'Nostalghia' And Enchantment, Again

And: The Meaning of Oliver Anthony's Missed Meaning

My obsession with the Tarkovsky film Nostalghia has burrowed deep into my subconscious. I woke up Sunday morning with a new, deeper sense of the meaning of the film having emerged into my half-consciousness as I arose out of sleep. This is probably because I had delivered a talk the day before about re-enchantment. For the 99 percent of you who are sick of hearing about me and this movie, kindly skip the rest of this item. I won’t recount the plot or anything; if you want to read more, just search the archives for “Nostalghia”.

Here’s what occurred to me: the film is about a man stuck in an in-between place. He is a Russian living unhappily in Italy, and broods over how much he misses Russia, to the extent that he can’t resonate with the beauty around him in this foreign country. The only person he can connect with is a kind of holy fool, a madman who is as obsessed over the dark future to come as the Russian is over the past back in Russia.

Also, the Russian — Andrei — meditates constantly on the impossibility of translation. He doesn’t think Russian poetry can be properly translated into Italian, or vice versa. This is a symbol of his frustration with being unable to live at peace in Italy, even temporarily.

Well, I learned in my research that the experience of enchantment only takes place in liminal space, in middle grounds. You have to be close enough to an enchanting thing to develop a relationship with it, but not so close that you thoroughly control it. To control a phenomenon — a person, a place, or a thing — is to disenchant it, to crush its mystery, and its allure.

Being trapped in one’s consciousness by brooding on the past, or by brooding on the future, is an attempt to control the flow of time, which is to say, to control life. But life can only be lived in the flow of time. What makes life enchanting is accepting that we can never fully control things, but we can control our response to things. As Iain McGilchrist writes, how we choose to attend to things has something to do with love.

Andrei only solves his problem by loving Domenico, the holy fool, so much that he makes a sacrificial ritual act at Domenico’s request: he carries a lit candle across the drained surface of an outdoor thermal pool. The absence of water in the pool that day is because the bath managers were cleaning it. As God parted the Red Sea so the Israelites could escape Egyptian captivity on dry ground, so did He part the waters of the bath so Andrei could escape his captivity inside his own head.

During this ritual, which takes only nine minutes, Andrei’s attention is entirely focused on the task at hand: serving Domenico. (The director Tarkovsky told the actor to play the scene like the act of crossing the pool was the summation of a human life.) At the end of the journey across the pool, Andrei, who has a heart condition, dies of his exertion. The final image is an icon summing up all of time, with snow falling through the broken (missing) roof of a temple — an image in Tarkovsky of grace appearing not only in spite of violence and tragedy, but because of it.

What’s the lesson for us? This, I think: if we would be enchanted, we must work to keep our attention in the present moment — not to forget about the past or the future, but rather to make sure they don’t get in the way of living in the moment. We cannot fully control our experience in this life, but we must learn to love those who are around us here and now. And in particular, we must learn to love them first, not understand them. Maybe we will understand them (“them” = people, or places, or things) in time, but if we love them, we will attend to them. We have to learn to live in the liminal spaces opened up by the nature of our mortal lives — that is, of our lives in time. Opportunities to love others sacrificially are like the Red Sea parting, and allow us to escape the slavery of our own selfishness. We should prepare ourselves to take these chances when they present themselves to us.

Attempts to deny the liminality of the present moment, and the present place, will inevitably disenchant, because they can only be practices to exert control. In this, it’s like trying to capture a light beam in a bottle by capturing the particles that make the light beam. When it stops moving, it ceases to be a light beam. When we freeze time through nostalgia for the past or the future, we cease to live fully. Another way to put it is that we have to be content with mystery, and rest in it. I think this is true for everybody. For us Christians, we rest in contentment with the sure knowledge that God is everywhere present, and fills all things, and will never abandon us.

The Meaning Of Oliver Anthony’s Missed Meaning

The singer-songwriter Oliver Anthony gave an interview to The Free Press. Excerpts:

But when I asked Anthony about being catapulted into the first major event in a presidential election cycle, he shrugged. “I’d like to stay out of politics,” he told me. 

And the idea that he has been embraced by the political right baffles him. “If anything,” he said, his music is “more about the right than the left.” 

He added: “I’m singing more about, like, a lot of the older, super conservative politicians that brought us into endless war through my entire childhood.”

Oh hell yes. Every Washington Republican who supported the Iraq War and the continuation of the Afghanistan War long past its ability to result in a stable, post-Taliban country, and who hasn’t admitted he was wrong, should have the decency not to claim Oliver Anthony. I wish he would write a song about them.

Turns out Anthony’s father ran a junkyard. Yeah, real white privilege there. More:

All this seemed like reason enough for progressives to hate Anthony, although they had to come up with a more substantive excuse. 

So, they zeroed in on his song’s apparent criticism of welfare recipients (if you’re five-foot-three and you’re 300 pounds / taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds) and, worse yet, his nod to the QAnon conspiracy theory that political elites are running a secret child-trafficking ring: I wish politicians would look out for miners / And not just minors on an island somewhere.

