Garcin’s famous line shouldn’t shock us. We say, “Who the hell are you…?” when we think that someone is interrupting our peaceful existence. However, it was Sartre who elevated that consciousness by comparing—equating, even—hell and people.

He does this in the beginning of “No Exit” by twisting the metaphor of hell. The images attached to “hell” are so overused in myth, fiction, language (i.e. idioms) and media that when people think about it, they couldn’t help seeing the instruments of torture, suffering souls, or fire. But since Sartre portrays hell as a small living room, the audience abandons its old architecture, though they inevitably could not abandon its more authentic referent—the state of damnation. Anticipation builds until, little by little, they realize what hell has turned into. Hell=other people.

The torture that Garcin, Inez and Estelle undergo is governed by the givens of their world. There are no mirrors to check their own reflections for themselves; they cannot affirm and control their appearances. Estelle relies on Inez in knowing how she looks like, and Inez, in turn, is capable of tricking Estelle about her looks. There is no closing of lights that would allow them to sleep (they are incapable of sleeping in the first place); there is no rest from tormenting and being tormented by others.

Though they inextricably torture each other, the dynamics in their relationship makes one more powerful than the other two. Inez appears to be the most assertive and aggressive among the three. She is the first to bring the idea that they are each others’ tormentors. Her only obvious distress is not obtaining the object of her desire. However, since she bears the “gaze” in her attempt to have Estelle, Inez is the watcher, the active looker, which is a position of power (made superior by the fact that Estelle affirms her appearance only through Inez). Estelle, too, suffers from not having Garcin; but in her attempt to lure him, she displays herself as a “spectacle” and waits for Garcin’s “gaze”.

Inez’s torment on Garcin is the worst. Garcin could not define his “existence” because, as Sartre would say, he is acting in “bad faith”. He needs Inez to affirm his “essence” (i.e. that he is [not] a coward). He is acting in bad faith because he relies on his essence to assert his existence. Inez feminizes Garcin by saying that he is a coward. Garcin not possessing the “virtue” of masculinity (i.e. participation in war) puts him in a feminized position in relation to the other soldiers.

Thus, I say that Inez is the most appalling image of the “tormentor”. If it is true that we are each others’ tormentors, then the only distinction that we can make of ourselves—of Garcin, Estelle and Inez—is our positions of power.

I'm Explaining a Few Things
By Pablo Neruda

You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
and the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
and the rain repeatedly spattering
its words and drilling them full
of apertures and birds?
I'll tell you all the news.

I lived in a suburb,
a suburb of Madrid, with bells,
and clocks, and trees.

From there you could look out
over Castille's dry face:
a leather ocean.
My house was called
the house of flowers, because in every cranny
geraniums burst: it was
a good-looking house
with its dogs and children.
Remember, Raul?
Eh, Rafel? Federico, do you remember
from under the ground
my balconies on which
the light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?
Brother, my brother!
Everything
loud with big voices, the salt of merchandises,
pile-ups of palpitating bread,
the stalls of my suburb of Arguelles with its statue
like a drained inkwell in a swirl of hake:
oil flowed into spoons,
a deep baying
of feet and hands swelled in the streets,
metres, litres, the sharp
measure of life,
stacked-up fish,
the texture of roofs with a cold sun in which
the weather vane falters,
the fine, frenzied ivory of potatoes,
wave on wave of tomatoes rolling down the sea.

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings --
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.

Jackals that the jackals would despise,
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate!

Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives!

Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain :
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers,
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes,
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull's eye of your hearts.

And you'll ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
The blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
In the streets!

