James Taylor / Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

Someday soon we all will be together
If the fates allow
Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now


Here is Christmas again. This is a time which is loved by many, but feared by quite a few as well. It is a time (supposedly) of happiness, of family gathering and heavy dinners, of partying. Also of bitter loneliness and near depression. Perhaps nothing of what we wanted has been achieved, another year is passing by, and to many that alone is depressing.

Written in 1944 by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blame for Minnelli's Meet me in Saint Louis, Have yourself a Merry little Christmas is one of the most popular and most performed Christmas songs of all time. It has also been covered quite a few times by different artists.  But I would say that James Taylor's version is possibly the one that's best captured the bittersweet taste of this period of the year: sparkling happiness mixed up with dark melancholy, the two sides of Christmas.

Ian McEwan: Atonement

It is the hot (for England) summer of 1935, in a nice big country house in Sussex. The Tallis, a high class family, inhabit it for the summer holidays. The father, a high government commissioner, is away in his London office, busy at work with preparations for a European war that back then, in mid 1930s, is becoming a real possibility. Among the people at the house we find the mother, tortured by never-ending migraines; the elder daughter (22 year-old Cecilia); the younger one (13 year-old Briony); the brother Leon; business man Paul Marshall; and finally three cousins from the North, on a visit. Along with a due bunch of servants, we find Robbie Turner as well, the son of the governess, who is also a protegé of the Tallis family.

Briony is the central character in this amazing story. At 13, she is theoretically on the brink of leaving childhood, but she is also well into that strong egotism so typical of childhood and early (sometimes full) adolescence. Nonetheless, in this case to her ordinary child's solipsism, you also add up a great imaginative creative power.

Briony, thrilled by story creation 

She's thrilled by the act of creating tales. Writing, translating into words the awesome, or just plain, events of existence is something she definitely loves to do: she is truly a writer, a narrator in the making, a young person whose life will, in years to come, likely be devoted to literature, to the re-shaping of reality in the form of fiction. It already is, actually, this very day, as she spends most of her hours putting little stories on paper with increasing skill. She imagines stories all along, which she later has her mother (and about everyone else) read and evaluate: she likes showing off her talent. Her emotional development, her new experiences and thoughts will find immediate reflection on those pages she is constantly filling up.

But on this particular summer day extraordinary things will happen. Things which will mark Briony's fate as well as those around and linked to her. The fate of the people at the house that very moment is going to be determined by Briony's imaginative powers. Today is the day, and tragedy will take place.

What is going on? Some cousins from the north are coming to the Sussex mansion, in order to spend a few weeks with the Tallis: 15 year old-Lola and her two younger twin-brothers. Also among the new guests today are Leon (Briony's brother) and a friend of his, Paul Marshall, already a successful young businessman. Just then, immediately before the arrival of the guests, Briony has finished a play that she has intitled Arabella, which she, full of excitement, of course intends to represent before her beloved brother and the rest of the guests. For that, she counts on the (reluctant) aid of the cousins: Lola and the twins. So she calls out for the due rehearsals to the annoyance of the northern cousins, which would rather do anything else. Go play by the swimming pool, for instance.

At the same time, Robbie, the housekeeper's son, spends the morning in dreamy introspection, thinking of quite a promising future unfolding before him: to his literature degree he has just achieved, he speculates with adding a new one: Medicine, no less. And of course he also thinks, and quite so, of Cecilia, the Tallis elder daughter, whom he has known since they were children. He fancies her. That morning, he is fantasizing about her, while inmersed in his bathtub. And at one point, he emerges from the bathtub and reaches the nearby desk, where he sits down to typewrite a letter to Cecilia Tallis.

He playfully tries different versions, some of them a bit too rude to really think of delivering, but which he writes as well, just for the fun of it (maybe thinking what if, anyway).... He finishes the definitive version, one he thinks is OK: a more or less polite version of course, of what he had to say. But, what happens then?...yes, we guessed it: he mistakenly ends up sending the wrong letter, one of the rude versions he had been playing with, one which he thought he had discarded. The rudest one, in fact, one which reproduces a explosive slung word. Explosive, that is, for the place and time and the vehicle, a letter.

Fancying, invoking tragedy 

Cecilia and Robbie have known each other since they were children. They are in love, only they still haven't become fully aware of it. They soon will, that same day actually, but the most awful misunderstanding is going to stand on their way, also that same night. And it is the deliverer of the letter (writer-in the-making Briony) who will be the responsible for it.