Except he’s not really criticizing welfare recipients as much as a government policy that allows them to hurt themselves. 

“We live in a country where, like, food is ridiculously expensive,” Anthony told me. “Commercial agriculture has encapsulated most of North America’s land.” 

He added: “Even the food that a middle-class American buys from the grocery store—a lot of it is just, it’s terrible for us, you know?”

And:

Not a decade ago, this kind of song would have been embraced as a working man’s rant against the establishment—and, if anything, it would have dovetailed snugly with the 2004 Democratic presidential campaign of Howard Dean or the 2000 campaign of liberal senator Bill Bradley. 

But now, Vox insisted, what really matters is the “embedded racism” of “Rich Men North of Richmond.”

Or Anthony’s “racist, Reaganite image of ‘welfare queens,’ ” as The Daily Beast noted. 

Rolling Stone suggested the song is “the work of some dark money political agenda now seeking to overtake the charts.”

And one NPR expert observed that Anthony is a “straight, white, cis-gendered man in a forest with a guitar singing.”

Apparently, it doesn’t matter that Anthony is singing about the plight of a multiracial tapestry of working-class Americans across the nation. Nor does it matter that their anger—the anger that gave rise not only to Trump but to Bernie Sanders and RFK Jr.—is warranted, that jobs are evaporating, fentanyl is proliferating, family breakdown is rampant, and the mortality rate is rising. Nor does it matter that many Americans, regardless of political stripe, decry inflation (your dollar ain’t shit) and bemoan Washington, D.C. collaborating with technology companies to steer public behavior (they all just wanna have total control / Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do).

All the partisans could think to do was to lionize or vilify Anthony. To weaponize him one way or the other—which he found mind-bogglingly infuriating.

I hope you’ll read the whole thing. Anthony (real name: Chris Lunsford) says he had gotten into drugs and drink trying to manage his own depression, when a few months ago, he had a religious conversion, surrendering all his problems to Jesus Christ. He sounds like a pretty straight shooter: a man who has suffered, and who is now on the right path, but trying to walk it humbly.

I think it is so very telling that both the right-wing and the left-wing partisans immediately seized upon the song to claim it, or vilify it, based on their own knee-jerk interpretations — interpretations that are not borne out by an honest reading of the song’s lyrics (which the FP story explains). What a sad story that tells about where we are in America. It tells us that we are incapable of listening to each other, of hearing anything that fails to conform entirely with our own preferred narratives. It is simply impossible that someone with whom we might otherwise sympathize has something critical to tell us about ourselves — and that we should listen, because we might learn something.

I’ve had so many conversations this year with people outside of my Hungarian milieu about Hungary, and about the Ukraine war. It is both baffling and depressing that so few people I meet are interested in the idea that they might be wrong, or at least not 100 percent right, about Hungary, or the war. I try to be humble enough to see that I could be wrong — my wrongness about Iraq in 2002 shames me to this day, because I was mighty arrogant back then, and completely unwilling to imagine that I could be mistaken. I’m not holding myself out as a paragon of honesty here. As Orwell said, it takes a lot of effort just to see what’s in front of my eyes. But having made a huge mistake because I didn’t want to take seriously facts and logic that contradicted my preferred narrative, I try now to resist the all-too-human instinct to embrace confirmation bias.

Who does this anymore? It seems like just about anyone who questions the Official Narrative of their own side is treated as weak-minded or disloyal. Whose interests does this serve? Not yours, I can tell you that.

When I was researching Live Not By Lies, I was meeting with a group of old-school dissidents in a former Communist country. They happened all to be Catholics. After we finished the interview, they started talking about the abuse scandal, which had reached their country. They all believed that these were made-up stories by the enemies of the Church.

Later, a younger Catholic who worked for the local diocese, and who had been there to hear that, said that the experiences of those older people under Communism froze their opinions in amber. Because the Communists had tried to smear Catholic priests back in the day as sexual perverts, the old Catholics still alive today assumed that every allegation of sexual sins against a priest were false. The young Catholic said he would have thought the same thing until just a couple of years ago, when his work for the diocese taught him that there were some really bad problems with clerical sexual misconduct.

It was reasonable for those older Catholics to assume at first look that the new allegations were a smear. It fit their past experience. Their error was in not allowing themselves to believe that the allegations might actually be true, and deserved to be examined on their own merits.

This whole thing reminds me of something I was told by someone who was involved professionally back in the 1960s with a very prominent Catholic archbishop who led a barely closeted life as a gay man. The archbishop said he could afford to be uncareful, because nobody would ever believe that a Catholic archbishop was gay. He was right, too. This is how bad actors get away with exploiting others right under the noses of otherwise decent people.

If you are on the political Left or the Right, and you misinterpreted Oliver Anthony’s song, it would do you some good to think about why you made a mistake. It’s not because his lyrics are deceptive. I got into a big argument with a left-wing friend who insisted that the welfare abuser lyrics meant that the song was totally right-wing. It was simply not possible for him to believe that a leftist, or a left-sympathizer — like him, a white man — could find welfare abuse to be a bad thing.

Your homework is to watch the movie version of Twelve Angry Men.

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