned with the epithet “the President’s personal lawyer,” calls a press conference at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee.  Giuliani hunches over a podium and rants about conspiracies that have deprived the President of victory in the recent election.  It’s not worth watching except for ghoulish reasons and the networks quickly cut away from the debacle.  So far as I can understand, Giuliani is saying something about the voting machines being wired in such way as to flip votes on command by dark forces in Venezuela, some of this cabal linked to George Soros (a Jewish conspirator associated with Elders of Zion) and Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela who has been dead now for seven years.  Of course, the burden of the ninety minute harangue is that the election two weeks ago must be wholly discredited, an outcome that would strip many Republican legislators of seats that they won in the contest.  Implicit is the threat, now characteristic of Trump’s twilight political style, that if he doesn’t get what he wants he will tear down the whole system and leave not one brick standing.  


Giuliani is perspiring and this causes his black hair dye to run in sinister rivulets that bracket his wild-eyed face.  With the sludge running down his jaws and trickling onto his throat, he looks genuinely monstrous.  If you want conspiracies, I will give you one: Giuliani isn’t human anymore – he’s some sort of beetle or arachnid that has assumed a form remotely similar to a human being, but subtly unconvincing, uncanny, as it were, a space alien wearing a man’s skin, or an automaton or reanimated corpse.  The alarming aspect of his appearance is not mitigated by the bizarre tableaux of attorneys flanking him.  A very tall woman looms over him, afflicted by some sort of rigor mortis that makes her move stiffly, like Frankenstein’s monster.  Her face seems painted onto the front of head.  On Giuliani’s other side, a young woman is close to him.  She has features like an antique doll, a mask-like visage that is curiously inexpressive.  The whole group seems unsettling and grotesque.  They are like figures from a painting by James Ensor, puppet-like caricatures of human beings, spidery masked personages, a couple of skulls jawboning one another.  


Giuliani’s flop-sweat is something that I have seen before, but I can’t quite identify where I remember observing this phenomenon.  Then, I recall a press conference filmed in Iran in which a minister of health, if I recall correctly, was denying that Covid was spreading throughout the Islamic Republic.  The man’s face glistened with sweat.  He was already infected with the disease that he denied existed.  I suppose, after the cameras departed, he went off somewhere to die. 


17.

A client whom I have represented for 25 years calls me.  He is a successful businessman recently retired from operating a very complex, technically sophisticated manufacturing firm.  The firm’s revenues are about 25 million dollars annually and my client’s business employs a staff of engineers and highly skilled technicians.  The work that my client’s company performs is exceptionally challenging with a fearsome potential for disaster.


After a few minutes discussion of a business matter, my client asked me about whether I believed in the dangers posed by the coronavirus.  This put me on my guard.  Political discussions (and everything about the virus has been politicized) can go destructively awry very quickly.  I made some noncommittal answer.  The businessman, then, told me that he knew no one who had been made seriously ill by the disease.  “The death counts are a hoax,” the businessman told me.  He said that hospitals had been instructed to identify every death in their wards as due to Covid.  For instance, he told me, George Floyd was claimed to have died of Covid but, in fact, perished as a consequence of a massive Fentanyl overdose.  (George Floyd died after a Minneapolis cop knelt on his neck for about nine minutes.  I’m not aware of any rumors that Floyd died as a result of Covid – I think he was found to be infected with the virus after his death, but not that Covid was the precipitating cause of death.)  My client, then, said that doctors were taking the temperature of the dead and reporting fevers.  “But my nurse friends tell me that when people die, they are all hot and sweaty and that when you roll them over, their backsides are all soaked.”  In other words, dead people warm up in the process of dying.  This was news to me.  I thought corpses were cold, not hot.  After an excited harangue of five minutes, my client told me that the Covid was just another flu and far less dangerous than most strains of that illness.  


When I mentioned this conversation to someone who knows this client well, I was told that several nurses who are friends of the man’s wife had been seriously ill and forced to quarantine for two weeks.  Presumably, they were the source of the macabre physiological information purveyed to me by this man.  Contrary to his assertion, about half of this man’s close friends had family members who had been made seriously ill by the coronavirus.


18.

A few days ago, I saw several large colorful semi-trailers parked around town.  These were marked Schwann’s and showed a robust black and white cow standing in a green pasture by a rippling creek.  Schwann’s is a ice-cream company that runs a factory a hundred miles away.  I hadn’t noticed the refrigeration trailers in town before, although, sometimes, you encounter them on the freeway.  


Make-shift morgues masquerading as ice cream freezer-trucks?


19.

On Thursday, November 19, 2020, my daughter, Angelica, was working with a developmentally disabled child at the school where she is employed.  She changed the child’s diapers and provided other care of this sort.  On Friday, around 5:00 pm, my daughter was informed that the child had tested positive for the Covid virus.  Before I came home from work on Friday afternoon, my office manager informed me that my secretary, who had been off-work for a couple day, had also tested positive for the virus.  I wonder if this will be one of those narratives, found in a bottle, as it were, in which the writing just trails off: “And, then, I learned that...”


20.  

On the sidewalk at night, walking my dog – something moves ahead of me in the darkness.  What is this?  A deer tentatively venturing onto someone’s front lawn.  I stop to watch the deer.  Some headlights are approaching on the boulevard.  The deer reverses direction and bounds back across the road.  And, then, three smaller deer follow, all of them leaping in the air as the headlights pierce the shadows.  I suppose that the deer browse along the river that runs in a wooded trench though our town.  When they are startled and come up from the river, the animals find themselves navigating residential neighborhoods where there are street lamps and curbs, flaring headlights but also sweet shrubs and flower beds to nibble.


21. 

One theme of network and cable news coverage of the virus is that a comprehensive federal response is needed.  But, viewed objectively, government intervention in this crisis has been botched from the outset and, certainly, hasn’t improved as the pandemic has progressed.  First, government authorities, in league with prestigious medical enterprises, denied that there was any problem at all.  For about six weeks, the public was assured that the virus could be confined to a few isolated outbreaks.  The Mayo Clinic pronounced: “If you can hear these words, you have nothing to fear from the virus.”  Then, with dizzying speed, some states reversed direction and locked everything down.  This made some sense in New York City and several other big urban areas where infections rates were climbing – the notion was to “flatten the curve” referring to graphs showing increase in infections.  “Flattening the curve,” in turn, was supposed to prevent hospitals from being overrun by infection cases that no one really knew how to treat.  The problem with this strategy is that it was adopted in New York City where the media is located resulting in a copycat rush in many states to follow suit, closing down economies that had not yet been penetrated in any significant form by the infection.  Minnesota shut down entirely when the rate of infection was relatively low.  These shut downs, in turn, wreaked economic havoc and so the government pumped money into the system, issuing checks to those who had lost their jobs due to the infection (and, indeed, to millions of others as well – the pay-outs were subject to large scale fraud and theft.)  Then, despite the professional opinions of almost all physicians, economies were prematurely re-opened, initially with success, but, then, with alarming surges of infection in many places.  The more the government urged people to wear masks to avoid infecting others, the more the public in some places rejected this message.  It’s clear now that the shut-downs in most States and the government funded unemployment checks were grievously mistimed.  Throughout most of the country, State and Federal governments reacted much too aggressively too early in the pandemic and, then, found themselves without political will or means to address the deadly surge of the virus that began in November and, now, has settled-in to ravage almost all of the country.  When people desperately need subsidies, none are available – the political parties are unable to agree upon a plan to compensate those who are without work and, with the election concluded and Congress in a lame-duck mode, no one is willing to spend any political capital to remedy the economic and medical disaster now unfolding.  And, throughout this whole debacle, there have been persistent shortages in medications, respirators, even personal protective equipment necessary to shield doctors and nurses from the infection that they are treating.  We make assumptions of competence about government response that are wholly unwarranted.  If the landings at Normandy had been handled with a similar level of negligence and folly, the entire invasion fleet would have sunk in the waters of the Channel a dozen miles from Omaha Beach.  


Everyone responded to the virus as if it were a short-term problem.  But it has not been short-term in its effects at all.  This is characteristic of a Democracy led by media with a tendency to over-estimate crises when they are first identified, but, then, to ignore them when they cease to be interesting to most of the public.  Everyone now acts as if the calamity of the hour is the most abiding disaster than can possibly occur until something new distracts the public’s attention.  Each election, therefore, is an apocalypse, the last election in the history of the Republic, the vote to end all votes.  A wild strain of the apocalyptic clouds all action.  It’s as if no one can plan for next month let alone three or four years in the future.  Future? What future?