After Briony has given Robbie's letter to her sister, one definitive scene will take place. In the evening, the guests (including Robbie) gather up for dinner. Afterwards, having both got up discreetly from the table, Cecilia and Robbie head for the library, where they will end up making love with shelves full of books as a frame. Briony just enters the library while they are at it, and well, she sees the thing, and being just 13 (and also being high class England in the 1930s) she does not quite understand what is going on.

But her powerful imagination is quickly set into motion. A dark imagination at that moment, way darker than that of a similar creature: Ana, from The Spirit of the Beehive. Briony is more proactive than Ana, and she will unconciously generate what will turn out to be injustice and cruelty, born out of that abundant inner world of hers.

Earlier that day, Briony had also witnessed something by the lake, again involving Cecilia and Robbie, another weird (to her child's imagination) event, that she again will process in the wrong way.

Later at night, in the woods surrounding the house, something horrible will happen. Is it a rape? An attempt? The victim is Lola, the 15-year-old cousin from the north. Everyone is distressed, and the police are quickly called in. All people at the house are interrogated on the crime. Who might the assailant be? But Briony, her imagination out of control, has already decided who he is.

Atonement is a great exploratory work, a must for those readers who wish to be told a good story, also for those who like reflecting on the power of literature, who want perhaps to manufacture good valuable literature themselves, for the story which is told and the horizons the narration might reach. The great power of fiction, and its own reality.

History itself is a construction of our minds, even if its based on factual truth, it is after all a series of texts, which we create and shape. So will the lives be of those people in Briony's hands. Narrations. Imagination can be a source of aesthetical beauty. Also of lies, arbitrariness, ultimately disaster. But it too has the potential of eventually creating some form of posthumous symbolic justice.

The destiny of the flesh

As an author, as any author worth the name, Briony is some sort of a goddess, thus capable of instilling life on the creatures of her imagination, putting them on stage and set them out to think, live and experience. Also, as we will discover, she will even have the capacity to alter the lives of the physical beings around her, retelling their stories and destinies. Early in the movie, we had seen Briony alone in her room in the middle of the act of writing, so precious to her, and we have spoted some diminutive figures by her side, like ready to be manipulated by her, if she wishes. They might be a symbol of her power of creation and literary manipulation.

We are made of flesh and, true, that flesh will be vanishing in the course of just a few years or decades. After that, it is only remembrance that will remain of us. Our flesh will have become just a text, a narration, an oral one or, if we are lucky enough, written by someone. If anything, we will have turned into a story, such is the destiny of our (now) tangible matter. What is to be done with that bunch of texts which constitutes our identity, once we are gone? We are in the hands of those who will carry out our memory, those executors of our narrations, those who establish its basis and those who will add to it. If they exist, if we are fortunate enough to have them. Otherwise, nothing will be left of us, fair or not.

Briony will discover just that in due time. At one point, people are gone and all that is remaining is their tale. She will learn that this tale can be retold or reinterpreted, enriched with new meanings, clever variations. And in doing so, in some mysterious way some sort of peculiar justice, should we say rebalancing (in an aesthetical or moral sense), can even be made, without betraying the essential truth.

In Briony's case, it was a matter of atonement, of self-punishment. A moral challenge. But overall, if we are the chosen ones, if we have awaken a strong mind's creative power and put it at the service of our story...well, it is hard to imagine a bigger fortune.

Compliance (2012)

It is a mad busy day at a branch of a fast food chain. The day outlook seems to be a bit grim. Dificulties are mounting up. The previous night, someone left the refrigerator door open. Some food have got rotten, and there will be problems to serve some orders. Also, problems aside, and beyond some artificial friendliness, staff members do not appear to get along extremely well.

To make things a bit more confusing, suddenly there is a phone call asking for the branch manager. Turns out to be a police officer, coming up with a strange accusation: a customer claims that money has been stolen from their purse, that same morning at the branch. The officer also reveals the existence of some amount of evidence for the crime. As a result, one of the staff members, 19 year-old Becky, is accused by the officer on the phone. She is drawn aside. And the nightmare begins.

Compliance (Craig Zobel, 2012) is true psychological horror. Horror might arise from a life-threatening menace, but more frequently it simply arises from trouble (or complete impossibility) to understand exactly what is going on, not in the world as a whole, but in our personal micro-world. Horror arises from the troubles we all have understanding the others (and ourselves), their deep pshycology and reasoning, their actual motivations, the meaning of their actions. To some extent, all we are familiar with is nothing but a handful of masks we see around us, acting in a way whose actual purpose we dont completely grasp, or not at all. We just have verbalized messages directed at us or at the others, along with some ambiguous body language clues. All to just try figure out a little what the mess is about.

