Hi everyone,
Coming up in the latest Marginalia:
• I recently wrote about the distinction between terror and fear, but what does that have to do with Jordan Peele’s latest film, Nope? The video-essayist and podcaster Thomas Flight has a brilliant new video looking at that question and how it interacts with the sound design in the film, which I have a lot more to say about below in Watching.
• What do we do with questions that may be ultimately unanswerable, or those things we inevitably fail to capture with words yet can’t stop talking about? How do we express those fundamental parts of the human experience that, as phrased by the Sufi mystic Al-Niffari, lie “between words and silence”? For the responses of Roger Scruton and e. e. cummings, look no further than the section on Reading.
• My dad recently sent me a quote that he said captured something his father had taught him, and which I have in turn learned from my dad. “Men crave duty,” the saying goes, “a cause to defend, a cross to bear, a family to protect.” There will always be those who crave (or who believe they crave) an easy life, but for many others, a sense of duty cannot be divorced from a meaningful life. That desire to live up to responsibility is evident in Leonard Cohen’s sudden journey to Israel in the midst of war in 1973, which you can read about in Listening.
Watching:
There are a handful of people who I’ll call, for lack of a better term that includes everyone I’m thinking of, “online creators” whose work has shaped mine and who I would feel like I’d had some kind of success if I could consider them my peers. Of them, Thomas Flight is one who has consistently helped me to understand cinema through a more “craft-focused” lens; as a writer and literary critic, my approach to films is often focused on narrative and theme.
So when Thomas got in touch to say that one of my recent essays had informed part of his approach to his latest video-essay on Nope, I was incredibly grateful. You can watch the video-essay here, and I encourage you to check it out. His analysis of how “ambiguity, our imagination, and the distinction between terror and horror play out within the sound design” of Nope is as compelling as it is convincing. He offers us an important lens through which to appreciate the film.
The sound design is the element Thomas focuses on, and there are many other elements in this movie worth examining, but the problem for me is that they don’t add up to a worthwhile whole. The sum is very much less than its parts; the experience of watching Nope as a viewer is – I find – far less interesting than analysing its craft as a critic. However, if I’d followed my gut on this and not given the film a second thought, I’d have missed out on the many lessons we can learn from how it was made.
And that is precisely wherein lies so much of the value in the work of Thomas Flight and others who help us to see past our intuitions and gut reactions, to see more deeply into what depths lie beneath even a seemingly superficial surface. I very much encourage you to check out (and, if you can, support) Thomas Flight’s work on his Youtube channel and/or his podcast.
Reading:
While talking on a podcast about the intellectual hurdles standing in the way of his own religious conversion, Douglas Murray mentioned a book to which he’d contributed an introduction and which collects some key pieces written by the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton. In this collection, Confessions of a Heretic, there is a wonderful essay called “Effing the Ineffable”. The unintentionally snigger-inducing title aside, the essay manages to distil and clearly express one of the fundamental problems of religious thought in only two (stunning) pages.
Scruton opens the essay noting that Aquinas, in spite of the some two-million words he spent on his Summa Theologica, declared at the end of his life that all of his writing meant nothing compared to the beatific vision he’d been gifted, which words could never describe. Scruton links this to Wittgenstein’s injunction that the things “whereof we cannot speak we must consign to silence”. Reading this, I was reminded of the opening to a wonderfully strange novella, The Principle, by Jérôme Ferrari, in which the narrator says that to speak of certain things, “our only choice ... is between metaphor and silence”.
Scruton’s theme is that at some point, every serious inquiry into first principles always leads to philosophical bedrock, the axiomatic nature of which is often experienced as questions such as: “what makes those first principles true or those fundamental laws valid? What explains those original causes or initial conditions?” These are questions that are currently unanswered and possibly never answerable. Scruton is then led to ask, given our deep desire for answers, “So how should we proceed?”
The particular way in which Scruton answers his own question, and the manner in which he answers it, is worth taking the time to read for yourself. (You can find it in the book mentioned, or read it online here.) I’ll just add that this question of the failure of words and the experiential nature of certain epistemologies is woven throughout the history of religious thought and no small amount of art and literature. Amongst dozens of other similes for the moon, the poet e. e. cummings once described it as “the shyest metaphor”. The essayist Evan Puschak expounds on this imagery, saying in a video-essay that, “Cummings has a transcendental reverence for the moon, but he has a hard time pinning it down in language. That’s why it’s the ‘shyest metaphor’ – any attempt to understand it, to know it, will result in the symbol fleeing further away.”
Here, we find cummings, in one of his papers housed at Houghton Library, attempting in his own way to “eff the ineffable”, or at least express how inexpressible some of the most important things are:
“To know is to possess, & any fact is possessed by everyone who knows it, whereas those who feel the truth are possessed, not possessors.”
There are those (largely of the Richard Dawkins ilk) who see this sort of thing as mere nonsense, who grumpily paraphrase Alice when she says to the Hatter, “I think you might do something better with the time … than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers.” And those who think that way gain little from the wonders of Wonderland. The rest of us might not have the words to convince them they’re missing out on anything, but we at least see the value in believing “six impossible things before breakfast”.
Listening:
In preparation for a new documentary on Leonard Cohen (Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song), I revisited an episode of the Honestly podcast from a few months ago, called “Who By Fire: Why Leonard Cohen Ran Toward War”. It’s a fascinating look at the Yom Kippur War of 1973 through the lens of a book by her guest Matti Friedman, which tells the story of how a depressed and officially retired 39-year-old Leonard Cohen got involved with events in Israel that year.
It’s a story that begins with Cohen, living alone on the Greek island of Hydra, hearing that war has unexpectedly broken out in Israel, a nation he’d never been to. He throws some things in a bag and finds a way to make the journey to Israel, for motivations not entirely clear (perhaps even to himself) except that he feels he has to do something. I will leave the details for you to hear about in the podcast or read about in the book, but there is one subplot worth dwelling on for a moment.
While performing music for the soldiers on the front lines of the war, Cohen wrote “Lover Lover Lover”. Towards the end of the song, Cohen sings that he hopes that “the spirit of this song ... be a shield for you, a shield against the enemy.” Without an appreciation of the history surrounding the song’s composition and Cohen’s experiences in the Sinai desert, a listener might well wonder what this is about. One beautiful answer is suggested near the end of the podcast, taken from a scene near the end of Cohen’s life.
In 2009, a 75-year-old Cohen performed in Tel Aviv, and at the end of the concert he prayed, out loud, for the audience. He spoke the prayer in Hebrew, but in English it was:
“May the Lord bless and protect you.
May the Lord shine his face on you
and be gracious to you.
May the Lord show you his favour
and give you his peace.”
This is a very old prayer called The Priestly Blessing, and it is traditionally said by priests known as the kohanim – a word that is the source of the surname Cohen. According to notes the songwriter made on his time in Israel, a man asked him what he was doing wasting his life with poetry when he had a sacred duty to his people as a descendant of Aaron, a Cohen. This unsettled the singer, though it seems he didn’t know precisely what to do with it. At the Tel Aviv concert, he finally fulfilled his sacred role – but I wonder if the verse in “Lover Lover Lover” might be an early instance of his trying to say the prayer he was meant to say, born to say. Perhaps the young songwriter who sang, “May the spirit of this song be a shield for you,” was working up to being able to finally pray, one day, “May the Lord bless and protect you.”
The Honestly episode can be heard here.
As always, thank you for reading and supporting Art Of Conversation,
Matthew