My Years With Proust - Day 468

. . . I still clung to life; but I knew that I had nothing now but bitterness to expect from it.  I ran to the lift, heedless of the hour, to ring for the lift-boy who acted as nightwatchman, and asked him to go to Albertine's room and to tell her that I had something of importance to say to her, if she could come see me there.  "Mademoiselle says she would rather come to you," was the answer he brought me.  "She will be here in a moment." And presently, sure enough, in came Albertine in her dressing gown.

   "Albertine," I said to her in a low voice, warning her not to raise hers so as not to wake my mother, from whom we were separated only by that partition whose thinness, to-day a nuisance, because it confined us to whispers, resembled in the past, when it so clearly echoed my grandmother's intentions, a sort of musical diaphanousness, "I'm ashamed to have disturbed you.  Listen to me.  To make you understand, I must tell you something which you do not know.  When I came here, I left a woman whom I was to have married, who was ready to sacrifice everything for me.  She was to start a journey this morning, and every day for the last week I have been wondering whether I should have the courage not to telegraph to her that I was coming back.  I did have the courage, but it made me so wretched that I thought I would kill myself.  That is why I asked you last night if you would come and sleep at Balbec.  If I had to die, I should have liked to bid you farewell."

   And I let the tears which my fiction rendered natural flow freely.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 1155-1156

Marcel finally has it out with Albertine, sort of.  None of us like to breakup with someone, and so we often consciously or unconsciously misbehave, hoping that she'll break up with us and we can maintain the fabricated moral high ground.  To facilitate the breakup we also sometimes invent stories to facilitate the process, although I think that everyone past the seventh grade could routinely come up with a better effort than Marcel's. Still when you're in love or in pain, or in love and in pain, it's hard to think logically, so we shouldn't be too hard on Marcel.  The excuse itself might have been lame, but the scene itself is set up nicely, including the thin partition separating him from his mother and the reminder of the young Marcel tapping on the wall to contact his grandmother.

Note to self: try and use the word diaphanousness more in polite company.  I suspect if I tried to use it in impolite company I would get punched.  I often will present challenges to my friends to use a specific word or phrase during a faculty senate or Core division meeting with the promise of an adult beverage as a reward.  I think if one of them can bring in "musical diaphanousness" it might qualify for two adult beverages.

Out of the Past

Our of the blue yesterday my sister Beth sent me some pictures that I had not seen in years.  No great commentary included, or needed.  I'm thirteen years older than Beth, so in many ways I think I've always served more as her uncle than her brother,  not that I don't love her.  I left home to head off to college before she even entered kindergarten, I think, and from then on I never was around too much.  I need to head over to Chicago and spend some quality time with her and her kids.

I'm guessing that I must have been fourteen or fifteen here.  She, of course, was beautiful from birth and I don't think she's had an ugly day since.  Me, on the other hand, . . .

I was a physical specimen even then.  I can't figure out why I didn't have more girlfriends growing up.  If you've seen Weirder Things you'll understand my childhood growing up in Indiana.

My Years With Proust - Day 467

. . . She gave me such pain by her withdrawal that, reaching after her, I caught her desperately by the arm.

   "Would it be physically possible," I asked her, "for yo to come and spend the night at Balbec?"

   "Physically, yes. But I'm dropping with sleep."

   "You'd be doing me an enormous favour . . ."

   "Very well, then, thought I don't in the least understand. Why didn't you tell me sooner?  I'll stay, though."

