kubilai khan's four elephants

A few years ago, I kind of stumbled into earning a living by teaching history at a junior college. My lessons tend to have grand, portentous titles like “The History of Western Civilization” or “Twentieth Century World History,” but they’re actually rather silly, cobbled together affairs. What I do is delineate very simplified historical narratives to longsuffering students whose enthusiasm for history, and bookish learning in general, is moderate at best. We get along though, because they’re nice kids mostly, and I’m quite ducky and patient and clever and funny. To their relief, I really don’t expect much of them in terms of academic engagement: I feel no particular drive to preach a kerygma of high-cultural fluency that, in any case, would be perceived by them as merely alien and irrelevant. So instead, like a ham (but a pedagogical one), I strive to be entertaining, and I present Mesopotamia, and the Greeks, and so on, in a kind of spirited didactic tap-dance, with lots illustrative anecdotes and “fun facts” about this Pharaoh or that Empress, like bold tabloid headlines: “Fat Kubilai Khan Went Hunting On Platform Born By Four Elephants!” or “Slutty Theodora From Family Of Circus Performers — Worked As Prostitute Before Reigning Over Byzantine Empire!” I suppose I’m trying to use memorable characters like beacons in the night of my students’ nonchalant ignorance… As a joke, on occasion, I give out little stickers to people who volunteer to answer questions. After a long slog through Mercantilism or the Black Death or whatever, I sometimes break out into song (“Don't be mad once you see that he want it! If you liked it then you should've put a ring on it…”), or perhaps recite some William Blake, or decree “mental breaks” to talk about amusing animals like tarsiers, or giraffes, or boogie-woogie birds of paradise. I show pictures and offer intriguing factoids: “Do you know how a giraffe holds its head up all day without getting tired?” Or I mime what a pug’s reverse sneeze might look like. And then, abruptly, I go right back to the treaty of Versailles. It’s a rather good show, as far as it goes. Part stand-up comedy, part “happening,” and part well-meaning instructional pap.

Almost none of my students read books at all, and they have only the vaguest, most perfunctory notions about the past: Hitler was very bad… There were mummies in Egypt… One girl once earnestly asked me at the end of a profitable semester: So who came first Julius Caesar or Napoleon? Because for her, as for most of my students, neither are persons residing in a structured, coherent human reality that she can recognize as in any way congruent to her own; their names don’t even have the abstract value of signs associated with a an acknowledged “high culture” in relation to which she might position herself; instead, they are merely foreign, extraneous flotsam that she can negligently stuff, higgledy-piggledy, along with whatever other educational debris she happens to stagger across, in a largish metaphorical box marked “school shit.” More recently, it transpired that a bewildered boy could not complete an assignment because he just didn’t know that, conveniently, you could locate books by their call numbers in the library. Now, these are young people in their late teens and early twenties, sometimes quite intelligent, mostly from middle-class backgrounds, and heading for university — not nitwits, or the helpless products of blighted ghettos. They are not technically illiterate, of course: they can read and write — if, for the most part, with a rather limited proficiency. Their literacy is shaky simply because the culture they’ve acquired consists almost entirely of a haphazard mishmash of television, trashy pop music, advertizing, “social media,” and, as an anthropological twist pertinent to my own school in particular: whatever usually rather macho and conservative values they have imbibed from their family’s exotic native folkways. Indeed, most of my students are first or second generation immigrants to Canada — many from strongly patriarchal societies. This, as well as the fact that English is sometimes their second or third language, no doubt adds to the disconnection they must feel to whatever I’m babbling about — but, in truth, the native English-speaking students are no more engaged. I find that most of my pupils are quite shiftless intellectually, and that they all share a fidgety propensity to cultivate perpetual distraction.

Of course, much of this is the result of the ubiquitous contemporary technological pollution of everyday life: the myriad hypnotic screens soliciting your attention; the thin, exciting music blaring in your ears while you unmindfully hurry up to get to where you’re going (or perhaps clamoring from an obnoxious dolt’s mobile phone speaker, on the bus); plethoric incoming text-messages that demand to be checked willy-nilly mid-conversation, and, like an itch, call for an immediate response; callow video game fantasies of mayhem; solipsistic pornographic dreams; hysterical public shaming perpetrated at a distance and anonymously; status updates and tweets and Instagram pictures of your lunch; Tinder (or Grinder) pictures of your cock. And, in the midst of all that noise, there’s also the whole involved business of fitting in, and of friends, and romantic relationships, and cigarettes, and having all the right symbols of status and generational communion. But I don’t think the problem is just teenage agitation in the context of a crass technologically induced philistinism. In the introduction to The Age of Extremes, Eric Hobsbawm’s marvelously lucid history of the “short twentieth century,” he wrote that:

At the end of this century it has for the first time become possible to see what a world may be like in which the past, including the past in the present, has lost its role, in which the old maps and charts which guided human beings, singly and collectively, through life no longer represent the landscape through which we move, the sea on which we sail. In which we do not know where our journey is taking us, or even ought to take us.

I feel that my millennial students’ broadly shared aimlessness and inarticulate ineptitude betray that much deeper perplexity which Hobsbawm is referring to, and which seems to have afflicted all “advanced” societies for the past several decades. Like the kids in my classes, we all feel ourselves mired, as if in suspension, in a kind of bewildering, fragmented, amorphous, a-historical present. Hobsbawm again:

[…] in some ways the most disturbing, is the disintegration of the old patterns of human social relationships, and with it, incidentally, the snapping of the links between generations, that is to say, between past and present. This has been particularly in the most developed countries of the western version of capitalism, in which the values of an absolute a-social individualism have been dominant, both in official and unofficial ideologies, though those who hold them often deplore their social consequences. Nevertheless, the tendencies were to be found elsewhere, reinforced by the erosion of traditional societies and religions, as well as by the destruction, or autodestruction, of the societies of ‘real socialism.’

So the world has become, in many ways, quite “illegible” to most people. The traditional framing narratives offered by religion have long been abandoned or devitalized — or they’ve been distorted and monstrously transformed by shotgun weddings to foreign and much more recent revolutionary ideologies (as in the case of militant Islamism). In a real sense, we seem to have lost our way. The sheer confounding pace and radical scope of historical change since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution — a steady acceleration punctuated with dramatic, violent lurches of increasingly global consequence — seem to have broken our compass. Most recently, we witnessed the communist block crumble under its own weight in the late eighties and early nineties, opening the path for the quite obscene and hubristic ecumenical triumph of neo-liberal market fundamentalism, but this too is now shaken by the ongoing financial crisis, and the calamitous handling of it by governments and the grimly obstinate international organs of plutocratic and anti-democratic reaction (IMF, World Bank, European Commission…). In his own age of confounding upheavals, Nietzsche had already identified the alarming trend:

For a long time now our whole civilization has been driving, with a tortured intensity growing from decade to decade, as if towards a catastrophe: restlessly, violently, tempestuously, like a mighty river desiring the end of its journey, without pausing to reflect, indeed fearful of reflection.