22.

There will be no climactic denouement to this chronicle.  My daughter, Angelica, is negative for Covid.  Our office secretary remains off-duty on quarantine.  Other people in the office who worked closely with the sick secretary have been tested, also with no disease detected.  So, this account will have to muddle forward for who knows how long.


23.

At the Nature Center, where I have been walking recently, one trail eludes me – this is the Blue Stem Trail, a loop that is accessed by only one spur path and not otherwise linked into the system of trails innervating the 565 acre preserve.  It’s my objective to stroll every one of the trails at the Nature Center but this loop isn’t easily reached and stands apart from the rest of the tract of woodlands and prairie meadows.


Finally, a couple days after Thanksgiving, I found my way to the Blue Stem loop.  The trail commences at a point one and a half miles from the parking lot.  With Jack, I reached the place about 3:30 pm, the sun low in the horizon and showing red mingled with faded blue through the lattice of bare trees along the western horizon.  The loop wraps around a big prairie that is completely burned.  The charred grassland is a complex pavement of hard black tufts, each about six to eight inches around and elevated above the surrounding ash to the height of my pointer finger.  This sort of tufted terrain, studded with bristly black stubble, would be very difficult to navigate – a hiker would have to step from blackened tuft to tuft, always risking turning an ankle at each stride.  The burned meadow is very large, about two football fields wide and probably a half-mile long, a black wound in the trees and fields.  The edges of the meadow are lined with graceful white birch trees that shimmer in the twilight.  On the north side of the meadow, there’s an enigmatic cottage, entirely white with a grey tar-shingled roof and a utility pole poking up adjacent to its side-wall.  There are no windows opening into the building’s white walls and the structure stands apart with no trace of a path or driveway leading to it.  Although the trail feels very remote, in fact, it is probably closer to other manmade structures and inhabited places than other parts of the Nature Center.  The graceful fringe of white-stemmed birch trees flows elegantly into the backyard of a great manor house.  This is a place at the end of a private road where an old man who had something to do with editing and publishing Reader’s Digest once lived.  It was never clear to me what this man was doing in Austin – he looked like an elderly hippie with a great fluffy beard and long straggly hair and was, obviously, incredibly wealthy.  He’s dead and gone now and I don’t know who inhabits his elaborate mansion, visible in its rear elevation from the Blue Stem trail.  Through another skein of trees, I can see the groomed fairways and tees of the golf course.  Where the meadow opens to the East, some black cattle are grazing in a distant pasture and there are farm buildings, steel sheds at the edge of distant shelter belts and, nervously peering over the horizon, are the whirligigs of big wind turbines spinning on the Dexter ridge.  In the gloaming, the red lights atop those tall towers flicker on and off like Christmas tree lights.  


We circumnavigate the burned meadow and, then, return to the oak savanna where an iron bridge like cast-off agricultural equipment crosses over the black oozy bed of the creek or one of its tributaries.  Just as we leave the loop path, a man and woman hustling through the gloom appear at the head of the trail and set off toward the charred field.  It’s too late for them to be attempting this loop, almost a mile in length and located a long way from the parking lot.  It will be dark before they get back to safety.  The trails are broad but confusing and it would be frightening to be in these woods alone after nightfall.  We hurry along the hedge rows and through the edges of the forest toward the parking lot.  In the shelter-belt to the West, the sun has set and a red glow similar to what can be seen in some of Casper David Friedrich’s paintings (particularly the sky in “The Great Enclosure) illumines the stark trunks and boughs and branches of the shelter belt along the road.  


As it happens, there’s no need to fear for the wanderers after dark at the Nature Center.  The moon is full and comes up out of the shrubbery brighter than a street lamp, the lunar surface all gouged with bluish seas and mountains.  This kind of moon makes the winter night brighter than the wan winter day.   


24.

The dire prediction looming over this Thanksgiving: Happy Thanksgiving, mourning by Christmas time – that is to say, people gather for Thanksgiving, infect one another, and, by Christmas, some of them are dead.  


Notwithstanding this declaration, millions travel over the four day Thanksgiving weekend.


25.

There are many infections. 


At the Nature Center, I circle a pond, wrapped in small trees disfigured by being drowned half the year.  At the center of the pool, there are several small islands, also comprised of little trees ravaged by being half-underwater for most of the year, jagged spiky clumps of dead wood poking up out of the dull sheen of ice that has formed where the pond is deepest.  In the shallow water, where the turf dips down to the pond, the wind ruffles unfrozen parts of the small lagoon so that its surface shimmers with scales of light.  Overhead, clouds chase clouds across a windy sky.


At the far end of the ponds in their shadow of dark crooked wood, a trail not on the map leads through a stand of squat, black evergreens to a place where there is a plastic table and several big boards covered with maps of the county under plastic.  An orange four-foot long styro-oam cooler latched shut sits under the table and there is a heavy metal tripod, as tall as a man, dug into the gravel drive with a hook hanging down from its center.  Two fifty-five gallon drums, tightly sealed, flank the table and there is a small storage dumpster, also orange and the length of a car, sealed tightly with a tarp held down by heavy rubber bungee cords.  A serrated hacksaw with tufts of fur on its blade rests on the cooler under the table.  A sign reads CWD Sampling Center.  CWD refers to Chronic Wasting Disease, a brain disease akin to “Mad Cow” disease that afflicts deer. I have no idea what kind of activities take place here.  A gravel road connects the site to the distant horizon.  


Many plagues and many infections.  


26.

Everyone in my family, Julie and Angelica, have tested negative for Covid so far.  Everyone remains on edge.  Every painful twitch, every cough, every moment of inexplicable chill or unwarranted flushing warmth feels like a harbinger of doom.  


One of my partners is now, at home, quarantining with the virus.  His son, with girlfriend, drove home from College and there was a family Thanksgiving and predictably enough, infected everyone in the family.


In Minnesota, people are dying at a rate of 75 a day, half of them old folks in nursing homes.  The vaccine will be available for a tiny percentage of health care workers, perhaps, next week – that is, in the middle of December 2020.  The vaccine serum must be stored at minus 100 degrees and requires two doses to be effective.  It feels like the vaccine will arrive about one month too late for most people.  

Professional football games are now being canceled.  You know that the situation is dire when this sort of thing occurs.


27.

At the George Floyd memorial in south Minneapolis, counter-protesters have ripped up and, even, burned some of the improvised tributes located next to the big mural.  Art conservators from the local museum have been recruited to the Pillsbury Center, a few blocks from the site where Floyd was murdered and where the mural was painted.  Apparently, the conservators are working to restore the artifacts damaged by the demonstrators.  This seems a bizarre misunderstanding of the makeshift nature of these memorials – these are spontaneous artifacts and their slow, but sure, destruction by the elements is part of their charm and meaning.  I understand that outrage may arise from the way that these tributes were savaged.  But, it seems misguided to recruit people trained to restore Lakota ceremonial garments or Baroque paintings – for instance, the Poussin “The Death of Germanicus” at the Art Institute – to conserve and restore crepe-paper flowers and placards written in Sharpy placed in windrows against the uptown mural.


28.

Most people, I think, consider themselves as apolitical – formerly, they limited their partisan activities to collegiate or professional sports.  But Trump, whose modus operandi, is to stir up division in all possible ways has insinuated political meanings into all aspects of life.  This is like pouring grit into an intricate system of clockwork gears and springs.  Too much friction and the mechanism grinds itself to destruction.  At a grassroots level, political agitation is engineered to make people care about things that would otherwise be remote to them – cultural nuances arising in big cities are far from the country concerns, foreign wars, esoteric aspects of tax policy, the sorts of things that ordinarily interest only what were once called “policy wonks.”  Trump’s innovation is to make people care passionately about policies and institutions that don’t affect them in any real way.  He injects apocalyptic rage and hatred into controversies about which most people shouldn’t care at all.  In this way, as in many other aspects of his presidency, Trump reveals himself to be esthetically, and fundamentally, a Man of the Left.  It was liberals who used to declare that the personal is political; Marxists who excavated the culture for traces of economic influence and systems of power – previously, Leftists, like Brecht, proclaimed the tyranny of the political over the personal.  Trump’s great innovation is to apply epistemological notions (truth is relative and may be deconstructed) and Leftist ideology (there’s no such thing as the personal) to right-wing politics.  