   My mother was asleep when, after engaging a room for Albertine on a different floor, I entered my own.  I sat down by the window, suppressing my sobs so that my mother, who was separated from me only by a thin partition, might not hear me. I had not even remembered to close the shutters, for at one moment, raising my eyes, I saw facing me in the sky that same faint glow as of a dying fire which one saw in the restaurant at Rivebelle in a study that Elstir had made of a sunset effect. I remembered the exaltation I had felt when, on the day of my first arrival at Balbec, I had seen from the railway this same image of an evening which preceded not the night but a new day.  But no day now would be new to me any more, would arouse in me the desire for an unknown happiness; it would only prolong my sufferings, until the point when I should no longer have the strength to endure them.  The truth of what Cottard had said to me in the casino at Incarville was now confirmed beyond a shadow of doubt.  What I had long dreaded, had vaguely suspected of Albertine, what my instinct deduced from her whole personality and my reason controlled by my desire had gradually made me repudiate, was true! Behind Albertine I no longer saw the blue mountains of the sea, but the room at Montjouvain where she was falling into the arms of Mlle Vineteuil with that laugh in which she gave utterance as it were to the strange sound of her pleasure.  For, with a girl as pretty as Albertine, was it possible that Mlle Vintenuil, having the desires she had, had not asked her to gratify them?  And the proof that Albertine had not been shocked by the request, but had consented, was that they had not quarrelled, that indeed their intimacy had steadily increased.  And that graceful movement with which Albertine had laid her chin upon Rosemonde's shoulder, gazed at her smilingly, and deposited a kiss upon her neck, that movement which had reminded me of Mlle Vinteuil but in interpreting which I had nevertheless hesitated to admit that an identical line traced by a gesture must of necessity be the result of an identical inclination, which knew whether Albertine might not quite simply have learned it from Mlle Vinteuil? Gradually, the lifeless sky took fire.  I who until then had never awakened without a smile at the humblest things, the bowl of coffee, the sound of the rain, the roar of the wind, felt that the day which in a moment was about to dawn, and all the days to come, would no longer bring me the hope of an unknown happiness, but only the prolongation of my agony. I still clung to life; but I knew that I had nothing now but bitterness to expect from it.  

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 1154-1155

And suddenly a Morrissey album has broken loose in Cities of the Plain, although I suppose you could argue that all of Remembrance of Things Past is a foreshadowing of the Smiths. "I who until then had never awakened without a smile at the humblest things, the bowl of coffee, the sound of the rain, the roar of the wind, felt that the day which in a moment was about to dawn, and all the days to come, would no longer bring me the hope of an unknown happiness, but only the prolongation of my agony. I still clung to life; but I knew that I had nothing now but bitterness to expect from it." Proust sets this all up with a lovely running metaphor of the sky: "I saw facing me in the sky that same faint glow of a dying fire . . ." However, what's grabbed me at the moment is the epiphany that Marcel's reaction, and maybe all jealousy, is not a jealousy tied to a potential male or female lover, but rather a jealousy tied to life itself.  Are we driven crazy by the thought of our lovers in the arms of another actually a jealous rage based on their choice of a joy, a celebration of life, that we couldn't give them? Who they are with is absolutely beside the point.  They have chosen life and we have chosen death, whose embrace and bed are cold; and suddenly Omar Khayyam has shown up.

My Years With Proust - Day 466

   The train had stopped at Parville, and, as we were the only passengers in it, it was in a voice weakened by a sense of the futility of his task, by the force of habit which nevertheless made him perform it and inspired in him simultaneously excititude and indolence, and even more by a longing for sleep, that the porter shouted: "Parville!" Albertine, who stood facing me, seeing that she had arrived at her destination, stepped across the compartment and opened the door.  But this movement which she thus made to get off the train tore my heart unendurably, just as if, contrary to the position independent of my body which Albertine's seemed to be occupying a yard away from it, this separation in space, which an accurate draughtsman would have been obliged to indicate between us, was only apparent, and anyone who wished to make a fresh drawing of things as they really were would now have had to place Albertine, not at a certain distance from me, but inside me.  She gave me such pain by her withdrawal that, reaching after her, I caught her desperately by the arm.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 1153-1154

Albertine is simply getting off the train, but nothing is simple in their relationship anymore.  "But this movement which she thus made to get off the train tore my heart unendurably . . ."  Proust devises a lovely scene, fraught with imagery.  Albertine is a yard away, but also a million miles away.  The problem is, as Proust tells us Marcel realizes, she is "not at a certain distance from me, but inside me."  I guess all relationships, both the healthy and the dying, reach that point where nothing is simple, where everything is a metaphor for something far more profound.  Maybe the key to promoting the former and avoiding the latter is to strive to remember that not everything means something, when, of course, it does.