            Most of us seem to be at least diffusely aware of such a sinister evolution: that we’re being played for fools and victimized; that the system is perverse and broken; that the gross inequalities swelling once again between rich and poor are scandalous, noisome, and unendurable. We’re in fact persuaded that these injustices should somehow be remedied: "Somebody better do something!" But more, we’re freaked out about global warming and dead pandas and the irreparable degradation we’re causing to the environment; we’re convinced that the politicians who so casually pretend to represent us, far from contributing solutions, are, for the most part, merely craven blackguards, unimaginative fools, crooks, scoundrels — the minnows and puppets of the extravagantly wealthy. We perceive that a corrupt, ubiquitous media, largely instrumentalized by these same vested interests, lies to us, or at least tends to distort and obfuscate factual reality as a matter of course to manipulate us and exploit our sluggish credulity. But alarmed, angry, and disgusted as we might feel, overall we find ourselves quite powerless to mobilize our defiance in a way that’s more than merely reactive and rambling. We are lost, and bereft even of the flimsy security blanket of prayer when we behold a pale horse and its dread rider. Notwithstanding the valiant and meritorious activism of some, we struggle to form enduring organized mass movements, which might articulate programs aiming to resist, to overcome, to tear asunder, to replace the system’s present deleterious configuration.

            I feel that out difficulty isn’t solely organizational or conjunctural, but that it stems from the forlorn intimation that, unlike our optimistic forebears of the Enlightenment, who so earnestly believed in progress and the perfectibility of humankind, we are condemned to fumble through an anomic fog. We are stymied by the anxious, paralyzing conviction, which so many of us seem to share, that everything we can say about the social world is always to some degree divorced from authentic veracity; that it is equivalent to any other such statement anybody else might make; that, as a rule, our relationship to this elusive social world might itself be incoherent; that values are slippery and impermanent; that words are empty shells, clumsily chanelling bursts of affect rather than transpicuous meaning; that abiding by the prescription of the young Wittgenstein, to pass over in silence what we cannot speak about, is intollerably frightening and that we must instead at all cost attempt to drown it in discursive noise; that, in our unsteady so-called “post-modern” era, as in the mind-bending physics of relativity, there can exist no absolute frame of reference for our disquiet hearts to find certainty and solace. The idea that no ideology or single set of values may usefully or perhaps legitimately be endorsed to represent and structure society appears to have debilitated our collective capacity to imagine a positive future to aspire to. The neo-liberal right itself still clings to the hope that it can definitively naturalize its own peculiar fetishism of free markets in the collective imagination, but in the face of our corrosive epistemological moment, as well as overwhelming historical confutation, even it has failed — although, since the representatives of this cult still hold most of the institutional levers of power, they can probably continue to pretend they have succeeded for quite a while still. It seems that the “truth,” at least in terms of some sort of broad social consensus reality, has become deeply problematic, making it all the more arduous to get our bearings. Undoubtedly, elites have long relied on the “noble lie” of Plato to keep the hoi polloi in check, but now the anomie is such that even the keepers and promoters of such lies can’t seem to help falling under their own mendacious spell — leading to the particularly toxic brew of confusion, denial, bad faith, manipulation, incoherence, terminal mediocrity, and desperate, impermeable fanaticism that so characterizes contemporary politics and the attitude of the global elites. As a byproduct, I suspect it also significantly contributes to the kind of listless disengagement and nurtured ignorance that I’m confronted with every day at school, but which my students share with broad sections of the public in countries like Canada.

            In a memorable short film, Adam Curtis — that inspired virtuoso of the ironic audiovisual collage as a device to highlight penetrating analysis — points out a fascinating illustration of how this post-modern mental bric-a-brac of reticence and befuddlement can actually be actively exploited by sufficiently shrewd and cynical political actors to wield power. In the film, he presents Vladislav Surkov, who was one of Vladimir Putin’s closest acolytes in Russia, and one of the main architects of the so-called "managed democracy" that has characterized Putin's regime. Surkov's contribution was to propose the generation of a stupefying, elusive, kaleidoscopic political “reality” for the Russian people thanks to an elaborate operation of political theatre. It consisted in conjuring up artificial "grassroots" pro-Putin nationalist movements like Nashi on the one hand, while on the other, also funding all sorts of opposition groups — a constantly evolving mix, which included neo-Nazis as well as progressives. The point of this rather surprising (limited) support for opposition groups by an authoritarian regime wasn't, of course, to foster pluralism and political choice, but rather to muddy the waters, as it were, and to make it very difficult for the public to discern what was actually going on. But the weird and brilliant final twist was that none of this was done in secret, quite on the contrary: Surkov publicly flouted and acknowledged his manipulations. According to Curtis, this strategy is really the application of practices inspired from contemporary conceptual art to politics: since no single discourse plausibly describes the world in its entirety anymore, such descriptions must be multiplied and left to coexist, no matter how contradictory, or even internally incoherent they might seem. Unlike in the age of innocence that preceded our muddled, anxious times, it seems that meaningfully singling out one narrative as "the truth" to the exclusion of all the others is impossible. Things are happening — bad things surely, a crisis... But we all remain hypnotized, wrong-footed, mired in the fractured mindset the authorities assiduously strive to cultivate in us with their bewildering stories, which are neither clearly truthful nor indubitably mendacious. And so we remain consternated and befuddled, but, most importantly, impotent witnesses, who can only say "Oh dear!" while the people pulling the strings are able to have their way, unseen, untouched, unrecognized. In a way, this reminds me of the strategy that the famous Palo Alto polymath Gregory Bateson proposed to the US army during the Second World War to secure its signals communications. Coding messages was useful obviously, but codes could be broken, and there were only so many Navajo “code talkers” to go around, so Bateson remarked that a good approach might be to drown the signal in an ocean of noise — in other words, to send not one message, but a profusion of them, all at once, with only the recipient able to distinguish the valid one. So the message, like Edgar Allan Poe’s purloined letter, would simply be hiding in plain sight.
            In any event, what Curtis then argues is that such manipulations are in fact also at work in advanced liberal democracies, like the UK. People in authority assure the public that the economy is picking up — but actually wages are down and unemployment is up. They explain that austerity budgets are a necessity to cut the deficit — but the deficit keeps growing, and in fact, through "quantitative easing," huge amounts of public funds are being transferred into the pockets of the very richest individuals. British soldiers are back from the Afghan war — but it’s quite unclear what the results of this conflict were, and what it was all for. The public is offered no linear explanations, only a profusion of sound bites — and things just don't seem to add up. Governments are doubling down on absurd and unpopular neo-liberal economic policies, which ought to have been utterly discredited by the present ongoing crisis — but, on the contrary, we are told in patronizing tones by the self-appointed grown-ups, the right honorable people in charge, that there is no other choice. Even the most dim-witted of citizens can't help but suspect that they are being steered into the rocks, and yet there are no stirrings of revolution, only quiet desperation, or alternatively, a frantic search for the vulnerable scapegoats provided by racism and xenophobia. Of course, here or in the UK, there probably doesn’t actually exist a self-conscious conspiracy of sinister men called Dr. Evil perhaps or Cobra Commander, or even Vladislav Surkov, meeting in darkened rooms to weave their webs of deceit. There are no Illuminati. But there are corrupted governments and ruling classes completely divorced from the people they are meant to represent. There is a capture and subversion of democratic systems by shockingly avid, ruthless oligarchies, with the complicity of their henchmen in the media and the professional classes. But although the public might have intimations of this, might in fact be confusedly outraged, or furious, or exasperated, nevertheless, no discourse coherently articulating the road to an alternative reality has yet captured the mainstream; no groove yet channels the collective discontent. For now, it is still unclear what to do and where to go.

