Blue Valentine

Earlier this week, I watched and loved Blue Valentine, a movie whose characters you can recognize as actual human beings whose flaws, struggles, and hopes are not dissimilar from your own. I rarely see movies where the characters are drawn so true to life or where a relationship, particularly a relationship that is falling apart, is reflective of the virtues and vices of both individuals, like the relationships that actual human beings like you and me have been in, and where no one is demonized.

The realistic portrayal of the lives of the characters (and their drinking, which also seemed true to life) reminded me of a favorite writer, Raymond Carver. And then there was a scene, where in intoxication and frustration, the male character pulled his wedding ring off his finger and threw it into the grass, which I remembered from a Carver story and which I took to be a conscious reference on the part of the filmmaker.

In my recollection, the character in the Carver story, in a burst of drunken and momentary animosity and foolhardiness and in the presence of his spouse, pulled off his wedding ring in threw it off a deck out into a field. He immediately regretted it and realized that he could never find the ring, or repair the damage that he had done to his marriage.

I have looked for the story but, as near as I can tell, it does not exist, at least not as I remember it. Instead, in a wonderful story called "Chef's House," about a couple who are long separated because of drinking and strife, they come together at a summer house after the husband goes on the wagon and they remember what they loved about each other, only to see it fall away again. In that story, in his book Cathedral, Carver wrote the following paragraph, the only one in his work I can find about thrown wedding rings:

We drank coffee, pop, and all kind of fruit juice that summer. The whole summer, that's what we had to drink. I found myself wishing the summer wouldn't end. I knew better, but after a month of being with Wes at Chef's house, I put my wedding ring back on. I hadn't worn the ring in two years. Not since the night Wes was drunk and threw his ring into a peach orchard.

I guess its possible that I made up the other details, or filled them into my understanding of this moment in Carver's spare and brief narrative. Whether or not it was a conscious reference or a reference at all, I still regard the film as Carveresque, which is to say beautiful, true, and as sad as life.

Lancelot

I just finished reading Walker Percy's Lancelot.

I received the book as a gift about eight years ago but was scared off by the description on the back cover, which struck as slightly too close to my life, inclinations, and fears of the future at the time.: "Lancelot Andrewes Lamar, a disenchanted liberal lawyer, finds himself confined in a mental asylum with memories that don’t seem worth remembering . . ."

Still not entirely disenchanted and managing to keep myself out of the asylum, I was recently inspired to revisit the book. (I lost the paperback that I had been given but had since bought an old "discard" hard copy from the New Orleans Public Library, which seems a fitting vessel for reading Walker Percy, one of the city's finest writers.)

In the book, Lancelot, the lawyer, teases through the details of his life and the world with a critical lens as he explains how he came to burn down his home, an old River Road mansion. The truths expressed by the narrator reminded me of how frequently it is the case that people with nothing left to lose, people at the very bottom of life, are most free to express truth.

Here are a few of my favorite passages:

In New Orleans I have noticed that people are happiest when they are going to funerals, making money, taking care of the dead, or putting on masks at Mardi Gras so nobody knows who they are.

***

New Orleans! Not a bad place to spend a year in prison - except in the summer. Imagine being locked up in Birmingham or Memphis. What is it I can smell, even from here, as if the city has a soul and the soul exhaled an effluvium all its own? I can't quite name it. A certain vital decay? A lively fetor? When I think of New Orleans away from New Orleans, I think of rotting fish on the sidewalk and good times inside. A Catholic city in a sense, but that's not it. Providence, Rhode Island, is a Catholic city, but my God who would want to live in Providence, Rhode Island? It's not it, your religion, that informs this city, but rather some special local accommodation to it or relaxation from it. The city's soul I think of as neither damned nor saved but eased rather, existing in a kind of comfortable Catholic limbo somewhere between the outer circle of hell, where sexual sinners don't have it all that bad, and the inner circle of purgatory, where things are even better. Add to that a flavor of Marseilles vice leavened by Southern U.S.A. good nature. Death and sex treated unseriously and money seriously. The Whitney Bank is as solemn as the cemetery is lively. Protestants started Mardi Gras, you know. Presbyterians take siestas or play gin at the Boston Club. Jews ride on carnival floats celebrating the onset of Christ's forty-day fast.

I like you banal little cathedral in the Vieux Carre. It is set down squarely in the midst of the greatest single concentration of drunks, drugheads, whores, pimps, queers, sodomists in the hemisphere. But isn't that where cathedrals are supposed to be? It, like the city, had something else even more comforting to me, a kind of triumphant mediocrity. The most important event which occurred here in all of history was the John L. Sullivan-Jim Corbett fight. Three hundred years of history and it has never produced a single significant historical event, one single genius, or even a first-class talent - except a chess player, the world's greatest. But genius makes people nervous, including the genius, so he quit playing chess and began worrying about money like everyone else. It is altogether in keeping that the famous Battle of New Orleans was fought after the war was over and was without significance.

***

Have you ever watched onlookers at the scene of violence, an accident, a killing, a dead or dying body on the street? Their eyes shift to and fro ever so slightly, scanning, trying to take it all in. There is no end to the feast.

***

I knew a married couple once who were bored with life, disliked each other, hated their own lives, and were generally miserable - except during hurricanes. Then they sat in their house at Pass Christian, put a bottle of whiskey between them, felt a surge of happiness, were able to speak frankly and cheerfully to each other, laugh and joke, even make love. But that is crazy. Why should people be miserable in good weather and happy in bad? Surely not because they are sinners in good weather and saints in bad. True, people help each other in catastrophes. But they don't feel good because they help each other. They help each other because they feel good.