We usually speak of the existence of kafkaesque situations in our ordinary life. That does not imply any event of fantastic nature. Just ordinary stuff that actually happens to us and quite often, becoming some sort of psychological horror. Kafkaesque is an used-up term expressing a world of weird, obscure (somewhat laughable) unfathomable situations of personal alienation. But that is actually our real world, too: one of confusion and misunderstandings in the everyday interaction between impenetrable psychologies. And it becomes incresingly sinister and hilarious -more kafkaesque- as our civilization goes on gaining more and more complexity. Our brains are in some way limited, there is a limit to the complexity we can cope with. The irony is that we now have better tools than ever before to communicate, to expand ourselves, but most times they are just technological projections of our inner chaos.

Now add evil to this equation. Add voluntary confusion and misunderstanding, add the actual intention to create pain, to create confusion. Then you have the full picture. At some point the whole thing might ignite, and unexpectedly we find ourselves confronted with perfectely exposed accusations in a polite articulate manner which we simply cannot understand: we find ourselves in the position of a well known Kafka character. Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K, he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested. We simply fail to figure out what has happened. How it is the rest of the world seems to have converged into action against us.

And there is, all of a sudden, the horror. Compliance happens in day light in an ordinary work environment, with ordinary characters, none of them specially evil, o not at all. Yet I found it one of the most frightening movies I have seen in recent times.

Suzanne Vega & Carson McCullers

I have been a long time Suzanne Vega fan, yet I missed her 2011 homage to the ill-fated southern (US) writer Carson McCullers, or at least I wasn't fully aware of it. I actually remember having heard something back in 2011 when I still lived in London. Now I learn that it was a musical stage piece written and performed by Suzanne Vega: Carson McCullers Talks about Love. And now in 2016, Suzanne has released a new album with songs adapted from the musical: Lover, Beloved: songs from an Evening with Carson McCullers. 

It was precisely just a few months ago that I discovered the literature of Carson McCullers, and I did so through the most frequent door into her world: her highly popular 1940 novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. And like so many others before me, I too was stunned by this 23 year old girl at the time who had managed to write such an incredible mature novel, her first. In 1940, when Lonely Hunter first appeared, McCullers was a shock for the reading public, by her obvious literary powers oddly combined with her fragile teen looks, even younger than her actual age.

It was McCullers herself who would later write that 1930's America, more specifically the "South", had become a great literary stage, to an extent that it could well be compared in literary potential to such spaces like czarist Russia. And along with William Faulkner  -and later other new writers like Harper Lee, Capote or Tenesse Williams-, it was also McCullers who would become one of the key figures to settle the reality of such a daring comparison. Yes, the American South seemed to have become some sort of a tragic dostoievskian space. With a biblic air to it. A literary space that demands the unfolding of human passions, or simply the exposition of the maddening complexity of human relations.

From a very early age, Carson McCullers had to fight against illness. She had rheumatic fever at 15, and suffered from continuous strokes throughout her entire life, which eventually left her half paralyzed in her early 30s. Finally in 1967, at just 50, she died from one final cerebral stroke. Her life was really a troubled one, in a physical as in an emotional sense: illness came along with alcoholism, sexual repression and a tragic relationship with her husband, Reeves McCullers, from whom she took her literary name.

It was around 1977, that the subtle and insightful 18-year-old Suzanne Vega came across a picture of Carson MacCullers, who had already been gone for a decade. She suddenly felt sort of intrigued by the clear physical resemblance. Some kind of discreet spiritual connection was at that point set into motion between her and Carson. 

Then in the early 1980s, Suzanne was studying English and drama at Barnard College, in New York. One day, her drama tutor came up with a funny project. He asked his students to disguise as an artistic or cultural figure from the past, and then respond to some questions as in a TV interview show, as if the students were actually the artistic figures. Of course, it was McCullers the past personality Suzanne inmediately picked to give life to.

Throughout the 1980s Suzanne established herself as a succesful iconic folk singer with such delightful works like Marlene on the Wall, Luka or Solitude Standing. And it was back in those days that she had started work in a play that would intend to explore that spiritual connection she had felt with Carson a few years before. The completion of this work would last for 30 years, as it would not be till 2011 that she finally completed it and put it on stage.

In 1967, the year Carson died, Suzanne was a child of eight. From that 1977, when Suzanne felt for the first time touched by the presence of Carson, until now it has been nearly 40 years. That is decades of connection for these kindred spirits. The result in creative terms is quite a nice one: an intriguing musical play and an album with a handful of smart songs. 

I love these two, Suzanne known to me for many years, and Carson, a recent discovery. And I feel delighted to know about this unexpected cultural link between them.