            I certainly don’t have any straightforward, unequivocal answers. I'm not active politically, and for now at least, what I feel I'm able to contribute is merely to strive to reestablish, in myself and (to some very limited extent) in my pupils, some sort of articulate coherence in our apprehension of the world — a vital sense of continuity between the present and the pregnant sediment of our shared experience. At the beginning of my little history classes, I usually try to connect the history of civilization with the much longer span of natural history, to give my students a sense of the relative scale of things, and the idea that we can adopt a perspective outside the scope of our familiar everyday understanding. I start by asking them what the age of the universe is, and sometimes I get the right answer (or anyways, within an order of magnitude…); then I ask them how old the earth is, and then how long it has supported life (congratulations are in order for all the correct answers naturally, but also for valiant guesses). I then ask how long humans just like us have been around. Once this has been established, conjuring the spirit of a young Nijinski, I stretch out my arm with dramatic flair and announce that it represents “the staggering and in fact scarcely fathomable interval of three and a half billion years of life on earth” — and then, with my free hand, after a solemn pause, I mime filing away the tip of my outstretched fingernail. On the spot, I bombastically exclaim that I have just wiped out the whole of human history! This always elicits a very gratifying reaction. After these theatrics, I usually transition more soberly to discussing what “civilization” might mean for a while, and then ask whether anyone knows why living next to horses is preferable to living next to zebras…  And I go on to tell them about Jared Diamond’s theory of geographical determinism: that the reason why certain people ended up establishing complex settled societies, mastering advanced technologies, and generally having lots of stuff, while others did not, had nothing much to do with any innate superiority of certain groups over others but everything to do with the physical environments they evolved in — the availability of domesticable plants and animals, and a group’s cultural and epidemiological connection to or isolation from other human groups. (Though at this point, I’m momentarily possessed by the infuriated ghost of some Kipling-loving Victorian colonial officer, who heatedly corrects me in the snottiest of Eton drawls, by reminding me of “the white man’s burden,” before I can curtly dismiss this retrogressive apparition and recover my composure…) It’s quite fun to go through this routine, and the students love it, mostly, or anyways those who are not too hopelessly obtuse and sullen — but I’m not sure they actually end up getting anything out of it except a passing diversion. I suppose what trying to do, in my own small way, is to combat not only their basic ignorance, but also to help them shake off the broader socially conditioned discombobulation they are laboring under by presenting the broadest historical context with which to frame their lives, and hopefully sparking some sort of insight. But it often feels like I’m writing with water, if indeed with a bold flourish.

            To be honest, I’m actually not that bothered by what my students get or don’t get out of my lectures. I suppose it’s up to them, really. In terms of this whole teaching thing, I feel more like a stranded tourist making the best of it than like an earnestly conscientious professional. I do try to be quite engaging and to make “the material” interesting, but for me, as long as I get on reasonably well with the kids (I do), and I can give my lessons freely, with little effort and even less supervision (I can); as long as I collect a decent wage (bah!), and have enough leisure and energy left over for art and writing and friends and clumsily chasing women and yoga and dining in cheap restaurants (blessed are those who hunger for chicken koobideh…), I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. But more positively, giving these classes has been a wonderful incitement for me to read a lot of history and anthropology and economics, and to think about these things in an active, engaged manner — to hoist myself out of the murky vagueness of a “dogmatic slumber” I had let myself wallow in. Since adolescence, I had nurtured quite a broad and deep artistic and literary culture, and I had also acquired some grounding in psychology, philosophy, and the natural sciences. But in many ways I remained quite a naïve person, and to this day, my experience of life has been rather confined. I grew up very sheltered, but also curious, open-minded and bookish; I’ve always been interested in people, and strongly, if diffidently drawn to them — despite a terribly inhibiting timidity, as well as a certain natural pessimism about my fellow man. As a dashing clever brittle young man, I had a strong tendency to assume the existence of psychological explanations for everything, because I was good at reading people and imagining what they might be thinking; this led me to grossly overestimate the contribution and influence of individuals in society, and systematically to underestimate the extent to which broader social and material structures determined their lives and actions — simply because I either wasn’t aware of the existence of these structures, or if I was, because I didn’t understand them. But like a lot of people, the ongoing economic slump and the pernicious policies systematically attacking the weal and welfare of people like me, which it brought out into the open, served to sharpen my focus — to pose social life and the way ideas spread and power operates as the central issues one needs to elucidate. So now, following my own readings, I lard the official curriculum not only with my needy buffoonery, but also with bits and pieces of the progressive social consciousness I’ve myself so belatedly acquired. Just Marxist rudiments really, with a dash of David Graeber and a smidge of Emmanuel Todd and perhaps a pinch of Freud and Michel Foucault and (why not?) Spinoza or Kurt Gödel on fancy occasions: but mostly class struggle, and the brutal, pitiless clash within settled civilization of the happy few who inherit the earth and the shabby many who seem fated for a quite while still to pine in vain for the great VIP room in the sky, where the last shall be first, and the organizers do serve fantastic canapés. I notice now that a good deal of my intellectual effort of the past few years, such as it is, has been to arm myself in some way against the ambient confusion and deliberate misinformation that makes it so difficult to grasp what’s going on — and perhaps more importantly, to figure out what to do about it. A lot of the time, I suppose I’m addressing myself when I teach my students. Or rather, I seem to be using this captive audience as a contrivance to clarify my own understanding. No doubt fatuously, I like to think of whatever enlightenment they happen to pick up in the process as merely a happy maieutic side effect, but one that nonetheless richly justifies my emoluments.

            Boiled down, for those of you unhappily deprived of my tuition, my pitch goes something like this: people are complex and contradictory, and whoever tries to feed you simplistic, reductive explanations for intricate realities is probably either a fool or a villain — or perhaps both. Ideas, like waves in the ocean, take on a life of their own, and societies are traversed by them. Our rationality is bounded, our lucidity imperfect. Misunderstanding and noise are fundamental features of communication. These things must be accounted for. Individual men and women can be fascinating, so they should be examined with interest, critical discernment, and compassion, but all the while keeping in mind that what determines the outcomes of historical processes are broader, more diffuse collective movements: the flood of conjunctural interactions, of internal and external contending forces and factors, straining, twining, surging, merging to compose the open, complex, nonlinear system we call society, whose emergent nature is certainly more than the mere sum of its parts. Geography is perhaps the most crucial of these factors, because it determines both our natural evolution as a species and the reach of our material culture. People in the past understood and related to the world in a very different way to how we do now, and to understand them, as well as our relationship to them, a tremendous effort of research, erudition, and of the imagination is required. But this effort is worth making because contemporary values, ideas, attitudes, ideological preferences all largely stem from the more or less distant past — and, more profoundly, from a kind of slow-unfolding anthropological substrate of collective experience, such as the often long bygone or “fossilized” but nevertheless still vitally influential multifarious traditional configurations of the family. In countless ways, we are still bound and determined by the past. Such was the vision, the knowledge, the wisdom, the science, the light that arose in me concerning things not heard before. Life is beautiful and transient. The mighty Kubilai Khan himself, ruler of all under heaven, who rode four elephants into battle, could not hold on to it forever. So try not to worry too much. And don’t wrestle with bears. Be kind to one another. Resist taking yourself too seriously. Maybe read a book once in a while… A big one.