Here’s an example of how this works.  My immediate readers will understand this instinctively without needing any explanation.  But I am writing, of course, for a posterity that will be baffled by the events of this last several years. 


A couple weeks ago, Bureau of Land Management representatives announced that they had discovered a strange aluminum monolith in a slot canyon somewhere in the Utah wilderness.  The monument was about 12 feet tall, a triangle of reflective metal standing in a sandy draw with one of its edges pointing in the direction of a deep fissure in the red rock cliffs.  Viewed from certain angles, the thing looked very much like the monolith that figures in Kubrick’s 2001.  BLM said that the object was in an impossibly remote location and that it would be dangerous to release information as to its coordinates – sightseers would get lost in the labyrinth of narrow canyons and have to be rescued from the inhospitable desert.  In its press release, the BLM said that its employees had discovered the monolith purely by accident while taking census by helicopter of big horn sheep in the habitat reserved for them somewhere in the maze of the Canyonlands.  The BLM press release, further, noted that it is illegal to install art works (if that’s what it was) on public lands and that it didn’t matter “what planet you were from” – the rule applied to all entities.  BLM implied that the monolith had some intrinsic value and that no one intended to remove it from its remote desert location.


More than a little disinformation, as it happens, was contained in the BLM declaration.  First, the monolith wasn’t as remote as advertised.  In fact, it was somewhere near Moab, and, reportedly, only 1200 feet away from a popular four-wheel drive trail.  When the government said that it intended to keep the location of the monument secret, this merely inspired explorers to discover the monolith’s location and, then, publish it geographical coordinates on the internet.  Predicably, dozens and, then, hundreds flocked to the site.  The picturesque red rock coves and spires were soon disfigured by garbage and toilet paper fluttering over the fins of scarlet stone and long queues of jeeps were parked along the four-wheel drive lane near the canyon where the monolith stood.  (Reporters noted that motorists who had misjudged the arduous road were being towed back to Moab, a rich source of profit for the local tow-truck operators.)


About ten days after the monolith was discovered, a group of young men filmed themselves tearing the structure down.  They proclaimed to the camera that the object was garbage and that detritus of this sort had no business disfiguring the pristine wilderness.  The video showed them knocking the monolith over and, then, removing all traces of the structure from the landscape.  This act was obviously politically motivated, a kind of discourse by vandalism similar to the destruction of the tributes at the George Flynn memorial – the concept was that nature should be kept inviolate and that the hoard of sightseers now tramping about the slot-canyon country were unwelcome here.  The monolith, it seems, had managed to inspire the rage of a group of Leftist environmentalists, fanatics for the purity of the wild, and, indeed, far more radical and intolerant than the BLM authorities entrusted with managing the area’s resources.


Later, additional monoliths appeared in other parts of the world.  One of them showed up on a mountainside in a remote National Park in Bulgaria.  Another monolith was erected under cover of darkness near Atascadero, California.  This monument appeared on top of a mountain and was identical, as far as I can determine, with the Utah object.  In this case, the monolith inspired the wrath of Right Wing thugs.  A group of young men video-taped their destruction of the monolith.  In the video, the kids are said to make foul-mouthed references to Qanon conspiracies and chant Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again.”  Swilling energy drinks, they yank the monolith down, curse it, and, then, erect a cross – America, they maintain, in the context of anti-Semitic slurs is a Christian country.  


So something presumably intended as apolitical, aluminum monoliths mysteriously appearing in the boondocks. took on a distinct political cast.  The artifact was repellent to Leftist eco-warriors because it represented human intervention into an otherwise pristine natural environment (query: how pristine if there is a well-used four-wheel drive route the length of four football fields from the object?)  The same exact monument in California inspired hatred by Right Wing White Supremacists who announced themselves as Christian Trump supporters.  Remarkably, what seems to have been intended as prank and reference to a famous movie now over 50 years old, engendered partisan political rage in the radical fringes on the both the Right and Left.  The only thing these passionate partisans could agree upon was that the monolith had to be destroyed.


29.

The virus atrophies old reflexes.  It’s hard to imagine going to a movie, particularly now that the weather has turned cold and icy.  I can’t imagine attending an opera or concert, going to a bar, attending a sporting event.  Where do you park for such things?  How do you order in a restaurant without making a fool of yourself?  What is the discourse required when meeting strangers?  What is the etiquette?  Why leave the house when you can have food delivered?  Why go to the theater if you have a functional Tv set?


30.

The vaccine is here.


The Cable news have become IN – that is, the Injection Network.  On all stations, the camera shows people in masks being injected in the arm by other people in masks, some of them with clear plastic visors.  Eyes visible above the black or pale blue masks don’t flinch. (Who knows what is happening to the rest of the face?)   In the first ten minutes of one hour of CNN coverage, no less than 15 people are shown, stoically posing for the camera as they are injected.  Perhaps, 50 million people will be injected with vaccine by the end of the month.


December 15, 2020

Saturday, December 5, 2020

On a Tale of the Christ

 On a Tale of The Christ




You don’t know anything about Patrick Roth.  Most likely, you’ve never heard of this German writer.  To my knowledge, only one of his books has been translated into English.  However, in his native country, Roth is important enough to be taught in literature classes in German Gymnasium.  Suhrkamp Verlag, a leading publisher in Germany, produces volumes of significant works of literature suitable for use in High School or Junior College courses – this is the BasisBibliothek series.  (The volumes come with numbered paragraphs for ready citation, a brief biography and bibliography of the author, notes as to unusual words and phrases as well as more detailed notes appended at the end of book as passages requiring explication; the books also sample critical reactions to the work and attempt a modest appraisal of the text’s significance.  These small format volumes are similar to the books Norton publishes in this country for College readers.)  Roth’s Riverside, the writer’s first novel, exists in a BasisBibliothek edition and, apparently, is widely read in German schools.  Suhrkamp originally published the book as a first edition in 1991, a slender volume under a handsome cover showing Caravaggio’s portrait of John the Baptist.  The teaching version of the book is cheap and nicely annotated and this was the edition that I read.  


Patrick Roth is a curious figure – he was an expatriate and lived in Southern California between 1978 and 2012 when he returned to Germany.  (He is now apparently a lecturer in literature at Heidelberg.)  During his 34 years in the United States, he wrote about a dozen books, all of them in his native language.  A cinephile, Roth studied film in Paris and, then, was granted a stipend to study at UCLA.  He enrolled in the film studies program at that school and, in fact, directed a short film in 1980 based on a story by Charles Bukowski, “The Killers”.  Roth seems to have worked as a correspondent for various German periodicals covering the Hollywood scene.  Although his stipend was for a one year period, he remained in the LA area, specifically Sherman Oaks, for 34 years.  You Tube videos and other information suggest that he probably spent two or three months a year back in Germany during that period.


Arts are state-supported in Germany.  German writers are subsidized to produce radio plays: so-called Hoerspiele.  Generally, these radio-plays are presented by small casts or feature monologues.  Roth supported his residency in Los Angeles by reporting on the American film industry – he interviewed film-makers and directors and free-lanced articles to the German press.  In his spare time, Roth wrote several radio plays produced in his native country.  Riverside, written in the context of Hoerspiele, has many features in common with a radio play.  The book is relatively short – about 100 pages – composed, almost entirely, in dialogue.  There are a few laconic descriptions outside of the speeches comprising the book, but these passages read like stage-description.  My guess is that the book began as a radio-play but became simply too long and complex for that form.  Nonetheless, Riverside shows many of the features of Hoerspiele – it has only three characters and, when description is required, the text uses extended poetic monologues, sometimes three or four pages long.  The form is classically Aristotelian, maintaining unities of place and time – events take place in real time at a single location, a desert cave in the wilderness, a place described by Roth in an interview about the book as being modeled on Zabriskie Point in California’s Death Valley.  (Zabriskie Point is significant to Roth as the location where Antonioni’s film of that name was shot.)

