By Eric Le Roy
‘We have fallen in the dreams the ever living
Breathe on the tarnished mirror of the world
And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh.”
(Yeats)
My life at an advanced age vacillates between flashes of murderous rage and periods of unaccountable serenity. When I sense the futility of thinking that anything much is going to change during my ‘golden years’, I waver between surly resignation and bursts of joy over the fact that existence is not such a bad thing. Happiness for no reason – vivid in imagery and enthusiastically lived, like lively adolescent fingers squirting notes up and down piano keys – runs loose in my mind like stallions and mares.
Then I commit my chronic error: I turn on the news. Almost instantaneously, I explode in rage. And there is nothing more impotent than impotent rage. People who are wiser than I am know this and refuse to let the twin obscenities of social media and mainstream media ruffle them too much. I haven’t yet mastered the technique.
When I am fed news that brings me face-to-face with stupidity, blatant dishonesty, or pure evil, I grow purple with fury. And it’s not that I hold others to a higher standard than myself. I know my weaknesses. I know my limitations. I know that I haven’t always been a good Boy Scout. But I also know that there is none of rottenness, the viciousness, vileness in me that I often see brought right into my home every day by the internet screen.
It’s bad enough with lying politicians, media instigators, and the general run of self-promoting phonies that stink up the world. But when it comes to serial killers, child molesters, and rapists, I want to annihilate them. I imagine a great big parking lot full of these rats, and being part of the shooting gallery that blows them away. I want bloody retribution. I dream of halftime shows at the Super Bowl consisting of public hangings, mass murderers being impaled, boiled alive, or catapulted, like 50-yard field goals, into stone walls with spikes sticking out of them. Eviscerations? Disembowelments? Impalings? Bring it on! What a halftime show!!
Be shocked. Be disgusted. Call me crazy. Tell me to ‘get help’. And then, the next time you experience road rage at someone cutting in front of you, examine your instant emotion. And don’t lie about it. Maybe you are a model of self-restraint. But for that single instant (an instant that proves critical in many deaths), I think you want to throttle that person. You want to go after them. Then the red light turns green, and, having the option of chasing them down the road, shouting threats at them through the window of your car, you always back off, and within a couple of minutes, you’ve completely forgotten about it. That’s the way it’s always been with me.
Am I right? So these are fantasies, mere fantasies. I doubt that I would ever do any of those things, and neither would you, although it would be a stretch to say I know I wouldn’t. My answer to the frenzy I feel is to switch off this junk and play with the dog. The dog always has the answer.
Aside from a few punch-ups back when I was in my prime, I have never been violent in a way that left someone else dead, maimed, or otherwise scarred. I have left homicide at the door and didn’t bother to pick it up when I went out. But I can not exaggerate, or even find words to express, the blind hatred that I often feel. I would question my own sanity were it not for the fact that many people have told me they feel the same.
My question: Why has mere disapproval or disagreement turned into something so potentially lethal? I myself am not an activist in this way, but others are. We read about it every day in the – you know it – goddamned media. Active Gunman at X University; 5 Dead, 12 Wounded. Or Terrorist Attack Claims 20 at Religious Festival. Or Holiday Makers Murdered at Campsite.
And it goes on and on. They talk about ‘copycat’ killers. What are they copying? Something the media, in its perpetual hysteria, has glorified.
I also find that sex has become ugly. If it’s not the gender wars (and it always is), it’s the weirdness of a lot of it. Now, please understand me here: I am a fervent advocate of people doing what they want, as long as they mutually agree to do it and are old enough to qualify for such an agreement. I fully support and endorse fetishism and all delicious inventions of the imagination in matters sexual. But some of it astounds me.
‘Fisting’, for example. Imagine balling up your fist, lubing up (I hope) and stuffing it into some woman’s vagina or a guy’s ass. I guess it would depend on the size of your…uh…fist. Ever heard of ‘felching’? If not, look it up. The gays have always been into anal, and they must have shared their secret with the hetero crowd, because I see that nowadays ‘anal’ sex is all the rage. It’s gotten so you can’t watch a decent porn film without having to sit through a scene where one participant is greedily licking out the other one’s asshole. Then you have the ones where they choke each other into unconsciousness. Nothing like having an orgasm while you die, I guess. The point is, it’s not sex really anymore. It’s grotesque exhibitionism.