the path of the righteous, like the morning sun

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sanctuary

Arsène Lupin, the "gentleman thief" and master of disguise, was the object of my first real literary enthusiasm. I started reading about his fantastical Belle Époque adventures in my early teens, like any number of French children before me. He was a sort of dashing mixture of the aristocratic and the earthily plebeian, of awesome cleverness and powerful physicality, of Sherlock Holmes and Robin Hood, of evil and good. He was an outlaw, yes, but he only victimized the blackguardly and the corrupt. He was charming and considerate to the ladies, but implacable in his nefarious pursuits — endlessly plundering priceless jewels, long-lost royal treasure or mystical radioactive stones. His gallic urbanity was the equal only of his boldness and his charisma; he disdained violence as indecorous, and instead cultivated style as a kind of substitute morality. A shape-shifter, he eluded description, just like he did any other form of capture, but there is little doubt that, beneath all the masks and the camouflage, stood a handsome, athletic specimen of masculinity. His powers of seduction, however, were not irresistible like the ones attributed to the vulgar and altogether preposterous surrogate phallus of a later technocratic age — the boringly invulnerable, sociopathic, panty-dropping James Bond, that utter cock. Like Bond, Lupin did wear tuxedos, but his came with a foppish top hat, a cane and a monocle: elegant accoutrements that expressed a playful histrionic flair, and hid a deeper, more contradictory character. He was a dime novel contemporary of Charles Swann; one whose heart had been broken on occasion by fair damsels who had prefered less worthy suitors, and his dignity and humanity were all the more apparent for it. Like any romantic hero worth his salt, he displayed a keen, impulsive sensitivity, and had once even attempted suicide: admittedly, not like poor Werther, the snivelling wimp, but with virile audacity, by joining the Foreign Legion and indulging in desperate, reckless acts of bravery — in vain, of course, for he was destined to survive, reawaken to life, and harken the call to new adventures. 

I never articulated it at the time, but I suppose the idea of a devilishly clever master of disguise must have appealed to me in a powerful way; there are myriad pictures of me as a child, enrobed in assorted "disguises" — not specific costumes really, but odd combinations of old clothes, sundry accessories, and motley toy props gathered from my parents' closet or from one of the teeming chests downtairs. The basement of the house I grew up in was my special place: a sort of lawless household id, a desultory depot for old junk and boisterous children. It consisted of a spacious, low-ceilinged, bare room with cheap red carpeting coming apart at the seams, bean bags, a television, shabby plywood furniture that held old records my parents no longer listened to, a bunch of books, and a fraction of the veritable jungle of potted plants my mother so loved to cultivate. An unfinished passage, with a cracked, exposed concrete floor, adjoined my playroom; cluttered with helter-skelter construction materials and lumber, it contained the boilers and led to the garage. It was always dark in there, and it frightened me. I felt better when the access to this casual domestic Hades was shut; but even when it was, if I was alone, I could usually not shake a sense of uneasiness, intimating what was no doubt a wilderness of abominable ghosts and children-eating shadows behind the door. In fact the basement as a whole seemed an ambivalent space: at once a refuge where surfeit youthful energies might safely be spent away from censure or inhibiting witnesses, as well as the native habitat of our beloved television set, that mundane yet magical gateway to the land of cartoon tomfoolery and adventure, it nevertheless remained a slightly unsettling, ominous zone of subterranean twilight — so distant from the comforting, light-swept settings of everyday family life. Still, every morning, at dawn, I would creep past my parents' bedroom and, like a diminutive Orfeus in footie-jammies, dauntlessly descend to watch cartoons. Sometimes, the programs had not yet started, so I stared at colour bars until they gave way to an orchestral version of "O Canada" over what was meant to be a stirring montage showcasing the natural wonders of our home and native land, a mari usque ad mare, and the first shows came on.

In any event, it transpired that this parlous but welcoming netherworld of the basement was also the place best suited for inventing and reinventing oneself in private reverie. Consequently, it was there that I tended to improvise my various costumes or disguises; these usually involved some sort of cape, and perhaps one of my father's old pipes; maybe a hat, or some faux-medieval headgear, a plastic sword, or a mask. Some sunglasses? A police motorcyle helmet? A scarf? Perhaps... A lot of the pleasure I derived from these outfits came from showing them off afterwards, of course. But the gratification I felt most keenly, and the one I suspect motivated my games, was to be able to fantasize myself as somehow other — better, more potent, more mysterious, more adult. I was not seeking to become somebody else, or even to portray myself as a coherent character distinct from my habitual self, like an actor who projects himself bodily into the role he wishes to represent for an audience; rather, for me, the outfit was an aid to purely internal elaborations — imaginative flights that seldom took the form of articulate stories or settled roles at all. What I was manipulating was the sheerest intention of narrative biographical whimsy: shapeless and yet so pregnant with potential. I would conjure vague fantasies of empowerment and gratification, of magical fulfilment. They were static situations in which I was the dragon-slayer or the wise old wizard or the brave warrior or the hegemon of multitudes, or the machiavellical villain or whatever — but nothing ever happened, because I never triggered any sequences of fabulistic events, and instead merely fiddled endlessly with fleeting dramatic fragments, concentrations, moments that could repeat over and over, as in a dream, carrying their message: "I am this, I am this..." And, flushed with the pleasure of knowing the open possibility of all the captivating, peregrine identities whose disparate multiplicity I seemed to teem with, I conjured them up with relish one after the other, only to discard them again. I let myself be seized by their energy and, for a moment, gloried in my potency. Kids' games don't have set rules for the most part — I mean the games that children themselves elaborate. That's because the purpose of these games is not to win or lose or to arrive at some predetermined result, but, much more importantly, it seems to me, it is to engage in the creative elaboration of such rules: to fashion structures of arbitrary order that are perhaps not quite coherent yet, but still already tend towards some kind consistency — like an intuitive yearning for orderliness. In a way, these spontaneous, ever-evolving, frameworks for play serve as intuitive theoretical models of reality, which provide the child with a measure of confidence in the intelligibility of the world, and his or her ability to navigate it successfully. Such games are exercises in conceptual invention that allow us to get some purchase on the onrushing immanent jumble of our early experience. I feel that behind my dress-up sessions loomed this very logic of exploration and imaginative conquest: the finality of my countless fancy dress variations was not to portray specific roles, but to build the internal assurance that I really could "be somebody" in the mysterious horizon of the world beyond childhood, where adults, film characters and cartoon paladins all somehow seemed to thrive.