Riverside belongs to a genre once popular, but without critical honor – these are books that purport to supplement the Gospels.  One might think that four synoptic gospels would be more than adequate, but, from time to time, writers have presumed to write fictions deploying biblical characters in cameo appearances, more or less, to impart prestige to otherwise rather ordinary historical romances.  In English, the most noteworthy example of this kind of novel is Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur, A Tale of the Christ , a best-seller in 1880 and a favorite source-text for the film industry.  (The first adaptation of the novel was in 1912, followed by big budget extravaganzas in 1926 and 1960.)  The Polish writer, Henyrik Sienkiewicz wrote a similar historical novel exploiting New Testament characters in 1895, Quo Vadis.  This book was adapted to the screen in version starring Debra Kerr in 1950 – Jesus is represented in the Hollywood movie by a radiant beam of white light.  Quo Vadis was first covertly adapted to the stage in a play written in 1895, The Sign of the Cross – a work with a plot suspiciously similar to the Polish novel.  (It’s unclear whether The Sign of the Cross is based on Quo Vadis or merely very similar in plot – a commercially fortuitous accident, in other words.)  Cecil B. DeMille bought the rights to The Sign of the Cross and produced a suitably tawdry spectacle based on the story in 1932 – Claudette Colbert bathes in ass milk and naked women are mauled by crocodiles in the Colosseum.  (The pre-Code film was so entertainingly offensive that it inspired the formation of the Catholic League of Decency.)  The Swedish writer, Par Lagerkvist, also specialized in this genre – his most famous novel, Barabbas was adapted into a movie on the epic scale in 1953 by Alf Sjoberg and, then, in 1960 in a version starring properly bankable American stars shot at Cinecitta Studios near Rome and directed by Richard Fleischer.  I cite these books and film-adaptations because they are obviously precedents to Riverside and because Roth clearly is aware of this tradition and writes within its context.  


Riverside concerns two brothers Andreas and Tabeas dispatched by the vestigial Christian community to collect stories about Jesus Christ.  Christ has been recently crucified and the two young men’s project is to interview people who came in contact with the savior.  To this end, they seek the cave of a leprous hermit, Diastasimos.  The leper’s cave is a hollow high above a desert wadi and, when the two young men reach the hermitage, it is raining violently in the wasteland.  The novel, devised in four chapters, reports the dialogue between the three protagonists while sheltering in the cave during the deluge.  (Roth likes rainfall – a deluge of Biblical proportions occurs in his short-story cycle Starlite Terrace published in 2003.  In interviews, he claims that the rainstorm is based on scenes in Kurosawa’s first film, Sanjuro Sugato released in 1943.  This is a showy, if dishonest allusion to a rare film.  In fact, the rainstorm that forces the characters together in Riverside is an echo of the torrential rain that falls in Rashomon and that continues while the divergent stories about the rape of the woodcutter’s wife and his murder are told.  Roth shows an anxiety of influence in not citing Rashomon as his model – Rashomon, of course, has a structure similar to the Gospels in that it relies upon four synoptic versions of the same events.)


The first chapter begins with an enigmatic description: the leper Diastasimos uses a ladder to hang a garment high above the floor of his cave.  It is unclear why he does this – particularly because we don’t know that the character is a leper when this action is described.  Andreas and Tabeas come to the cave where Diastasimos is squatting by his fire.  Roth crams the novel with various literary and philosophical illusions in the pedantic German manner – for instance, the cave of the leper is also Plato’s cave in which the Ideas are only dimly descried as shadows on the wall.  The two Christians have heard that Jesus came to the cave just before his crucifixion and they are gathering testimony as to Christ’s last days – thus, they want to interview the leper.  Diastasimos is an ornery character, nursing a grudge against Jesus because he was not healed during his encounter with Christ.  He disputes the validity of the written word as set against verbal witness.  And he distrusts the Christian narrative because of its unfairness to Judas, someone that he seems to admire.  Instead of telling the lads about his encounter with Christ, he describes how he learned that he was leprous, discovering lesions on his shoulder and torso while sharpening a sickle.  As a good Jew, Diastasimos went to the Temple in Jerusalem where he bought dove for sacrifice, planning to pray that he flesh be made clean again.  With the bad luck that characterizes figures in these sorts of narratives, the leper arrives at the temple just as a riot takes place, unrest that results in the Romans killing many people.  Indeed, a specific Roman centurion whips Diasastimos with a leather scourge threaded with copper shards and exposes his lesions.  In a scene worthy of the cinema, everyone recoils from the unclean protagonist and he staggers away from the massacre, escaping when many others are killed.  


In the second part of the book, the leper narrates his encounter with Jesus.  The Savior is making his way to Jerusalem for Passover.  Night is falling and Jesus with Judas and John climb the steep hillside in the wadi to where they see a fire burning.  It is Diastasimos in his cave.  Roman troops are abroad, searching for Jewish rebels and John is afraid Jesus will be captured.  Jesus is not afraid of the Leper and doesn’t seem to regard him as “unclean” – the others, of course, are afraid of contagion.  Jesus seizes Diastasimos by the shoulder, the first person who has dared to touch the sick man since the first display of his symptoms.  The leper asks Jesus to be healed but nothing happens.  Apparently, the sick man lacks faith.  Jesus explains his failure (or refusal) to heal the leper by telling a parable about each human being being divided into a bright and dark half – Diastasimos represents the darkness.  This imagery is coordinated with the discovery of a fire burning in the wasteland some distance from the leper’s cave.  This bonfire seems to be a Roman sentry post.  Judas hatches the plan to descend from the cave and boldly approach the fire.  Jesus will be burdened with a wooden threshold, a piece of carved timber inexplicably laying around the leper’s grotto.  John and Judas will claim that Jesus is their slave and, by this dissembling, they will evade the Roman sentries.  


This plan is put into motion in the third chapter.  Judas, John and Jesus descend from the cave in the darkness and approach the sentry-fire.  Diastasimos creeps down the hill behind them to witness their encounter with the Romans.  At the fire, we find the Roman centurion who flogged Diastasimos (exposing his leprosy) in the Temple.  The Roman centurion as a sinister advisor who immediately senses that the slave trudging toward the flames heavily burdened with the wooden threshold is, in fact, the Jewish Messiah for whom they have been searching.  After some dialogue next to the blazing watch-fire, it becomes clear that the centurion is convinced that Jesus is lurking in the shadows, pretending to be a mere slave.  Jesus drops the heavy piece of wood and Judas begins to savagely flog him.  As Judas scourges the fallen Christ, the centurion sees that the man writhing on the ground is covered with leprous sores.  Somehow, Jesus has become Diastasimos.  The centurion raises the fallen man and embraces him.  At that moment, all distinctions between characters seem to collapse.  Diastasimos who is both Christ and Leper, both inside the scene and observer, finds that his leprosy has been healed – his skin is clean and smooth.


The epilogue to this story is short.  Diastasimos has been healed by his recounting of this story.  He retreats into the darkness.  Andreas follow him to the back of the cave where there is a trough of water in which Diastasimos is washing a sickle. Andreas recalls how he would bring his father’s garments to him when he was a little boy.  Suddenly, he realizes that Diastasimos is his father.  In the firelight, the young man confirms that the Leper’s skin is unblemished and that he has been healed.

Roth embeds all sorts of allusions to Biblical texts in the story.  His prose uses short fragmentary sentences at inflection points in which high emotion is required – the leper speaks in dithyrambs and the text has some of the ecstatic energy of Nietzshe’s Zarathustra.  Everything is worked out in a stylized and precise manner.  For instance, the opening images in the book invoke the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water; similarly, the last sentences are symmetrical with the beginning – again the four elements occur.  The revelation that Andreas and Tabeas are Diasastimos’ sons seems unmotivated and implausible, but plausibility is not Roth’s strong point and he seems determined to cram as many signs and wonders into the story as possible.  Clearly, Jesus’ bearing of the wooden threshold simulates the burden of the cross and, when Judas savagely scourges Christ (to show that this man couldn’t possibly be the Messiah), his later betrayal of Jesus is prefigured – Judas exists to harm Christ so that the god-man can perform his mission. 