My Years With Proust - Day 465

" . . . You remember my telling you about a friend, older than me, who had been a mother, a sister to me, with whom I spent the happiest years of my life, at Trieste, and whom in fact I'm expecting to join in a few weeks at Cherbourg, where we shall set out on a cruise together (it sounds a bit weird, but you know how I love the sea)? Well, this friend (oh! not at all the type of woman you might suppose!), isn't this extraordinary, is the best friend of your Vinteuil's daughter, and I know Vinteuril's daughter almost as well as I know her.  I always call them my two big sisters.  I'm not sorry to show you that your little Albertine can be of use to you in this question of music, about which you say, and quite rightly, that I know nothing at all."

   At the sound of these words, uttered as we were entering the station pf Parville, so far from Combray and Montjouvain, so long after the death of Vinteuil, an image stirred in my heart, an image which I had kept in reserve for so many years that even if I had been able to guess, when I stored it up long ago, that it had a noxious power, I should have supposed that in the course of time it had entirely lost it; preserved alive in the depths of my being - like Orestes whose death the gods had prevented in order that, on the appointed day, he might return to his native land to avenge the murder of Agamemnon - as a punishment, as a retribution (who knows?) for my having allowed my grandmother to die; perhaps rising up suddenly from the dark depths in which it seemed forever buried, and striking like an Avenger, in order to inaugurate for me a new and terrible and only too well-merited existence, perhaps also to make dazzlingly clear to my eyes the fatal consequences which evil actions eternally engender, not only for those who have committed them but for those who have done no more, or thought that they were doing no more, than look on at a curious and entertaining spectacle, as I, alas, had done on that afternoon long ago at Montjourvain, concealed behind a bush where (as when I had complacently listened to the account of Swann's love affairs) I had perilously allowed to open up within me the fatal and inevitably painful road of Knowledge. And at the same time, from my bitterest grief I derived a feeling almost of pride, almost of joy, that of a man whom the shock he has just received has carried at a bound to a point to which no voluntary effort could have brought him.  The notion of Albertine as the friend of Mlle Vinteuil and of Mlle Vinteuil's friend, a practising and professional Sapphist, was as momentous, compared to what I had imagined when I doubted her most, as are the telephones that soar over streets, cities, fields, seas, linking one country to another compared to the little acousticon of the 1889 Exhibition which was barely expected to transmit sound from one end of a house to the other.  It was a terrible terra incognita on which I had just landed, a new phase of undreamed-of-sufferings that was opening before me. And yet this deluge of reality that engulfs us, however enormous it may be compared with our timid and microscopic suppositions, has always been foreshadowed by them.  It was doubtless something akin to what I had just learned, something akin to Albertine's friendship with Mlle Vinteuil, something which my mind would never have been capable of inventing, that I had obscurely apprehended when I became so uneasy at the sight of Albertine and Andree together.  It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering.  And the most terrible reality brings us, at the same time as suffering, the joy of a new discovery, because it merely gives a new and clear form to what we have long been ruminating without suspecting it.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 1152-1153

Proust recounts a conversation with Albertine, and his response to her words.  Even though Albertine has played such a key role in Remembrance of Things Past, she still remains in many ways a frustrating cipher.  My hope is that in the next two books, The Captive and The Fugitive, Proust fleshes her out.  I always hearken back to Hitchcock's proposal that you create suspense by what the author doesn't tell you, and maybe Albertine is an interesting character because of what Proust is not telling us about her desires.  We get glimpses, but it's difficult to say whether they truly represent her, or merely Marcel's imposed perceptions of her - or maybe our own imposed perceptions of her.  For example, one wonders how innocent Albertine was, not simply in action, but in willingness to use emotional cruelty in response to Marcel's own emotional cruelty. You can dissect her comments to Marcel and they suddenly stop seeming like a spontaneous gush of emotion.  " . . . You remember my telling you about a friend, older than me, who had been a mother, a sister to me, with whom I spent the happiest years of my life, at Trieste, and whom in fact I'm expecting to join in a few weeks at Cherbourg, where we shall set out on a cruise together (it sounds a bit weird, but you know how I love the sea)? Well, this friend (oh! not at all the type of woman you might suppose!), isn't this extraordinary, is the best friend of your Vinteuil's daughter, and I know Vinteuril's daughter almost as well as I know her.  I always call them my two big sisters. . ."  A long time ago I devoted several posts to the famous scene where a young Marcel spies (there's really not a better word for it) on Vinteuil's daughter and her lover.  When Albertine mentions her friendship with Vinteuil's daughter does this mean that she is ignorant of Marcel's experience (and his resulting knowledge that she is a lesbian) or is she clumsily emotionally tone-deaf or is she being willfully cruel?  I keep coming back to the third option because of Albertine including the, what at first blush might seem like a throwaway line, about how it was "the happiest years of my life."  Hopefully we'll learn more about Albertine's deeper motives and dreams and desires in the next two installments.