The Laugher
By Heinrich Boll

When someone asks me what business I am in, I am seized with embarrassment: I blush and stammer, I who am otherwise known as a man of poise. I envy people who can say: I am a bricklayer. I envy barbers, bookkeepers and writers the simplicity of their avowal, for all these professions speak for themselves and need no lengthy explanation, while I am constrained to reply to such questions: I am a laugher. An admission of this kind demands another, since I have to answer the second question: “Is that how you make your living?” truthfully with “Yes.” I actually do make a living at my laughing, and a good one too, for my laughing is – commercially speaking – much in demand. I am a good laugher, experienced, no one else laughs as well as I do, no one else has such command of the fine points of my art. For a long time, in order to avoid tiresome explanations, I called myself an actor, but my talents in the field of mime and elocution are so meager that I felt this designation to be too far from the truth: I love the truth, and the truth is: I am a laugher. I am neither a clown nor a comedian. I do not make people gay, I portray gaiety: I laugh like a Roman emperor, or like a sensitive schoolboy, I am as much at home in the laughter of the seventeenth century as in that of the nineteenth, and when occasion demands I laugh my way through all the centuries, all classes of society, all categories of age: it is simply a skill which I have acquired, like the skill of being able to repair shoes. In my breast I harbor the laughter of America, the laughter of Africa, white, red, yellow laughter – and for the right fee I let it peal out in accordance with the director’s requirements.

I have become indispensable; I laugh on records, I laugh on tape, and television directors treat me with respect. I laugh mournfully, moderately, hysterically; I laugh like a streetcar conductor or like a helper in the grocer business; laughter in the morning, laughter in the evening, nocturnal laughter and the laughter of twilight. In short: wherever and however laughter is required, I do it.

It need hardly be pointed out that a profession of this kind is tiring, especially as I have also – this is my specialty – mastered the art of infectious laughter; this has also made me indispensable to third- and fourth-rate comedians, who are scared – and with good reason – that their audiences will miss their punch lines, so I spend most evenings in night clubs as a kind of discreet claque, my job being to laugh infectiously during the weaker parts of the program. It has to be carefully timed: my hearty, boisterous laughter must not come too soon, but neither must it come too late, it must come just at the right spot: at the pre-arranged moment I burst out laughing, the whole audience roars with me, and the joke is saved.

But as for me, I drag myself exhausted to the checkroom, put on my overcoat, happy that I can go off duty at last. At home I usually find telegrams waiting for me: “Urgently require your laughter. Recording Tuesday,” and a few hours later I am sitting in an overheated express train bemoaning my fate.

I need scarcely say that when I am off duty or on vacation I have little inclination to laugh: the cowhand is glad when he can forget the cow, the bricklayer when he can forget the mortar, and the carpenters usually have doors at home which don’t work or drawers which are hard to open. Confectioners like sour pickles, butchers like marzipan, and the baker prefers sausage to bread; bullfighters raise pigeons for a hobby, boxers turn pale when their children have nose-bleeds: I find all this quite natural, for I never laugh off duty. I am a very solemn person, and people consider me – perhaps rightly so – a pessimist.

During the years of our married life, my wife would often say to me: “Do laugh!” but since then she has come to realize that I cannot grant her this wish. I am happy when I am free to relax my tense face muscles, my frayed spirit, in profound solemnity. Indeed, even other people’s laughter gets on my nerves, since it reminds me too much of my profession. So our marriage is a quiet, peaceful one, because my wife has also forgotten how to laugh: now and again I catch her smiling, and I smile too. We converse in low tones, for I detest the noise of the night clubs, the noise that sometimes fills the recording studios. People who do not know me think I am taciturn. Perhaps I am, because I have to open my mouth so often to laugh.

I go through life with an impassive expression, from time to time permitting myself a gentle smile, and I often wonder whether I have ever laughed. I think not. My brothers and sisters have always known me for a serious boy.

So I laugh in many different ways, but my own laughter I have never heard.

Song on the End of the World
By Czeslaw Milosz

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A Fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through fields under their umbrellas
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet,
Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world there will be,
No other end of the world there will be.

Valentine
By Carol Ann Duffy

Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.

Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.

I am trying to be truthful.

Not a cute card or a kissogram.

I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.

Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
if you like.

Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.

The Pope's Penis
By Sharon Olds

It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate
clapper at the center of a bell.
It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a
halo of silver seaweed, the hair
swaying in the dark and the heat -- and at night
while his eyes sleep, it stands up
in praise of God.