Critics disagree in their evaluation of Riverside.  Many thought the book inspiring and brilliant.  Others condemned the whole affair as tendentious and superfluous – this is the school of thought that regards four Gospels as more than enough.  Although I can’t exactly measure the timbre of the prose, some Germans thought that the self-consciously archaic diction was vulgar and pretentious.  Roth is an enthusiastic admirer of Carl Jung and, indeed, has been associated with various Jung societies in southern California and the novel certainly traffics in Jungian archetypes – for instance, the four elements at the outset and ending of the book and the figure of Diasastimos who embodies the dual nature of human beings: half light and half dark, half clean and half diseased.  (The name means something like “one who persists in a dual nature” and this odd Greek name for a Hebrew is mirrored by the English title to the German novel, “Riverside” referring to the hymn refrain “down by the riverside.”)


Roth subtitled Riverside as a Christusnovelle.  He, then, wrote two other books, completing the so-called Christus-trilogy.  In 1993, Roth published Johnny Shines oder Die Wiedererdeckung der Toten (Johnny Shines or the Resurrection of the Dead).  This was followed by Corpus Christi (1995). Johnny Shines is set in the present and involves a preacher’s son who steals a corpse and tries to resurrect the dead body in the wastelands of the Mojave Desert – the frame story takes place in jail where Johnny, imprisoned for his crimes, speaks with a woman who turns out to be his mother and who explains his obsessions on the basis of childhood abuse inflicted on him.  Corpus Christi is a return to historical fiction and involves the story of Thomas Didymas (that is, “doubting” Thomas).  Roth hangs each novel on situations that arise in films that he admires.  The setting of Riverside is clearly drawn from the scenes in Ben Hur involving the “cave of the lepers” – Ben Hur’s mother and sister have become lepers and live in a spectral cavern with other disfigured and miserable victims of the disease.  Roth also claims that a central aspect of Riverside is derived from Kurosawa’s 1945 crime film Men who tread the Tiger’s Tail – this is the encounter with Roman centurion at the bonfire.  Johnny Shines is suspended on narrative scaffolding taken from John Ford’s Western, The Man who shot Liberty Valence. Corpus Christi  is supposedly based on Kurosawa’s film Redbeard, a movie about a virtuous doctor in Meiji era Japan.  (The doctor is suspected of heresy because he dares to adopt Western medical practices in mid-19th century Japan.)  These novels also may be characterized as Midrash – that is, the Jewish exegetical practice of elaborating on Biblical stories to tease out additional significance in the narratives.   


Movies are mythology for Roth.  Movie stars are the equivalents of pagan gods and goddesses.  Roth deploys references to films the way that Greek and Roman writers allude to mythology.  This tendency on Roth’s part derives, I think, from his predilection for Jungian analysis. Similarly, Christian mythology (and I’m not sure that Roth qualifies as a “Believer”) affords us access to Jungian archetypes, particularly those related to redemptive suffering and the resurrection of the dead.  Similarly, films and movie stars are thresholds opening into “depth psychology” – that is, providing the writer with a basis to invoke a Hollywood (or film) mythology that can represent, in shorthand, as it were, various psychic dilemmas.  This tendency to treat scripture as film and film as scripture in the context of myth-making is evident in Roth’s later book, Starlite Terrace – so far as I can determine, the only novel-length writing by the author that has been translated into English.   


Starlite Terrace is a short book assembling four short stories.  The stories are linked by characters, themes, and location – the titular Starlite Terrace, a low-rent apartment building in Sherman Oaks.  The author, who appears, more or less, as himself, narrates the stories in the first person.  However, Roth isn’t a protagonist and his role is that of observer, or, perhaps, chronicler.  The stories are simply written but very dense with incident and allusion.  Roth packs the book with recondite film references and gossip, much of it scandalous, along the lines of Kenneth Anger’s compilation of lurid movie rumor in his book Hollywood Babylon.  Each of the four narratives focuses on a central figure.  These characters are uniformly hapless, leading grotesque or forlorn lives.  Much of the action revolves around a delicatessen named Noah’s.  Roth isn’t subtle – in broad terms, his book is about the great flood, called a Sintflut (“Sin-flood”) in German, punishment inflicted by God on a corrupt humanity.  Throughout the book, it rains incessantly and apocalypse by nuclear war figures prominently in two of the stories.  Although one of the characters is a fundamentalist Christian, Roth’s book chronicles antediluvian lives – that is, people who have been damaged or complicit in the evil and violence that surrounds them.  God destroyed his creation because it was corrupt and its people violent.  In this book, Roth explores humanity before the advent of Christ, people suffering in a world poised on the brink of destruction.  


Rex, the protagonist in “The Man at Noah’s window” is called “the King of Jews”, although he is, in fact, not really Jewish at all.  (After he was taken from his mother, a small-town prostitute, Rex was raised by a Jewish foster-family – we see him, as a boy, choking on the horse-radish in a Passover  ceremony.)  Rex’s life has been damaged by the disappearance of his father.  In Sonnenfinsternisse,(“Dark of the Sun” or “Eclipse”), Moss McCloud is a New York talent agent who has lost his daughter in a vicious custody dispute.  He has moved to Los Angeles and lives in Starlite Terrace in the hope of being reunited with his child, who would now be a middle-aged woman.  Gary is a fundamentalist Christian and, probably, an aging drug dealer; he is featured in “Rider on the Storm”.  Gary is in love with Grace, a much younger woman.  She leaves him to attend a party with some Armenian friends that she has met at Starbucks on the eve of the first Iraq war.  Gary goes to the party with Roth and shoots the place up.  June, the heroine of “The Woman and the Sea of Stars”, is a retired Administrative Assistant who worked for Disney and, then, Fox Studios.  She has no children but longs for a relationship with her niece Jennifer.  Her hobby is collecting wedding dresses at Thrift Stores with the idea that one of them will please Jennifer so much that she will wear it when she gets married.  She keeps her Jewish grandfather’s ashes in her apartment.  June knows all the juicy Hollywood gossip but she’s been badly traumatized by an assignment that she completed right after the end of World War Two – it was her job to watch four hours of raw concentration camp footage and provide notes to the boss as to the content of the film.  


All characters are eccentric and wounded.  Rex believes, probably incorrectly, that his father’s hands were used for insert close-ups in Gary Cooper’s movie High Noon.  (Roth views the movie and notes that there are no hand close-ups in the film.)  But these hands, that Rex believes to be extraordinary and famous, were used to repeatedly beat up his mother.  Moss McCloud is like a secular version of Hannah and Elkanah in the Old Testament – he has a daughter but has given her up, persuading himself that he is making a “sacrifice to God.”  However, McCloud isn’t without sin – in the context of a vicious child custody dispute with his ex-wife, he contemplated hiring a gangster to murder the woman, and, indeed, was saved from that crime only by a sheer violent fortuity: the criminal with whom he was planning to contract for the murder is assassinated just minutes before McCloud can close the deal.  Throughout the book, themes of paternity, disputed lineage, and savage violence are explored – parents are absent or cruel: McCloud’s mother is the most noteworthy figure in this brutal cast of characters – she pitched her little son out of a fourth floor window with the result that McCloud has a soft spot in his head where part of his skull is missing.  The figures in the book earnestly desire to be mothers and fathers but their failings and fate conspires against them.  In general terms, the book recapitulates some of the subject matter of Genesis.  Beyond the repeated allusions to the great Flood and the end of the world by radioactive fire and deadly water, Starlite Terrace recapitulates Old Testament concerns with procreation, succession, and family lineage.


The first two tales in the book, although highly digressive, can be scanned as abstruse but conventional short stories.  In the first story, Roth goes back to Germany for an extended stay and when he returns Rex has died.  Roth has dreamed of a great tornado sweeping down Ventura Avenue, but, also, a secret place of refuge.  Although Rex is figuratively lost in the storm, the story concludes with an account of how Gary Cooper was saved from a flood in his childhood home in Montana.  The story includes a poignant and very moving account of Cooper being chauffeured between businesses that he had previously patronized in Beverly Hills – the star knows that he is dying of cancer and, although he is reticient, he is saying good bye to the tradesmen and merchants with whom he transacted business in suits and shoes and other haberdashery.  Roth correlates this farewell with the scenes in High Noon in which the beleagured sheriff seeks assistance from the townspeople who are too cowardly to assist him against the bad hombres who have come to gun him down.  As in the movie, no one can really help Cooper and he will die, a few months later, from his cancer.  The second story involving Moss McCloud also has a conventional core – the New York theatrical agent’s attempt to hire a hit man to kill his ex-wife.  The story is linked structurally to the first tale – in the second story, Roth dreams of a secret shelter hidden somewhere behind a wall in Noah’s Deli.  This is the place where he will shelter against the tornado (and floods) about which he dreamed in the first story.  (One of Roth’s literary devices is to link his stories by dreams – at the time of writing Starlite Terrace, Roth was the President of the Jungian Association of Southern California.  In the story about Moss McCloud, the hero dreams of pouring blood into the open mouth of a gangster.  In the third story, a character saves another by spilling fiery water into someone else’s mouth, also a dream vision.  These sorts of correlations with connecting imagery are ubiquitous in the book and provide the sense that the stories thematically comprise a whole.)