Indeed, even when I insisted on wearing them in public, my costumes were not in fact part of any performance. Or at least not one directed outwardly. For instance, I was adamant that I must be allowed to sport a white shirt, a vest and a bow-tie to go to kindergarten. In my mind, I was dressing like my favorite older relative: my mother's maternal uncle and adoptive father, Joseph — a distinguished, bald, short, corpulant, vivacious middle-European Jew in his eighties, who was at the time still active as a psychiatrist in Paris. He had settled there with delighted satisfaction right after the war, subsequent to a rather testing sojourn at Flossenbürg concentration camp in Bavaria. Since the sixties he had lived in a terrific rambling bourgeois apartment on the Boulevard des Batignoles, where he also received his patients, thrilled to the vigorous, hopeful music of Beethoven, and contemplated with a hushed awe the breathtaking depths of the disquiet psyche, through the novels of Dostoevsky — for him, the two absolute summits of human civilization and achievement. I loved and admired him; I felt a deep affinity for the kindness and the dignity he embodied. Although I would, of course, never have been able to formulated it as a child, it now seems obvious to me that I wished to somehow absorb into myself the quiet authority, the settled virility, the intellectual potency, and most of all, the uncomplicated, joyful embrace of life that made up his character. At that time, I was unconcerned by any idea of "fitting in" with the other children because that had nothing to do with my social coping strategy, which was all about inventively armouring myself from within against a social world I found alien and unsettling. I did have friends in kindergarten, like Marc-Antoine, son of a mediocre dentist (the fillings kept falling out...), whose family once invited me to their country house up North for a memorable stay. There, we spent winsome afternoons hunting for stray golfballs in the woods, persecuting his pigtailed little sister, showing off our willies to each other, and watching The Never Ending Story with mesmerized rapture. Or Alexandre, the well-meaning but tumultuous and emotionaly disturbed giant, whose parents had just separated. Or Shiryl, the quiet Chinese girl who secured an illustrious eminence among us four- and five-year-olds thanks to her unique mastery of the confection of paper airplanes and paper boats. Nevertheless, I simply did not want to go. Attending kindergarten, and later, school was never quite an ordeal but it did seem a taxing and gratuitous chore that I was very keen to avoid if at all possible. In grade school, with my mother's complicity, I would manage to spend a good deal of time away from the classroom, because I was "sick." Every winter, I actually did labour under a plethora of assorted ear infections, colds, flus, throataches, and so on, but I tended to exagerate even the flimsiest of afflictions in an ongoing bid to avoid class. Hanging out with school friends somehow never made up for the anxiety and boredom institutional education precipitated in me throughout that long, wasteful progress. In any case, I did regularly wear a bow-tie to kindergarten, and nobody seemed to mind. My parents were very indulgent and understanding of this kind of excentricity, and my favorite kindergarten teacher — a gentle young woman with long brown hair, even sort of liked the idea. So for a while still, the rough confrontation of my childish domestic mythology with the world at large was deferred. 

Later, I mostly dropped the fancy dress: as a child and a teenager I was too painfully shy to take the next step and try to externalize my playacting in theatre. I found it deeply embarassing whenever my imaginative elaborations were somehow discovered — when I was caught in the act, as it were. The gaze of others, when I was aware of them as witnesses to the process, or withal as a watchful and expectant public, completely inhibited me and destoyed the spells I wove while holed up in private sanctuary, leaving me awkardly exposed. Instead, to stimulate and buttress the imagination I came to rely on music and books. By the time I was maybe ten, I had made a habit of playing cassettes to help me fall asleep. On my dinky little single-speaker tapedeck, I played the same two or three tapes in the dark over and over, night after night. I did it mostly to assuage the tight feeling that always came with the prospect of slumber: the troubled sense that, somehow, giving in to it meant embracing an encroaching, minatory darkness. I was always reticent to lapse from consciousness, because it could mean plummeting headlong into such unknown, fathomless, frightening depths... The first tape of "nighttime music" that I can clearly remember was Dmitri Shostakovitch's fifth symphony — that bombastic, exciting, cinematic, soaring emotional escape. Its ample pulse seemed awash with the same diffuse anxiety that underpinned my own personality, and yet also somehow to carry an antidote for it — causing an ephemeral sense of exhalted freedom to well up in me as I nodded off. This was the kind of music I enjoyed back then: rousing late-romantic or early-modernist symphonic stuff. Looking back, I notice a lot of it was Russian: Shostakovitch, Stravinsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky... What it all had in common was a sweeping "narrative" quality, combining robust dynamism and moments of fragile, lyrical beauty. I also loved Dvorak's Symphony from the New World, and the stately, grandiose meanderings of Mahler's sonorous fifth symphony. I did play music myself, a bit — but this, alas, did not contribute to my emancipation. The fault lay squarely on my own scarcely conceivable neuroticism during this period of my life, and my busy parents' baffled, helpless inability to show me a way out of this melancholy labyrinth of inhibition. For years, I took these absurd saxophone lessons. Absurd because I had no special affinity for this instrument, which I had chosen more or less at random, and because I was incompatible with the strange and unpleasant tutor I ended up saddled with — the one saxophone player in the city who didn't care for, or know anything about jazz. Of course, I was complicit in this short-circuit of what could have been a vibrant avenue for self-expression — because instead of telling my parents clearly that I didn't enjoy the lessons, and wanted to do something else, I simply shirked practicing as much as possible and let the situation fester for years, until, waking from my masochistic transe, I finally got the nerve to call this woeful cretin and shakily tell his voice mail that I had decided to part with his services, and in fact to discontinue my saxophonic calvary altogether.

So, barred from active artistic fulfillment by my own self-defeating tendencies, I retreated into passive ones in my early teens. I gradually expanded the range of music I listened to, assembling an ecclectic hodge-podge of records (Vivaldi, Debussy, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Renaud, Sting, Antonio Carlos Jobim...), which no longer served to usher sleep in, but to accompany endless afternoons in my room, sprawled on a bean bag, devouring thrilling stories of detection (Maurice Leblanc, Conan Doyle...) adventurous historical romance (Alexandre Dumas, Walter Scott...) or intrepid globetrotting exploration and imaginary steam-age technological marvels (Jules Verne). In late 19th century France, schools used to award these big, handsome, beautifully illustrated red-bound books to students who did well in their studies. They were called "prize books" because they were given to the best-ranked students for each discipline at the end of the year. Parents would also offer them to their kids as gifts for special occasions. My aunt Brigitte, who has always been a very generous and thoughtful gift-giver, once sent me one. It was Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days — and on the first page, written in the very neat, spidery script that one mastered in the stiff but democratic schools of the Third Republic, "Maurice Laurent, donné par son Bon-Papa, 1er janvier 1888" was recorded. I was fascinated by this direct connection to a past which I understood to be contemporary to the putative time of the fiction presented in that volume. How thrilling! I adored fantastical tales of adventure, but all the more so when they were contained in lovely old books, illustrated with fabulous etchings that helped to visualise the stricking characters, the curious settings, the multifarious actions. Their musty, dusty smell itself constituted a kind of magical link to the exotic otherness of the past — a continent accessible only in the imagination, with the help of these charged objects of power. At around this time, I also started collecting old metal Sergent-Major nibs, and I assiduously practiced the beautiful, over-tidy, looping calligraphic style of that period. I suppose on the one hand, I did genuinely want to remedy the horrid scrawl I had picked up at the crummy school I attended for the first couple years of my education, but, on the other hand, and most importantly, I yearned to connect more deeply with the imagined golden era of flamboyant derring-do I assumed these books to have emerged from, and which they painted in such glowing colours. No such blessed season ever existed, of course; or if it did, it revealed itself to be what the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, impermeable to naive boyish illusions, called the Ages of Capital and Empire — a time characterized, for most of those who lived through it, not so much by swashbuckling adventure as by exploitation, savage brutality and oppression. But of this, I was still blissfully unaware — and in any case, I was interested in "olden times" not so much as a historical reality, but rather as an enticing fantasy of the erstwhile: one with which I might fashion a compeling décor for my idle, innocent, pre-adolescent daydreams of escape.

