Things to catch up on—

My poem "The Windfalls" (written for and dedicated to nineweaving) has been accepted by Lone Star Stories for their April issue. Thanks in part to this sale, and to a conjunction of several most welcome discounts at the local Barnes & Noble, I have been able to purchase the Criterion DVD of A Canterbury Tale for a price that did not leave me bankrupt. I shall dedicate its first viewing to ericmarin.

The last several days have been consumed with writing, but the end result is that my story "A Voice in Caves" will appear shortly in Sirenia Digest #14, so for the love of God, if you haven't already, subscribe. greygirlbeast has extended her not-to-be-missed offer until January 31st—a free signed copy of the trade paperback of Silk to each new subscriber—and for those of you who don't get enough gay male weird erotica in your everyday lives, this issue should be a particular enticement.

Our Powell-and-Pressburger-fest continues, now with more rushthatspeaks. On Wednesday, we watched Black Narcissus, and are set for The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) or The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) next.

I am glad to have seen Black Narcissus. But it didn't enrapture me in the same way as the others Archers films I've seen so far, and I am still trying to diagnose why. Maybe it's that sense of place again—here recreated so gorgeously in glass backdrops and hothouse flowers that it's almost as overwhelming to the audience as to the nuns, feverishly beautiful in Technicolor, too immense in its high, cold spaces for the eye to take in comfortably; sensual and profoundly indifferent. At her failure to hold her convent together in this alien land, Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) weeps not that the undisciplined culture of the Himalayas has undone them, the people whom they were supposed to school and doctor and otherwise traditionally civilize, but, "I couldn't stop the wind from blowing, and the air from being as clear as crystal, and I couldn't hide the mountain!" Sister Philippa (Flora Robson), a gardener who has planted the terraces of Mopu with primroses and daffodils instead of potatoes and peas, like a safe space of England, finally confesses, "I think there are only two ways of living in this place. Either one must live like Mr. Dean or like the holy man. Either ignore it, or give yourself up to it," and Clodagh's response to her is prophetic: "Neither will do for us." The wind never dies. The sky opens out into forever. The land strands them with themselves, so that the conversion of the old concubines' palace into a house of worship only skins the nuns closer to their own dreams and desires. Even swathed in a filmy curtain, Shiva Nataraja still dances in the shadows. But it's not India. It's dreams of India, and perhaps we're never meant to forget this. "Black Narcissus" is not an exotic classical allusion, after all, but a loud perfume Sabu's Young General bought from an Army-Navy store in London. But I never felt wrapped up in the landscape the same way as in "I Know Where I'm Going!" or A Canterbury Tale, and so I believed less, I think, that it would affect the characters so devastatingly.

What did catch me were maybe the last forty-five minutes of the film, which I realize is a little paradoxical: the characters suddenly dropped into reality at the same moment as the plot became pure, stylized, dream-soaked melodrama. But I couldn't look away. Across the table from one another as a candle gutters down like an exorcism, Sister Clodagh and Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) double one another like chess queens, the white-wimpled sister superior with her book of prayers, the ex-nun in dark crimson with with her red, red lipstick—she makes herself up with such simple motions, like a nightmare where commonplace objects assume an inexplicable dread. She has buried herself in fantasies until she's mad with them, sick as a rose. With her hair soaked straight, her clinging dress and her clawed hands, she's never looked more beautiful as she appears behind Clodagh, bell-ringing on the cliff's edge: and she looks as though she's already dead. And I love the reversals that surround Mr. Dean (David Farrar: we never learn the character's first name, as the nuns are always and only "Sister"), the sardonic British agent who is neither the disreputable libertine that Clodagh at first takes him for nor the demon lover that Ruth builds him into, though the camera lingers on him like a lover's assessing eye, long-legged, bare-chested, as much a sensual object as the girl Kanchi (Jean Simmons) whom he delivers to St. Faith's with a provocative dig at Clodagh: "She's seventeen, she's an orphan, and it's high time she was married. Every evening when I come home, I find her sitting on my veranda. She dresses herself up and puts flowers in her hair . . . Are you sure there's no question you're dying to ask me?" But these films are full of non-romances, and whatever affairs Mr. Dean may carry on in his private life, up at Mopu he's no one's lover. Confronted with Ruth's hectic projections of him first as the man who encouraged her sexually and then betrayed her with Clodagh, he shouts in frustration, "I don't love anybody!" And I believe him. By the end of the film, perhaps so does Clodagh; she leaves him with ghosts, but not the sweetheart kind. The ex-palace, ex-convent disappears into the clouds as the rains start to fall, like a dream, the world-illusion of desire. The mountain will outlast them all.

It's also the only film by the Archers that reminded me of a book—not Rumer Godden's source novel, which I have not read, but Tanith Lee's Tamastara (1984) and Elephantasm (1993), both phantasmagoric conjurations of an India that obsesses or possesses or otherwise transforms those Westerners who come into contact with it, usually with rewards for those who understand its nature, ruin for those who refuse to see. Which is not precisely the point of Black Narcissus, whose nuns have brought their particular hauntings with them from England, but there's something of the same haze and elaborate atmosphere, and the treatment of sexuality as something elemental. I can only imagine Lee's seen the film. I just encountered them in reverse.

Lastly, because this site is an incredible source of information:

with his lanky face and his unexpectedly deep, husky voice that can boom like the tide when raised

It seems that Roger Livesey was originally cast as Colpeper in A Canterbury Tale, but he turned the role down; he found it "off-key." I have to say I'm not sorry. I liked him very much as Torquil MacNeil of Kiloran, and his voice with its odd, cross-grained resonance might have suited Colpeper's poetic invocations, but his face has been lived in, it's likable—Eric Portman doesn't look quite human from certain angles, or as though he inhabits himself much, and that exactly matches the character. (I think he's beautiful, but we have already established that my tastes are not standard.) Colpeper should not be instantly, sympathetically attractive. He should be always and faintly strange; off-key. And in the end, fortunately, that's what we got.