The last two sections in the book are more lyrical and diffuse.  Much of “Rider on the Storm” involves a lengthy passage of film ecphrasis.  Ara, an Armenian film-maker, tells a group gathered at Starbucks about a movie he saw as a little boy.  In the film, Noah’s fourth son is excluded from the ark.  This man, named Ur, consorts with a witch, imploring her to turn him and his much beloved wife into animals so that they can be saved with the other beasts loaded into Noah’s ark.  The witch turns Ur’s wife into a goat but he isn’t transformed.  The fountains of the heavens are unleashed upon the earth and, although Ur’s wife, in the form of a she-goat, is led onto the ark, Ur is left to fend for himself.  In the raging waters, he desperately seizes the side of the ark.  Roth, then, describes a camera trick – the image shows a cross-section of the ark with Ur clinging to its side and, within the wooden vessel, the she-goat that is his wife crowded close the wall to which her husband has clamped himself outside.  A narrow passage through the wood connects the two.  The account of the movie is dream-like and implausible.  I very much doubt that any movie of this sort exists (or could ever exist) and Ara’s description seems contrived, a device to weld a very slight tale about a man disappointed in a romantic liaison to the more intricate and profound scriptural themes animating the book.  (Nonetheless, the story contains some funny passages, particularly Gary’s assertion that he all would have been well in his life if he had somehow been able to attend a party thrown by the Beatles in the Hollywood Hills – as a member of the rock group, the Turtles, he’s been invited but can’t get there.  This event is described as “the mother of all parties”, I think a reference to Saddam Hussein’s florid rhetoric on the eve of the Iraq war, the time during which the story is set – the American invaders, Hussein said, would “perish in the Mother of all Wars.”) There are a number of interesting things in “Riders on the Storm” – for instance, the grooves in the records cut by the Turtles are metaphorically linked to Laurel Canyon, where the hero lived during the sixties.  For a time, Gary worked as a Statist (the German word means “extra”) on the TV show ER and may have spoken one or two times with George Clooney – this also yields some comic material.  But doom hangs heavy over all of these tales and, in the end, Gary shoots up a party where Grace (an obviously allegorical name) has gone with the Armenian filmmaker, Ara.  As he is apprehended by the police, Roth sees that Gary has become Ur and that the shooting represents him in the process of becoming either a human (who will be drowned in the flood) or an animal saved on the ark – in any event, the deluge is coming.


The last story, June’s tale, “The Woman in the Sea of Stars” is very beautiful and, I think, represents an improvement on the lyrical style and exceedingly loose narrative form that Roth experiments with in the preceding narrative.  June, a tough old Hollywood dame, yearns for a visit from her niece, Jennifer.  Roth has been sick and has to be nursed back to health by his buddies at Noah’s Deli who lovingly nurse him back to health.  The author is feverish but, at the point that his fever breaks, he has a vision of the cosmos including an astronomical feature called the Horsehead Nebula.  In this dream-vision, he focuses on the eye of the cosmic horse in intra-galactic space, but he is careful to note that the vast celestial form is comprised of dust or interstellar ash.  Characteristically, Roth is careful to show that the dream isn’t febrile – it comes after the fever has broken.  For Roth, dreams are windows into a true reality and, therefore, the author is described as lucid when he has this vision.


Roth goes to June’s apartment to visit her niece who has, at long last, come to see her aunt.  On TV, an old John Wayne movie is broadcast, The Conqueror, in which the star, rather ridiculously, played Genghis Khan.  June relates a well-known Hollywood rumor: the movie was shot on radioactive sands near St. George, Utah with the result that many people in the cast and crew later developed cancer and died.  (June attributes John Wayne’s cancer to this toxic film location.)  In fact, June says that studio scenes requiring simulated outdoor locations were made with truckloads of the poisoned red dirt hauled to Los Angeles from Utah.  This part of June’s story rhymes with an earlier section in Moss McCloud’s Sonnenfinsterniss (“Eclipse”) in which Moss meets his future wife in a restaurant in a New York hotel where everyone has gathered for the end of the world during the Cuban missile crisis – it is as a result of this encounter that Moss’ lost daughter, Amy is conceived.  These allusions support the apocalyptic scaffolding on which the story-cycle is framed.  


June, then, goes on to sketch the story of her life.  Her grandfather was a resolute and courageous German Jew.  She has his ashes in an urn on her mantle.  A structure of type and anti-type relates Hollywood stars to their fans.  June’s life in some ways mirrors the life of her type, Marilyn Monroe.  She has a foster father and an unhappy, childless marriage.  She works as a secretary for Disney and, then, at Harry Cohn’s Fox Studios.  She’s traumatized by the assignment that she record in words the ghastly content of four hours of concentration camp footage.  (In the footage, she sees people being burned alive, an image that relates back to the scenes of fire and water in the movie described to Gary in “Rider on the Storm”).  In the end of the story, she enters the water – in this case, the swimming pool at Starlite Terrace.  She has poured her grandfather’s ashes into the pool that is lit from bulbs below its surface.  It’s now night and everyone is drunk.  June dives into the water, piercing the ashes that have formed into a shadowy human shape on the surface of the water.  Here is how Roth describes June’s dive:


Wie unter den Saum eines sich bauschenden Brautkleids tauchte sie, aufwarts in Innere der treibenden Figure sich zu stellen, ins Zentrum der lichtdurchglanzten tanzende Wolke.


She dived as if under the edge of a billowing bridal dress, upwards to set herself within the moving figure, at the center of a dancing cloud through which the light sparkled.  


The ashes of the dead Jewish grandfather has become an ashen bridal gown (June has collected these for Jennifer.)  Motifs involving ash and radioactivity, humans burnt to cinders in the concentration camp, and the dust of interstellar space that forms the Horsehead nebula are all combined here.  Roth sees the fiery eye of the celestial horse in the center of the ash drifting on the turquoise water of the swimming pool.  At last, the destructive water of the flood has become the baptismal water of the new Covenant.  June emerges from the pool as if “new born.”   


This rapturous concatenation of symbolic leit motifs will seem either ecstatically beautiful or absurdly contrived according to the sentiments of the reader.  The story is really a complex, and compactly dense lyric poem in prose – not so much a narrative as a constellation of interconnected images relating to death, the apocalypse, and rebirth.  I’m attuned to this sort of thing and willing to overlook some of Roth’s more outlandish contrivances and, so, found the text very moving and ingenious.  In its density of imagery and breadth of reference (concentration camps. Bugsy Siegel and Marilyln Monroe, radioactive sands and an intergalactic nebula), the prose approximates a poem by Celan – dust, eye, genocide, water.  


Gottesquartett is Roth’s most recent book, written in 2019 and equipped with an epilogue in which the writer discusses the Covid pandemic in suitably Biblical terms.  In the fifteen years intervening between Starlite Terrace and Gottesquartett, Roth’s thinking and literary concerns have evolved in a way that many readers will find disquieting.  Starlite Terrace was a suite of stories enlivened and energized by allusions to the Bible and Jungian analysis.  Gottesquartett is Bible commentary configured as Jungian depth-psychology.  There are several anecdotes narrated in Gottesquartett but they serve as examples of psychological processes.  Storytelling is now subsumed within precepts derived from Jung.  Bible stories related in Gottesquartett don’t stand on their own, but rather are referenced as systems of Jungian archetypes.  Roth has shifted his focus from the narrative to the didactic.  The stories in Starlite Terrace were studded with allusions to Jung and the Bible.  Now, Jung and the Bible are central to the text and the tales, themselves, are only incidental, that is, allusions or anecdotes illustrating psychological or philosophical arguments that Roth poses.  Starlite Terrace comprised of stories with a faint suggestion of Jungian interpretation as a nimbus surrounding the tales.  Quartett is all Jungian interpretation with the stories reduced to short exemplary anecdotes.  There is a disheartening seriousness to Roth’s Gottesquartett and some features of the book seem embedded in a kind of eccentric cult.  Nonetheless, Roth remains fascinating and, despite my reservations, I found the book both intriguing and compelling.  It’s an unusual text, not exactly essay, nor really a personal memoir, but rather a series of propositions derived from Jung and illustrated by odd personal anecdotes.  The secret source of the book’s quasi-poetric (dithyrambic) prose in Nietzsche’s Also spach Zarathustra and passages in the text lapse explicitly into a kind of ecstatic, if didactic, poetry.