Not surprisingly, these words from Albertine usher in more doubt and jealousy and misery in Marcel.  He tells us, "It was a terrible terra incognita on which I had just landed, a new phase of undreamed-of-sufferings that was opening before me" Several posts ago I proposed that suffering, or at least prolonged utterly self-possessed suffering, might be considered to be one aspect of privilege. However, am I also being callous in making that statement?  It's also, doubtless, a testament to a kinder soul, a deeper thinker, a person blessed/cursed with more imagination.  Proust tells us, "It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering." Much earlier Proust noted that, "In a world thronged with monsters and with gods, we know little peace of mind."  Is this intense suffering a worthy trade-off for a heightened sense of the world and of the self?

The Cave

I suppose this is at least marginally an allegory of a cave, although, per usual, it has none of the depth of Plato.  On our recent trip to Zanzibar we left Stone Town for a couple days and headed to the south part of the island, in the process driving past the turnoff for the resort where I stayed on my first visit to the island six years ago.  During our stay we visited three waganga, essentially Muslim shamans, of which I'll have much more to say. To see two of them we embarked on a bike tour, more on that later, which is one of the odder-themed bike tours one can imagine.  Along the way we stopped at the Mwanampambe Shrine and Archaeological Site, which is a cave that contains some of the earliest evidence of life on Zanzibar.  It also is a holy shrine, and we were fortunate to get a tour from Mr. Ali, the elder whose family looks after the cave, at least the spiritual side of the cave.  He asked us if we wanted the experience or if we wanted to pray, and of course we said we wanted both.  First of all this required us changing into long white robes, which was easier said than done when you're as big as I am.  Happily, they had a robe big enough for me, and soon as I was prepared to walk, barefoot, into the cave.  The pictures below don't do justice to the beauty of the cave, nor does the relative paucity of my words do justice to the experience itself.  Guided solely by the lights from our phones we made our way along the slick, uneven floor of the cave until we were around forty yards inside.  Suleyman, the nice young man who led us on the bike tour and arranged all three meetings with the waganga, told us that he had brought people to the cave several times but had never been inside, and he seemed ever so slightly nervous, which was doubtless for spiritual rather than physical reasons.  Tanzania itself is a mixture of Christian and Islam, but once you get out of Zanzibar itself, both Unguja and Pemba, the folks are almost entirely Muslim.  As we've discussed before, the Islam practiced in Zanzibar is a very syncretic version marked by a definite strain of African spiritualism.  Still, there is sometimes an uneasy balance between the two worlds.  In Islam we are told to believe in the Seen and the Unseen, but out on Zanzibar the Unseen is sometimes a bit too close for comfort.  Mr. Ali told us about the ceremonies performed in the cave, including initially speaking to the spirits of the cave and introducing us - we heard the tell-tale word mzungu, which is the Swahili word that Zanzibaris use when referring to folks of European descent; essentially, it means someone who roams around aimlessly, although busily.  At one point he lit incense and, after his own prayers, he asked us if we wanted to pray.  I knelt and, very quietly, I thought to myself, said the shahada in Arabic, but apparently it wasn't as quiet as I thought because the other folks in the cave exchanged very knowing, and pleased, looks.  At the very back of the cave Mr. Ali showed us a large bronze urn, where he carried out more elaborate rituals.  He said that at times the jinn of the cave would rise out of the urn in the form of a octopus or a giant snake, because if they appeared in their actual form (some sort of jinn-appropriate anthropomorphic image) the visitors would fine them too frightening.  Steve and I later opined that a floating octopus would would be scary enough for us.  And speaking of scary, as we were in the back of the cave we were circled by dozens of bats and all I could think of was how this would qualify as one of Dave Kelley's ultimate nightmares.  Overall, it was an extraordinary experience, although one, for the obvious reasons, we're not going to share with our students when we return in January.