Disclaimer: I am not one of these tedious types who are always yelling about sex ‘objectifying’ somebody. OF COURSE, it objectifies them; how the hell else would you get hot and bothered enough to jump in the sack with someone? There is not enough abstract or even platonic love in the universe that can compete with the proper physical endowments rolling out in full voluptuous or throbbing force, and it’s false to claim it can. Yes, there are deeper, more profound forms of love than carnal, sensual passion. But that is another conversation. For now, I stick with my thesis that nobody wants to fuck an idea or an ideology. A real person is needed. Some have tits, and some have dicks, and some nowadays have both. Objectify them. Please.
Like a lot of folks, I watch porn from time to time. More in the past than now. Alone, it led to masturbation; with a girlfriend, it led to shared arousal. Porn, sometimes. But it wasn’t a habit. It’s like spaghetti bolognese. It’s delicious when you’re in the mood, but you don’t want it every night.
Drugs are even worse. Thunderbird wine or Jim Beam bourbon on Saturday night? A case of Old Milwaukee over the weekend? Shall we roll a joint or two? Can I offer you a dish of brownies laced with psychedelic mushrooms? Nope, not good enough for these kids. They want opioids. They stick up their noses at heroin – not enough of a buzz. Now they want fentanyl, which is 100 times stronger. The synthetic stuff is tops. But what’s a party without mixing the fentanyl with cocaine or some other fabulous cocktail? Death? Well, hell, what’s a good time worth to you?
Am I griping about this? No, I’m just glad I’m not doing it. And you’re talking to a guy who drank half his life away. And snorted enough coke to build a snowman on Christmas Eve in front of the Church of All Saints. So I’m not playing Mr Goody Two-Shoes. What I’m saying is that I wanted to get high, not dead. And the thing I am suggesting now is that even more people, a staggering number it seems, are no longer taking the fast lane to Euphoria but the precipitous, plummeting road to Oblivion. Everywhere you look, suicide rates are going up, especially among the young. Don’t know about you, but my attention is directed at this question: What is so wrong with the world that a great number of people just want to block it out, numb themselves against it, or even end it? No face, no name, no number?
I don’t have the answer, and I am not going to attempt to give you one. Suffice it to say that I have survived this long, not because I wasn’t a bad boy, but because there was always something in me that wanted to survive at all costs. Some kind of ‘affirmative action’ in my brain and in my heart has kept pushing me forward. And even as I age, even as I bellow at the computer screen bringing me the hateful news of the day, even as mortality holds a dagger to my throat and I am sometimes repelled by my own face in the mirror, I am still a tiger, and I am proud of it. I rejoice in it. But along with this also comes a mighty sadness and a steppe-like loneliness that goes deeper than the chill of a winter on the North Pole. Somehow, even that keeps me going. I draw on it. I use it to try to make art. This is not virtue signalling. It is a menu of survival tools.
Practising sanity is much easier when I am writing – as I am now. I don’t mean savage retorts on Quora and Facebook, which I love to do as I fulminate. I mean that when I write stuff that is intended to amount to something, I often deal with ultimate concerns. In some ways, it distances me from a world that I comprehend less and less, even as I learn more and more. In other ways, far from allowing me to escape, it plunges me deeper and deeper into the fathoms of the sea, where old treasures sulk but still glitter.
Writing for me rebuilds coherence in a world I do not feel comfortable in. It permits me to remember and care about things that have mattered before and matter now. It is easier, when I am writing in this way, to revivify that which was and remains beloved; to evoke in words the melancholy wisdom of years and years lived as a creature, yes, a creaturely being, much more enveloped in the churning maw of nature’s rejection of sentimentality than most college students, in their revolutionary certainties, even imagine, much less understand. You just have to hang around for a while, I guess. Then it comes to you: the torrents in the bones.
Think of life’s frustration this way: You are lost in the desert and cast your eyes about, desperately looking for water. Suddenly, you spy an oasis, or even, if by then you are sufficiently demented, a waterfall – and rush forth with rejuvenated hope, parched lips ajar in anticipation – only to discover that the bright pool so scintillating and radiant before your eyes was merely the sun beating down on caramel dustland. When you crave water and repeatedly find only sand, it does something to you over a long enough period of time. It wears you down. It leaves scars.
Loud headlines are designed to titillate the dull, brainwash the obtuse, rabble-rouse the discontented, succour the ‘victim’, and infuriate those who look for something genuine, some artery, vein, or even capillary where the blood flows through uncontaminated or clogged. The agendas of the world are here to manipulate us, and they succeed. I wake up fresh, singing a song, and within minutes, the invasion of ‘breaking’ events reported by thought-merchants and bling-marketers of one kind or another reduces me to something I don’t want to be. Or, put more honestly, I let it do that.