I must say, growing up has not turned out to be an altogether straightforward process for me. I was allowed for a very long time to cultivate a sufficiently gratifying simulacrum of engagement with the world — or at least an association with it sufficently mediated by the protective shell of a compensative, escapist imagination, enveloping me and mollifying my contact with what I experienced as the harsh and fraught surfaces of society at large, outside my immediate family — that it was only with the greatest reluctance that I was induced, very gradually, to crawl out of my artificial haven of waking dreams. Despite some fugitive shadows, overall, my childhood and youth were a cocoon of light, of tender lambent affection, of affluence, of sympathetic complacency... I was always well loved, and generously encouraged to pursue my fanciful velleities freely. But somehow this never assuaged the deep, fearful unrest that permeated my existence. Growing up, I bloomed like a hothouse plant: vividly coloured and slightly odd and exquisitely fine — but also fragile and vulnerable to the merest cold gust.

fragile enchantments

We went walking a lot... We met in school, when I was about sixteen years old, and at first, to get acquainted, we ditched classes to criss-cross the surrounding neighbourhoods and talk about literature and girls; we also discussed our travels and compared life experiences — unfurling with verve the creative mendacious hopeful boasts with which young men like to pepper their accounts. We got buzzed on cheap beer and, in the snow-covered streets, stumbled back to my house from exhilirating social outings with some older kids he knew. We went to the movies downtown. Talking, walking. Walking, talking. We saw this terrific film, En compagnie d'Antonin Artaud, in which Sami Frey plays the great writer in erratic shambles after the war, living at a psychiatric clinic he sporadically sneaks out of to make the rounds with a young poet friend and disciple, trying to score laudanum in a black and white Paris full of brittle women, left-bank intellectual cliques, and gaunt, hungry, splendid young men sporting worn blazers. I suppose, in a strange way, we felt it was about us. We also saw lots of dumb films starring beautiful girls. We both agreed that fragile, semitic Elsa Zylberstein was the fairest and most enchanting. We smoked cigarettes without inhaling.

Childebert's father, Chlothar, was a high-ranking diplomat. He lived in Quebec City and only came infrequently to check up on my friend, who rented a room somewhere near school. The family had moved around a lot. It included Childebert's striking Polish mother, Radegund, an operatic blond who liked to throw dinner parties, spend money with princely abandon, and break things on occasion — in thrall to righteous uxorial wrath, or in the savage moments of lucidity when she was confronted with the emptiness of her nomadic, ancillary existence. There were also two glamorous and neurotic sisters, Chlotilda and Amatilda, who never seemed to be around. They had all lived in Italy for a while, and then in South Africa, and in some other places maybe, but I don't remember. Chlothar was a slight, intense, bespectacled man, with an easy, urbane manner that one somehow suspected must conceal a festering ferocity. He was also a snob. He came from a poor family of coal miners in the North of France. On purpose, he had failed the exam to enter teaching college, so that he wouldn't have to waste his existence living up to his family's humble ambitions for him. Instead, like a lot of French baby-boomers, like my own father, he was the first of his kin to attend university. He studied art history, and was able to show off his brilliance to such effect that he won the Prix de Rome, and lived for a couple of years at the state's expense at the Villa Medici, on the Pincian Hill. There, he wrote forgettable essays about classical architecture, chased women and became friendly with Balthus and Marcello Mastroiani. Eventually, he got married to a Polish miner's daughter who craved social ascent; and to support their shared ambitions, Chlothar entered the Foreign Service and became a Freemason, steadily rising in rank and influence ever since.

We were introduced at a tony French Brasserie in downtown Montreal, where Childebert had asked me along to their monthly filial get-together, in my capacity as his one "presentable" friend. All the more presentable, it turned out, when I mentioned that my psychiatrist grand-father Joseph had for years treated Edouard Pignon, a minor but notable mid-century painter who was a long-time friend of Picasso. To seal his approval of my pedigree, Chlothar payed for dinner and gave me a signed copy of a book he had just published about his "great friend" Jean-Paul Riopel, the famous French-Canadian dauber of lyrical abstractions. This esteem stood me in good stead after I was obliged, later that year, to fly to Paris on very short notice because the beloved, aforementioned grand-father was dying. I missed one of the year's final exams at the trig private Lycée I attended, and as a result, a jaundiced teacher who disliked me for being a bit too clever for her plodding tuition, jumped at the chance to teach me a lesson and thus restore her flouted honour. She refused any entreaty to consider the extenuating circumstances of what she had convinced herself was a grievous offence. Indeed, she had decided that I would fail the school year to pay for it, and more generally for my insolent defiance of her authority. But in the event, my budding social connections saved me. All it took was a phone call from my mother to Chlothar for the matter to be quashed and my good academic standing magically restored.

Childebert himself was tall, broadshouldered, handsome, and powerful: his physical allure mared only by nearsightedness and the clumsy inability to express his corporeal vigour by means other than virile posturing, violent exertion, and a certain brutality. He was very charismatic, and had the presence of a great cat — a large predatory animal that had been tamed perhaps, but imprefectly, so that its dangerous, feral nature always threatened, in a flash, to reassert itself. He was also remarcably bright. In school, he was the darling of teachers, mobilizing with masterful assurance the scholarly and social codes required to jump smoothly through the hoops of the curriculum, to dazzling effect. An avid and sophisticated reader, he was highly cultivated — sensitive and awake to the expressive possibilities of art and literature, as well as to the tense elegance of mathematics. I feel he never really nurtured this fine esthetic sensibility for its own sake however. His interest and his engagement were genuine, but never divorced from the sense that his cultivation was also, or perhaps mostly, an investment in a kind of cultural capital that was utimately destined to be transformed into real power or otherwise instrumentalised for purposes of social reward.

In school, overall, he was quite outgoing and open to new contacts; he had that instinct for engaging with others that people used to fending for themselves alone in alien settings often develop. When he chose to be, he was effortlessly charming, but he could also be quite arch and aloof. He was fearless and popular with girls, for the most part — although many were astute enough to be put off by what they instinctively perceived, even if they couldn't quite articulate it, as his basic misogyny, and his underlying indifference to them as anything but iterated configurations of the "desirable feminine." He was never brutal or even manipulative with women, nor was he really callous, but there was something baldly carnal and selfish in his pursuit of them. He felt a strong fascination for their bodily bounty, but had only faint consideration for them as persons. As we grew older and I met his successive girlfriends, I noticed he seemed to select them not simply on the basis of their lithe comeliness — which was a necessary, but not an altogether sufficient condition. Rather, he appeared intuitively on the lookout for a certain pliant, masochistic propensity: one that would induce these girls to put up with, and even perversely revel in, the mild but unrelenting emotional abuse he always seemed to mete out once the relationship had become established. Their trespass, the one that untethered and, in his heart of hearts, justified his underlying sadistic streak, was that they inevitably failed to live up to the feminine ideal he fetishized by contaminating it with a singular personality, a history, a self independent from his ebbing and flowing desire. My impression was that his own sexual appeal, beyond his lean, robust build, mostly rested on the feeling of danger he projected; of compressed, concentrated energy, ready, at any moment, alarmingly to uncoil.