The sign for the Mwanampambe Shrine and Archaeological Site, with the other side in Swahili, naturally enough, partially blocked by our bikes.  It would be an odd place to visit if you were not accompanied by a spiritual elder because you would miss out on an entire world, although, although the cave itself is beautiful.

The entrance to the cave.  You can see white cloth hanging from the ceiling.  On our return trip, in addition to offerings, we're supposed to bring white cloth to include as an offering.

Mr. Ali, the spiritual elder of the family that serves the cave.  He was a very nice man, who, unfortunately, also took a spectacular fall in the back of the cave (something I was certain I would do) and we were certain for a minute or so that we'd managed to kill him.  However, he bounced straight up and was fine.

Steve with the posh camera that the college loaned him, and which managed to, time after time, not actually take the pictures that he snapped.  Still, he looks incredibly happy.

It's not much of a picture, but you can get a glimpse of the bats that circled us during the experience.

Lazarus never looked so old or corpse-like.  Yours truly emerging from the cave.  It was an absolutely amazing experience.

My Years With Proust - Day 464

The truth of the matter was that the member of the band of Balbec girls whom I really loved, although she was absent at that moment, as were the rest of her friends, but was coming back there (I enjoyed being with them all, because each of them had for me, as on the day when I first saw them, something of the essence of all the rest, as though they belonged to a race apart), was Andree.  Since she was coming back again to Balbec in a few days' time, it was certain that she would at once pay me a visit, and then, in order to remain free, not to have to marry her if I did not wish to do so, to be able to go to Venice, but at the same time to have her entirely to myself in the meantime, the plan that I would adopt would be that of not seeming at all eager to come to her, and as soon as she arrived, when we were talking together, I would say to her: "What a pity I didn't see you a few weeks earlier.  I should have fallen in love with you; now my heart is bespoken.  But that makes no difference, we shall see one another frequently, for I am unhappy about my other love, and you will help to console me" I smiled inwardly as I thought of this conversation, for in this way I should give Andree the impression that I was not really in love with her; hence she would not grow tired of me and I should take a joyful and pleasant advantage of her affection.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 1150-1151

Marcel now claims that, not only does he not love Albertine (or at least is not going to marry her), but that he in fact loves someone else: Andree.  "The truth of the matter was that the member of the band of Balbec girls whom I really loved, although she was absent at that moment, as were the rest of her friends, but was coming back there (I enjoyed being with them all, because each of them had for me, as on the day when I first saw them, something of the essence of all the rest, as though they belonged to a race apart), was Andree." Now, I've made the point several times that you can love two women at the same time, as compared to lusting after n+1 women all the time.  Having said that, I'm beginning to believe that in truth Marcel doesn't love Albertine or Andree, or anyone other than the specter of his grandmother (we always associate our grandmothers with the concept of true, unconditional love, I would argue even more than our own mothers).  Beyond Marcel's propensity to madly and randomly emotionally hop around, there all too often seems to be a strategy to his love affairs.  For example, read his plan for winning over Andree: "I smiled inwardly as I thought of this conversation, for in this way I should give Andree the impression that I was not really in love with her; hence she would not grow tired of me and I should take a joyful and pleasant advantage of her affection."  On the one hand I guess you could say that it speaks to a sense of despondence/desperation fueled by too many failed love affairs.  On the other hand, I would argue that true love, that is true, pure, mad love, transcends a strategic approach because you have taken the heart/soul/mind to a place beyond cold logic.  If this is true, and, again, what the hell do I know about anything - I am fifty-seven and unmarried - then Marcel's fascination with Albertine speaks more to commodification than love; of, of course, the title of the next entry in Remembrance of Things Past is The Captive.