I'm tempted to call Midnight's Children as the X-Men of India, but that won't do. There's no getting away from post-colonialism, which I think is Rushdie's strongest attempt.

In it, you find children who can:
-smell emotions
-change sex
-travel through time
-destroy things with the knees
-travel through mirrors

Well, there are 1,001 of them who can do things like these, their powers varying according to how near/far their birth 'seconds' are from India Independence (exactly at the stroke of midnight).

If you can handle non-standard English, then you might enjoy it. I didn’t—not because of Rushdie’s invention of a new language—but because I have this familiar feeling that Rushdie is just boasting his technique/s, much like Balagtas of Florante at Laura. In short, I was impressed but overwhelmed. The writing made me anxious in some parts, but that’s entirely personal. Surely, there are a lot of good things in this novel. And guess what? I recommend that you read it.

Find yourself contemplating about the four ways in which Saleem Sinai, the protagonist, is connected to India:
1. passive-literal
2. passive-metaphorical
3. active-literal
4. active-metaphorical

You won't understand them now.

Links:
Magic realism as post-colonialist device in Midnight's Children
Sparknotes: Midnight's Children
Plot Overview

King Kong

After 30-45 minutes of humdrum narrative development, King Kong blows you off with digital pyrotechnics.

But filming filmmaking got me interested instead. Carl Denham’s camera was gorgeous—a collector’s piece. Sorry to be scrupulous about this trifling detail (if I may so myself), but it’s worthy of note as I find old artifacts evocative (they make you imagine things).

Carl Denham bravely risks his (and his crew’s) life only to capture images of dinosaurs and a massive gorilla with what seems like a 35mm Bell&Howell. I couldn’t resist finding out how accurate the props manager’s choice of detail is. Of course, the camera (the diegetic, not the actual) has to be something big, old-fashioned, and manually operated. I say Denham's is perfect not only because he looks busier and more engrossed in his job while rotating the lever (more movements, more cinematic). In terms of appearance, it’s the same as the first unit “A” camera used to film the original 1933 King Kong (the actual, not the diegetic).



Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

Awesome. Mecha combined with Orga (in Philip Dick's words). Now I can imagine a Neon Genesis Evangelion live action movie. Note: imagine.

The Sound of Music

The problem with low budget stage plays is that no matter how cheap you pay, it’s not worth it. Last night’s “The Sound of Music” (I’m not telling where I saw it) is awful. To begin with, the choice for the material is irrelevant with the occasion. The production’s supposed to be a part of some institution’s centennial celebration. Yet, no matter what angle I look at it, it’s stupid to have “The Sound of Music”. The presence of the nuns seems to be the only relevant motif—and a shallow one at that. I may not know a lot about theatre aesthetics, but I think the producer, director and the crew know less.

An Opinion on the Question of Pornography
By Wislawa Szymborska

There's nothing more debauched than thinking.
This sort of wantonness runs wild like a wind-borne weed
on a plot laid out for daisies.

Nothing's sacred for those who think.
Calling things brazenly by name,
risqué analyses, salacious syntheses,
frenzied, rakish chases after the bare facts,
the filthy fingering of touchy subjects,
discussion in heat--it's music to their ears.

In broad daylight or under cover of night
they form circles, triangles, or pairs.
The partners' age or sex is unimportant.
Their eyes glitter, their cheeks are flushed.
Friend leads friend astray.
Degenerate daughters corrupt their fathers.
A brother pimps for his little sister.

They prefer the fruits
from the forbidden tree of knowledge
to the pink buttocks found in glossy magazines--
all that ultimately simple-hearted smut.
The books they relish have no pictures.
What variety they have lies in certain phrases
marked with a thumbnail or a crayon.

It's shocking, the positions,
the unchecked simplicity with which
one mind contrives to fertilize another!
Such positions the Kama Sutra itself doesn't know.

During these trysts of theirs, the only thing that's steamy is the tea.
People sit on their chairs and move their lips.
Everyone crosses only his own legs
so that one foot is resting on the floor
while the other dangles freely in midair.
Only now and then does somebody get up,
go to the window,
and through a crack in the curtains
take a peep out at the street.