Despite his unpleasant asperities, or perhaps in part because of them, I was fascinated. Soon, I had started to dress like him and to talk like him: I wanted somehow to absorb not so much the substance but the style that allowed him to glide, it seemed to me, so boldly and frictionlessly in circumstances where, clumsy, foolish, hesitant, I cowered and trudged; to shine so brightly, where I dimly smoldered. Out of elements of his magnetic personality, I thought I might fashion myself a persona, or an armour, such that, remaining myself, I would nevertheless be steeled against the new adult world into which I had just at that time begun to be thrust, and overcome my reticence and paralizing timidity. Incorporating his voice, and something of his sharp edge, I hoped to acquire a formidable countenance. In me, I think he recognised an intelligence commensurate with his own, propicious personal dispositions, cultural affinities, and most of all, the opportunity to partake in that gratifying communion, which characterises the intense, unguarded friendships of early adulthood. And for a few years, we were great friends indeed. He soon moved to Paris, where he was in time admitted to one of the prestigious state schools that Napoleon, desiring a meritocratic device by which to secure steady batches of administrators, engineers and scientists for the nation, had created to educate the future governing elites — a rather inequitable system, which still persists, separating the elect from the damned, who frequent the crowded and underfunded universities.

I would visit Childebert most years, and we would resume our habit of traipsing across the city, but less aimlessly now, because Childebert wanted me to meet some rather interesting characters: like a swarthy "dentist" who never seemed to work, but who did do a lot of drinking, and seemed content to spend his days in his underwear watching football matches and pornographic films, absent-mindedly burning holes into the worn Persian carpets onto which, missing an ashtray stationed inconveniantly out of reach, he would, on occasion, drop the odd lit cigarette. Esconsed in his immense, high-ceilinged appartment of the XVIth arrondissement, he looked incongruous, amidst the immaculate, wainscoted white walls and rococo stucco ornaments; he reminded me of the vaguely obscene carnal blurs Francis Bacon liked to represent in flat, open, semi-abstract spaces. His name was Odoacer and he was the on-again off-again fiancé of Childebert's eldest sister, whose taste in men turned out to be rather ecclectic: she already had a daughter by an impoverished and drug-addicted dancer, would later frequent a journalist who was also a viscount, and, as far as I know, ended up with a fat, bald photographer who kept going to places like Rwanda and Afghanistan to bring back shocking pictures and hair-raising, but also, in the end, tiresome, stories of his gallant exploits. We ate oysters with Childebert's vexatious younger sister and she gave me a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein, "that well-known faggot," for Christmas. We hung out with lots of cute girls who were all mad and had names like Émeline or Amandine or Capucine — some of them quite nice. Once, Childebert insisted on showing off his boxing skills at the gym of the École Normale Supérieure, and was quite dismayed that — by a mysterious operation of the holy spirit rather than any innate ability — I actually managed to clock him. He took out his fury on a nerdy classmate of his, who, to my mind, fully deserved the merciless beating he received because, when previously we had sat through the movie Gladiator together, he kept interrupting to correct Russell Crowe's Latin. We went to visit Radegund, who by now had divorced Chlothar and lived with an inconsequential lover in a converted chambre de bonne on the 8th floor of a walk-up overlooking the church of Saint-Sulpice's elegant gray façade, subsisting on her alimony and the scant income she got from writing translations. I once accompagnied Childebert to the National Assembly where he picked up the notes he was meant to base himself on to compose impassioned oratory about, of all things, agricultural subsidies, for a representative who had hired him as a speech-writer, and we amused ourselves at a café larding with the foulest obscenities and double-entendres the orotund ciceronian periods celebrating the good earth he dutifully composed. We took the train to Orléans, where Jeanne la Pucelle of yore showed the French that God was on their side, but all we did was smoke dope and lounge around in beanbags at one of his longsuffering girlfriends' flat, watching clumsy, baffling, bloodthirsty, and, at times, startingly beautiful Takeshi Kitano films.

I always had a good time on these short trips, which seemed so eventful and stimulating to me, and during which, for the most part, I was so warmly welcomed by everyone. There was none of the disconnection with my environment or the sullen aversion I reactively felt at home. Here, the consensus seemed to be that I was all right... It was such a relief every time, like coming up for air after a deep dive. I couldn't help but notice, however, that as he got older, Childebert, little by little, shed a lot of what had made him so incandescent when we first met, and that he seemed to double down on his less appealing traits. In a perplexing way, something in him seemed to coarsen, in a gradual process that left him more arid and morose. As a teenager, something about him reminded me of the poet Rimbaud, magic fount of the youthful dionysiac, as it were; and, like Rimbaud — who abruptly stopped writing poetry in his twenty first year to concentrate on more seemly, businesslike activities, and who was working as a coffee and arms trader in the Yemen just before he died —, Childebert curtly seemed to have dismissed creative pursuits or anything that smacked of esthetic vulnerability. To me, he appeared to have walled himself off in a barren cynicism and grotesque macho attitudinizing. Like a reverse butterfly, in my absence, he had cased himself in a cocoon, only to reappear a grub, contemptuous of his former colorful and winged incarnation. His intelligence was still there, of course, but he appeared to have willfully suppressed any aspects of it not immediately called for in whatever "adult career" or perhaps "destiny" he grimly contemplated. Paradoxically, this tack to maturity required him, at one point, to fudge together a long literary dissertation on the work of a famous Italian writer, Erri De Luca, whom he knew personaly. So he wrote a deft, perceptive essay, but in a completely detached way: yet another empty scholarly exercise, another tedious chore that needed to be accomplished brilliantly so that he might win plaudits, obtain his diploma, and move on to whatever more important things he expected from the world. At that time, he had started playing video-games for hours on end, cultivating a dazed stupor. He especially liked the ones where you wantonly shoot people in a sort of grimy war zone, whose bleakness, I suppose, echoed his own. He also behaved appallingly, I felt, with the last of his girlfriends I was acquainted with: a striking Franco-Japanese girl he had very attentively nursed back to health after a scooter accident she suffered. But by the time I relocated to Paris myself, and ended up staying with them, briefly, while I waited to move into my own flat, he had already transformed her, with her helpless complicity, into a wretched hodgepodge of mommy-substitute, scapegoat, and drudge. This was quite uncomfortable for all of us, of course, because she was humiliated, and he became curt and dismissive of me, not caring for a judgemental witness to his intimate misdeeds — even a discreet, silent one, who kept his distaste and embarassment to himself. Soon, I moved into a cheap hotel, feeling sad, angry and betrayed: aware, in any case, that our friendship was at last at an end.