At times, on days without hope or respite, I think I could even welcome the Big Sleep. But it is fear of the nothingness beyond sleep that keeps me going. Something keeps me chasing the wind. To be or not to be, that is the question. I have always chosen to be.
And why is that? I believe that it’s because life has a way of producing little miracles when you least expect them. Not prophets rising from the dead, drowned people swimming to shore. Not high jump records from amputees, babies out of the wombs of 100-year-old women, or accordion melodies from plastic containers. I mean the little surprises, the smiling eternities that can fill a human or a dog’s or a cat’s face. I mean the flocks of birds winging seaward in the evening. The beautiful poem discovered by accident. The idea for a new blog. A stimulating film.
Speaking of stimulating films, my wife and I saw one a couple of nights ago. In English, it was called “Bless the Woman”, but the film was Russian and in the Russian language, with no subtitles. I lived in Russia for 8 years, and I loved it. I have written a lot about those years, and I still know some of the people. Putin’s war on Ukraine has ruined a lot of that good feeling, and in the last few years, I haven’t had much good to say about Russia. In fact, even the film industry in Russia today is rubbish. Much of that, like everything else gone wrong there, is because of state censorship.
But – and it may surprise you – the Russians have made great films. Too much about World War II, it has been suggested. Stephen Spielberg once said that without the war, there would be no Russian film industry, and there is an element of truth in that. But I understand why the Great Patriotic War means so much to them, and the Soviets could make memorable movies when they wanted to – about other things. Most of them were long, slow, and deep in the development of the characters. Extended plots that require patience. Right up my alley.
The film we saw together, almost three hours long and called Благословитe женщин (“Bless the Woman”), single-handedly restored my faith in Russia and caused me to remember many of the things I had loved about it. Directed by Stanislav Govorukhin and adapted from Irina Grekova’s novel, it is about Vera, a young village girl who dedicates her life to her older soldier husband, Larichev, following him through difficult military postings, war, and personal struggles, exploring themes of love, loyalty, sacrifice, and survival during pre-war Soviet times and the Second World War.
Non-Russian people who detest Putin and have never lived in Russia sometimes hear about ‘the mysterious Russian soul’, without ever having any notion of what it is. And it must be remembered and acknowledged that, historically, there have been levels of cruelty, disregard for human life, and a way of dealing with other people based on corruption, swindling, and cheating, which other cultures have matched occasionally but would have to take great pains to do so long term – a challenge Russia has always managed to meet. Other nations regard their own atrocities as aberrations; in Russia, they are business as usual. In Russia, the hard life has had few interruptions.
Yet, unlike what many think, behind the cold exterior Russians often project, is a warmth, a need for celebration, a black, jovial, uproarious sense of humour, and a wild, dark romanticism that knows no bounds. Russian love, it is said, is not ‘because of’ but ‘in spite of’. To me what that means is Russians, for all the waste in their lives, are capable of unconditional love and blind devotion that most Americans, Brits, and Europeans would be totally flummoxed by.
Vera is real; she is emblematic of the multitudes of Soviet women and how they persevered through bleak and heartbreaking experiences that Western females would blanch at even as they now proclaim their ‘feminism’. The actress who played the character of Vera, Светлана Ходченкова (Svetlana Khodchenkova), reminded me of everything I have ever known and loved in Russian women. Seeing her as a village girl, blossoming, round-faced, barefoot and ever-so-slightly stout with Russian strength and resilience – and without the calculated restraint and mastery of the double-entendre of those to the manor born – we follow her amid her many travails as she lives through the long years of the 1930s and begins to age in the last scenes (1953-1958). There is something glorious even in her sadness, and something unforgettably plaintive in her laughter.
It’s not only because I fancied the actress (I did), but because of what she represented. Grace under pressure; beauty and endurance under the harshest adversity, and I know that Russian women have been like that, because I still know such women today: Наталия Муравьева, my great friend, and Любовь Ле Рой – my great wife.
Sometimes, we just need reminders. It’s funny, really funny – both comically and strangely – how a movie, totally unexpected and in a language I didn’t really understand (my wife translated a lot of it), somehow managed to drive its message into my heart. I understood without ‘understanding’ because something in me was ready to be uplifted, and along came the right elevator, right on time, to raise my heart to the highest floors of the world.
Weltschmerz shrugged.