Many readers, I think, may be appalled by Gottesquartett.  I enjoyed the book, but am afraid to unreservedly recommend it to others.  Certainly, the structure of the book is beautifully designed and deeply resonant.  The protagonist, Patrick Roth, a figure that is, for all intents and purposes coincident with the author, has returned to Los Angeles from Germany after an absence of seven or eight years.  The occasion for Roth’s travel, apparently in the Fall of 2019, is the recent death of a woman called Dianne, the author’s Jungian psychotherapist.  Roth has been asked to speak at her obsequies and feels her loss deeply.  Indeed, he characterizes Dianne as the figure most decisive in his life – after meeting her, he says, there was no longer anything purely “accidental” about his existence: she taught him to live, as it were, intentionally.  Furthermore, Roth and Dianne have promised one another that the person who dies first will manifest to the survivor in some kind of sign.  In this way, there will be proof that the soul survives death.


Roth intends to spend four days in Los Angeles – this is the quartet that is referenced in the book’s title.  There is another quartet: the four voices interacting in the book: these are Roth, Ava, Vera, and Wyatt.  All of these people are involved with the Jungian Association to some degree and were admirers of Dianne.  The quartet is gathered in Santa Monica in a house that overlooks the sea within sight of the high rise condominium where Dianne once lived with Ed Erdinger, also now deceased, a prominent Jungian psychoanalyst and author.  The mountains are on fire and many homes are endangered in the Hollywood hills and Santa Monica range.  Ironically, the services for Dianne have to be canceled – wild fire threatens the place where the gathering was supposed to occur.


In effect, Roth and his three California hosts are trapped in the house overlooking the ocean.  At night, they can see fire flaring behind the mountains.  Roth has brought with him some short stories or essays and he proposes that, each night, the company gather on the terrace and read aloud what he has written.  (He also delivers his eulogy for Dianne in this way.)  The book is divided into four nights.  On each night, one of the quartet reads a text by Roth.  The members of the group, then, discuss the text and offer interpretations of the writing.  Roth, who seems insufferable in this book, dominates the conversation with his sage remarks about his own prose.  He’s a very bad and annoying house-guest, monopolizing discussions and arrogantly insisting that people read aloud what he has written.  He assumes center-stage and will not relinquish that role to anyone else.


Nonetheless, the notion of a group of people isolated in a house and passing the time during a crisis by telling one another stories is a time-honored narrative device, a way to impart profundity to what might otherwise seem mere anecdotes.  Boccaccio’s Decameron has this structure  – seven women and three men confined to a country manor during the plague in Florence amuse themselves by telling 100 stories.  Margaret of Navarre’s Heptameron is similar; in this case, a bridge has collapsed and a company of travelers stranded at an inn pass the ten days required to restore the span by telling one another stories – in this case, seventy-two tales.  The form that Roth uses for his book also resembles Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the more sinister 120 Days of Sodom by de Sade, also a text that involves characters isolated in a country house, passing the time between orgies by telling one another erotic stories.  Gottesquartett is peculiar because the stories aren’t particularly well-developed or interesting and seem, more or less, excuses for Roth to demonstrate his exegetical prowess – the interpretations that Roth imposes on the material are more important than the stories or dream related. 


A key element to Roth’s practice is the concept of Einstellung.  The word is used dozens of times in the book and represents a central concept.  Einstellung is one of those German words that has dozens of meanings depending upon context.  Literally, the word refers to “setting something within”, that is, within a situation or context or mental framework.  The word can be translated as “installation” or “attitude”.  Roth expresses the idea that Einstellung is fundamental to true understanding – in order to grasp something adequately, we must somehow “install” it within our psyche; truth is participatory – we have to imagine our way into a situation or text.  Einstellung defines Roth’s approach to scripture.  We must participate in the scriptural text by imagining ourselves within the situation described by the writing.  This concept is aligned with the Jewish exegetical practice of Midrash.  In Midrash, the person interpreting a text imagines additional details of the situation, adopts a perspective within or interior to the circumstances described in the writing, and may improvise elements of the narrative that aren’t explicitly revealed by the text itself.  Another form of Einstellung developed in the book is the notion of energizing a text by reading it aloud.  Actually pronouncing the words of the writing are a way of installing the text in our imagination – this is why Roth insists that the writings that he has brought to California be read aloud.  At one point, in the book, Roth describes a religious exercise prescribed by a German church – members of the congregation are directed to write in long-hand chapters of the Bible.  By this spiritual exercise, the writer inhabits the text and assimilates its meanings to himself.   In Jungian terms, the concept of Einstellung which denotes bringing within oneself meanings that might otherwise be perceived purely rationally and as abstractions is the opposite of the notion of “projection” – also a crucial concept in the book’s psycho-dynamics.  “Projection” means perceiving one’s inner reality in others or things.  It’s a form of transference or, as Roth also demonstrates, a kind of psychic translation in which meanings are “carried over” (uebersetzt) into a context outside of their original setting.       


Gottesquartett is described as Erzaehlungen eines Ausgewanderten – that is, as “stories by one who has wandered away”.  The subtitle suggests that the book will be comprised of something like short stories.  But this is deceptive.  Most of the book consists of interpretations of anecdotes or dreams. The reader moves through the text waiting for stories, but they are not forthcoming.  Much of the writing is fascinating, but, at times, the subordination of narrative to exegesis may be frustrating to many readers. Some tales have promising titles – for instance, there’s one called “Michelle Pfeiffer in Love”, but the stories are slight to the point of vanishing.  (In the anecdote about Michelle Pfeiffer, Wyatt, who is somehow also connected with the movie industry, attends the Golden Globes.  After the awards are presented, the participants decamp to the Trader Vic’s for drinks.  There, Wyatt sees Michelle Pfeiffer beaming radiantly at him.  He’s wearing a rented tuxedo and doesn’t really belong with the glitterati in the bar and he can’t figure out why the beautiful woman seems to be beckoning to him.  At last, he figures out that she is watching herself on a TV monitor placed behind where Wyatt is sitting -- her luminous smile signifies her pleasure at seeing herself on-screen accepting an award.  The movie star is in love but it is amour propre – she loves her own image.  This story occurs in the context of a lengthy explanation of the concept of psychic projection.)  The closest thing to a conventional story occurs near the end of the book in the context of densely philosophical discussion as to love and memory.  This discussion arises from consideration of two texts: a bible verse from the book of Luke and the concluding paragraph of Thornton Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey.  The citation from Luke involves Jesus recalling how 18 persons died when the tower at Siloam collapsed – there was no evidence that these people were guilty in any way, yet they perished by an “act of God”.  Jesus uses this fearsome example to demand that his listeners “convert” or they too will perish.  This strange non sequiter (the people crushed under the tower didn’t deserve this fate, whilst presumably those who won’t convert might have earned destruction) is a trigger to Thornton Wilder’s novel about a group of travelers who are killed when a bridge collapses.  Therefore, the text at Luke 13:4 engenders Wilder’s novel – Roth’s book is full of this sort of intertextuality.  Further, the threat of destruction explicit in the passage from the Gospel and Wilder’s meditation on fate and causality mirrors the situation in the book, the apocalyptic threat of the wild fires burning in the hills above Hollywood.  Finally, Wilder’s bridge of San Luis Rey is present in the location of the story – the four have gathered at Marina del Rey in Santa Monica.  In Roth’s imagination, the Christian apocalypse is another form of Goetterdaemmerung (“the twilight of the Gods”) and, further, associated with the final massacre in The Wild Bunch.  (The “god-quartet” also refers to William Holden, Ernest Bornine, Warren Oates, and Ben Johnson walking through the dusty Mexican village to rescue Angel, a comrade held by the vicious General Mapache; Pike Bishop’s terse command “Let’s go!” from Peckinpah’s movie is an epigraph to the book.)