Childebert delighted in Takeshi Kitano films. They are almost always the same. They star "Beat" Takeshi — a small, twitchy, homely, middle-aged Japanese man — as some sort of gangster. In his dark, broadshouldered doublebreasted suits, he lounges around interminably, smoking cigarettes, waiting for something or for somebody; or he stands on a jetty, in front of the ocean, ignoring the crashing waves to stare out into the distance; or he looks out wistfully at the myriad lights of the monstrous, decadent, entrancing nighttime city, as his own reflection creeps into focus in the window of his immaculate hotel room... We are meant to understand that he is the strong, silent type. In the event, he is also a psychopath. Inevitably, some other yakuzas try to strongarm him, or some crooked cops have a go at blackmailing him, or his devious two-faced boss attempts to double-cross him — and he just gets fed up. That's his cue to start, with a shockingly abrupt and sanguinary theatricality, to maim and kill all these fucking bastards who think they can bully and take advantage of him. With relish, but also oriental self-possession, he shoots and stabs and punches and kicks and stomps whatever dares resist him. Along the way, there are always wholesome good times though: a lovely girl to long for but ultimately to push away, for her own sake, because his is a lonely road; some crude slapstic at the expense of some hapless sidekick, just for laughs; and a touch of the maudlin and the sentimental, as he waits for the final showdown — indeed, why not buy a kite for that sick little boy in the hospital? But in the end, he knows that no one can escape his fate and death awaits us all, especially those of us with sharp Yamamoto suits, ruthless enemies, empty Glocks, and nowhere to run. But, of course, the Takeshi Kitano character faces this ultimate denouement manfully, with fatalistic acceptance: such was always his destiny.

I suspect the flinty main character must, in a genuine, unironic way have represented an ideal of manhood my friend sincerely admired, despite its caricatural absurdity. For my part, I found the films disconcerting and preposterous at first, but grew to recognise that they did have an idiosyncratic charm, a brooding poetry. There is someting admirable about them, despite all the gratuitous violence and their daffy kitsch. They are full of self-consciously lovely images: haunting, suggestive, infused with wabi-sabi. One feels a real esthetic sense is at work in them, only that it serves an odd, naive, misguided, perverse, narcissistic fantasy: the one that Kitano endlessly conjures up and embodies, in the form of the stoic, macho specter who lives in the strangely bare and vacant floating world of his dreams — a desert of fleeting beauty, boredom, honour, greed, fetishized morbidity and violence. They also speak of repressed feeling and affects snared in oppressive, implacable convention, which can only find an outlet in the occasional outburst of savage ferocity. I think Childebert, to some extent, really did live under a comparable kind of emotional duress, and that he craved release by similar means. In his later evolution, he was always dabbling in martial arts, always looking to measure himself to others, to assert his dominance in a transgressive manner. He sometimes struck friends or mere acquaintances for no special reason, except reflexively to give an outlet to the restive truculence that was always building up inside him. In Childebert, the brutal acting out never escalated to outright assault, but was merely an expressive simulacrum, a symptom. His simmering aggression was contained, but not to the extent of preventing the occasional bubbles from surfacing. It was a mark of his special consideration for me that he did not often try to subject me to this kind of bullying — a priviledge also, no doubt, the result of the fact that once, finding myself at the receiving end of one of his perfunctorily gestures, to my own surprise, I did not hesitate to punch him in the throat.

After we lost touch, I learned that he had actually moved to Japan. He worked for a couple of years as a lecturer in French literature at Tokyo University, and also produced a few literary translations of indifferent Canadian and American novels for French publishers. But presumably, he soon got bored with this, and, once his Japanese was up to snuff, by virtue of his conspicuous gifts and his sure talent for ingratiating himself to authority, he somehow contrived to become the personal assistant of a very large Japanese insurance company's CEO — and within a decade, he was heading this company's subsidiary in Singapore. He married a Japanese woman. To his relief, she doesn't want any children, but doubtlessly does cook and clean and, knowing her place, minister to him with a subservience he can take for granted. I know all this because he found my personal blog a few years back, and wrote me a warm email, to let me know what he was up to, and to reminisce fondly about old times. Reading over this brief portrait I have just sketched of him, it does strike me that he comes off as rather a bastard — monstrous even in some ways, or, in any case, very off-putting. But he was the most exciting friend I've ever had. Despite his flaws and his many objectionable features, I couldn't help but admire and be drawn to his sparkling intelligence, his charisma, his steadfast diligence in his pursuits, and his basic indomitable defiance. We shared a sense of humour and, for a time, both crude and raffined elective affinities. We were very young, and as we first encountered the harsh onslaughts of the adult world, we found some solace in each other; for a time, we resolved, in a romantic chimera of solidarity, to face this assailment together. In our folly, drunk on adolescent friendship and splendid presumption, we fleetingly convinced ourselves that, against all odds, we were winning the war.

walking at night

They leave their front doors open in the summer, and beyond the dark hallways, you might make out a glow coming from the back of the house. There are toys on the lawn, and bundled bikes; there are wind chimes, and haphazard constellations of bright stickers on the windows behind which children are sleeping. Once in a while, on the front porch, you can spy an old car seat, like a throne.

Sometimes there are voices: people you can't quite make out, on a balcony somewhere above you, whispering mysterious, intimate things. Leaves rustle in the breeze, which, for a moment, trails a faint whiff of reefer; a fat man is watching an infomercial on television, sitting alone in a darkened room.

"May you be healthy. May you be happy. May you be well-loved," you mutter, as a car passes.

You bless the banal, secret lives sheltering behind the flimsy walls that line the streets and alleys of Verdun. And you are genuinely moved, because, as your restlessness carries you still deeper into the forest of the night, you realize that with every step, you are coming closer to the place where the tyger burns and darkness gathers.

very old bones

It used to scare me, going down to the crypt. But I liked it too: the peculiar earthy smell that became more intense as you walked down the shaky wooden steps; the sense that you were leaving behind the mundane world where the noon sun bathed the shadeless village square, cooking your parent's rental car, as you descended into a cool and unsettling nether region — where the mummies were.

During the Wars of Religion there were massacres in the Forez, near where my paternal grandparents used to live. In 1562, the dread François de Beaumont, baron des Adrets, a Protestant captain infamous for his wanton cruelty, cut a bloody swath through the region, brutally burning down castles, sacking churches, and executing the vanquished by forcing them to jump from their town walls onto upheld spikes. The "mummies" might have been the victims of his exactions. Perhaps they were walled in? Perhaps still alive? That was the story anyways. The remains were naturally preserved by the potassium alum and arsenic in the ground.

We would go to the crypt, and then we would drive on a winding mountain road for a while, until we arrived at a path. You could walk down into the woods, by a stream, and all of a sudden you would be overlooking a waterfall, which gushed down quietly into a river valley bellow. The prospect stretched, lush and green, into the distance. And you could clamber down the soft incline of the rock face, till you touched the cool running water.

And the sun kept shining, and the cicadas kept calling, and the breeze kept blowing, and your mother still warned "be careful," but you — you remembered the mummies.