Roth’s complicated interpretative machinery imposes frames upon frames.  The four friends at the condominium overlooking Marina del Rey recall reading Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey out loud many years before and, then, discussing the question of whether there can be love without memory.  Wilder’s book seems to suggest that love abides even when people can’t recall what they love or, even, have had all of their memories, and thus, their own identity, obliterated.  This seems questionable to the practical Vera – her name means “truth.”  (She has appeared as an actress for many years in a “soap opera” and, therefore, presumably knows a thing or two above love.)  Vera challenges the idea that love can persist in the face of oblivion.  These conversations occurred decades earlier, before the group became involved in Jungian analysis (and before anyone knew Dianna) and were reflected in a short story that Roth composed.   


Wyatt reads the story.  It also has an elaborate frame: the four friends have just finished reading Wilder’s novel – it has taken six hours to read the text out loud.  It is near midnight and the characters seems to be a little drunk. They debate the meaning of Wilder’s assertions about memory and love and the novelist’s claim that “the bridge is love”.  Within this frame, Roth as a character in the story tells a story about a girlfriend, Sharon, that he met at UCLA in January 1976.  Roth has just come back from Germany and has dreamed about a bridge comprised of crouching cats.  Sharon invites Roth to meet her mother and stepfather.  The stepfather, whose name is Saul, lives on a sort of houseboat –it’s a yacht in fact – moored in Marina del Rey.  The stepfather has been hesitant to meet Roth – he’s described as an “older Jewish gentleman” – and we suspect that his reticence relates to the concentration camps.  Roth, with Sharon and her mother, cross over a little walkway onto the yacht  –it’s a kind of bridge that brings to mind the oneiric “crouching cats”.  On the yacht, it’s dark with light reflecting off the water into the cabin.  Roth immediately associates the lyrical lighting in the cabin with Stanley Cortez’s photography– the lighting effect is created by floating pieces of a broken mirror in a bowl of water and, then, shining a beam on them.  (The broken mirror and the projected beam seem to have archetypal significance).  It’s an awkward meeting and Roth tries to make small-talk by recounting how he traveled to Vevey on Lake Geneva in the hope of meeting Charlie Chaplin.  There have been break-ins and robberies on the boats moored in the marina and everyone knows that Saul has been playing with a revolver, a gun that he keeps on board for protection.  Roth brings his story within a story within a story to its climax but doesn’t get to complete the narrative.  We never find out if he met Chaplin or not.  Saul has a kind of seizure, an affliction of memory that affects him physically.  He recalls that when he was a pilot during the Second World War, he flew over German cities strafing civilians.  Guilt now torments him.  He mutters that he made 22 strafing runs, shooting down men, women, and children.  This disrupts the small gathering.  As Roth rises to leave, he hears a click behind him and suspects, for a moment, that Saul has snapped off the safety on the pistol and is about to shoot him.  But this is not the case and the narrative ends with Roth embracing Saul, a gesture of forgiveness between the two men.  (Odd and a little self-serving that a Jew would need to forgive a German.) The significance of the 22 strafing runs is that the Hebrew alphabet contains 22 letters.  Earlier in the book, Roth has ventured into cabalistic speculation, ruminating on the 23rd letter in the alphabet – the final character, which doesn’t exist, but is imagined to destroy the world (or perfect it) created by the first 22 letters.  (In an earlier story, Roth hears two accounts about the Torah – a rabbi saves one book from the Nazis; another rabbi is burned alive by Nero in Torah scroll: the white ash signifies the spaces between letters.  The narrator of these tales, a Jewish eye-doctor recalls how he met Max Brod in Prague – Brod imitated Charlie Chaplin to the amusement of the people gathered in the tavern.  Kafka is present but the narrator doesn’t notice him.  Later, returning to the narrator’s home in Hollywood after hearing these tales at a dinner party, the old man shows Roth a Pleiade edition of Kafka in which there are 21 letters in the title Kafka - Ouevres Completes I.  If the hyphen is counted as a character, the count of letters is 22, the equivalent of the Hebrew alphabet from which the world was created.  Roth interprets his memory of this event as being inserted in his mind by the dead Dianne and, therefore, a message to him from beyond.)  


Wyatt’s reading of Roth’s story about Saul, embedded in textual frames relating to a recent book that the  author has written about Paul, the apostle, formerly known Saul, is, then, discussed by the quartet.  Roth observes that the story has taken on a new significance.  Roth thought that the story was primarily about Saul and this was how the story was interpreted when he wrote it (and, apparently, read it aloud to his friends) twenty years earlier.  He now construes the story as about whether there can be love without Wissen – that is, love without “knowing” or “understanding”.  Roth now thinks that love is before all categories, even taking priority over space and time.  


It’s late at night. Ava can now return to her home.  The threat of the fire has passed, at least, with respect to her dwelling.  Roth must fly back to Germany in the morning.  He borrows Wyatt’s car and drives through his old haunts.  Dianne, after moving from the Marina del Rey condominium, lived in Bel Air.  Roth drives to Bel Air and, despite police erecting barricades at the entrance to the community, enters through the gate. (We are reminded that the 22 characters in the Hebrew alphabet represents a gate or, in German, a Tor, a word that is homophonic to Torah.)  He drives along a golf course and recounts an anecdote about how Alfred Hitchcock in a characteristically devious and, even, cruel way, gave his wife, Alma, a house in Bel Air for a birthday present.  Smoke blackens the air.  Roth gets out of his car, but can’t find the place where Dianne lived – he’s suffocating.  A series of apocalyptic visions follow and, then, Roth wakes up on a airplane descending from the sky to land in Germany.  The book concludes with an epilogue about the Covid-19 virus and a prayer by Roth – he has re-translated the 23rd Psalm from Hebrew – that those who have become ill will be healed.  The various revelations and apocalypses recounted in the book are now manifested in the diabolical virus afflicting the world.


I liked Gottesquartett.  It’s a book in which every event and idea is connected to every other aspect of the writing.  However, the book doesn’t have much connection to the quotidian reality in which we live – it’s highly abstract and mystical and suffers from an overload, a vast surfeit, of significance.  There’s so much meaning in the book that it has no room for mere characters or events.  Furthermore, the book has something of the aspect of a holy text in a cult.  Roth’s version of Christianity is very remote from what most people might consider orthodox – his God is Jung and Jung’s prophet is Jesus.  At one point, Roth says that the sharp sword of “individuation” – the central doctrine in Jungian analysis - is akin to the sharp sword that Jesus says that he will wield to sever father from son, and brother from brother, in furtherance of God’s dictate.  Jesus isn’t an end in himself or the center of an epistemology.  Rather, the Savior appears as a tool of Jungian analysis, a device by which a person enters into becoming what he really is – that is, the mechanism of individuation.  Roth’s Jesus (and Jung) doesn’t have any social conscience or political imperative.  At the heart of things is a personal salvation that arises from exegetical work on texts and relationships and dreams that are harbingers of our own fundamental nature.  Roth conflates worship with psychoanalytical interpretation.  Furthermore, in several passages in the book, he seems to renounce what is most characteristic of his own discourse – that is, his obsessive reliance on images from films as a key to understanding himself and others.  Roth asserts that Hollywood is a Babylon and, even, cites Kenneth Anger’s book to that effect as well as Griffith’s depiction of the fall of that great city in his 1916 film Intolerance.  Babylon is the pedestal upon which the Great Whore has been elevated.  And Roth interprets his fetishistic relationship with films and their imagery as a kind of idolatry.  In my estimation, this evolution in Roth’s aesthetic is not wholly for the good and it’s my surmise that he is tending toward a kind of extreme mysticism that, perhaps, will defy further articulation – words and things are sliding into the darkness of the ineffable and the unnameable, the cultic “mud” that Freud thought obscured Jung’s thinking.  


Gottesquartett is published by Herder Verlag, a Freiburg publishing house, that specializes in Catholic theology.  (Herder published all of the works of the Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner).  The book is handsomely produced with a beautiful cover showing Tobias and the great fish.  But you have a slight sense that there is something half-crazy about the whole enterprise.  Roth's unorthodox syncretic imagination seems to be ossifying into some kind of fundamentalism.