I don’t remember them last spring, or the spring before that. Perhaps I did not notice their songs. Though mornings are a new phenomenon for me. Late nights, most nights, in my own revelry, propelled by verres de vin had been my standard. Under those conditions my perceptions were dulled and early mornings rare and painful.

I don’t know many of the species, nor would I consider myself of the birdwatching breed. I think I’ve seen a robin, with its rust-colored belly, and I’ve definitely noticed a magpie. The taxonomy and the scientific holds no interest for me. It’s their spirit that enraptures me.

Most mornings I sit in contemplation as the soft light continues to diffuse through the window shades and their song grows louder. I sit in the beauty of this place where the sun shines and the birds sing and I wonder what they sing about. What do they tell each other?

“Hello.”

“Hello.”

“How did you sleep?”

“This branch is very nice.”

Do these bird-sized brains contain anything further? Or do they contain anything at all? What is this stubborn insistence to anthropomorphize all that I see in the vastness of nature? It’s more likely that these chirps and clicks are only just that, and like language sometimes there is no translation.

John James Audubon, Robin

Source

What if they sing to each other for pure pleasure? As they flit from one branch to the next, twitching bodies, turning heads, moving wings. Maybe they sing to the opening of the world. Each beautiful morning as the sun peaks over the edge and casts long soft morning shadows against the trees. They sing for this joy, for the hope of a new day, for a few more hours of life ahead of them.

What if they sing merely to bring beauty to the world? To make us humans smile. Did God give us these birds just for that? Because they do make me smile. They make me happy each morning as I lay in bed and keep my eyes closed, fighting off the beginning of a new day. Lingering in bed, having woken feeling well, the light slowly filling the room and the birds singing is a quiet luxury of minutes that has no equal.

What if they are singing the saddest songs and pouring their hearts out each and every morning so that the sadness of night and the previous day can be gone. Do they take up all this sadness in the world and convert it to beauty? Is that their purpose? Or is that just wishful thinking? Wishful thinking for a fantastical world that cannot exist.

Yet, the song of these birds makes me believe such a world can exist. A world filled with the mystical, the unexplained thin places. A world that we cannot understand, nor need to. A world in which so much more can be possible.

But in the mornings if I move too quickly, if the hum of machines is too loud, if my ears and head are filled with other noises — I cannot hear the bird’s song. I’ve learned it is only available in the stillness. Only when I slow down to listen to the chorus can I hear. And when a vehicle drives by, or a plane floats across the sky, this peaceful reverie is broken. And then I must sit still a little longer and wait. Then the song returns, the hum, the differing instruments of bird song playing the world into being, into the brand new day.

When I slow myself to listen I begin to see. I watch the squirrels leap from branch to branch, scurrying here and there. I watch them climb vertical trunks, their mouths full of treasures. I see a little flutter of wings dart across my view and alight in the green needly branches of a tree. I look upward and see the dendritic branches splaying outward and contrasting with the warming blue sky of morning, creating patterns and art all by itself. And I think of Malick’s Tree of Life.

I see the way the soft low-angle shadows of morning form and move as the sun begins to awaken the world. I feel the cool breeze of morning and pull my sweater tighter around my chest and grip the warmth of my coffee cup. And I can start to distinguish the differing chirps and songs of the birds, for it is not just one song, but many singing together the song of life and nature.

And when, on mornings like these, I slow down and listen and watch, I feel good. I feel life is good and that hope abounds. And I feel rooted to the earth, to a reality that is textured and deep and pure. I escape my daily disembodied existence where screens and images and algorithms control my thoughts and time. And it makes me want to cry, because I always want to feel like this and know that I cannot.

And in these mornings I know that there is more than just our rationalized capitalistic existence. There is something more, something deeper, and I think I can feel God in these mornings. At least that’s what I hope.

It makes me want to love. To truly and powerfully love. To love others, to love without judgement and harshness. To care and to give without needing anything myself. To love without the endless, selfish, taking and taking and taking.

But then I pick up my phone and the spell is broken, and the time is gone, and I must leave this special place and wade out into the waters of a world I’m not sure I want to be a part of. But I know it will be all right. I know I can survive it. Because tomorrow morning when I wake early I can listen to the birds sing.

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Yoga is a deep descent into the dazzling mind, emotions, thoughts, and life of Emmanuel Carrère. It’s part autofiction, part memoir, part something so uniquely its own that it eludes description or categorization. Carrère intoxicates with his seeming openness and honesty, which is difficult to discern from a literary trick, or the truth.

He seems to write about nothing and everything at the same time. Everything in the sense that he is writing about life, beautifully alive, complex, life. And nothing, because there is no plot, no inciting incident, no climax, just his thoughts and life strewn on the page.

New to Carrère, I find myself reaching for a familiar voice, a comparison, and inevitably land on Knausgaard. Though, I consider Carrère to occupy a different corner, a different flavor of the now scorned genre of autofiction, he and Knausgaard swim in the same sea. It is a sea of seemingly endless words and thoughts that spill out from deep indefatigable reserves of selfhood.

There is a mastery to what they do that can feel both deeply familiar and utterly foreign. It takes a true master of sentence and observation and thought to keep the reader turning the page again and again for thousands of words.

There is a trick and a sorcery to this level of writing that I cannot quite grasp. It eludes the idea of story structure and form and character. I can only but guess that it relies on rhythm of prose, an ability to instill mood and feeling that does not wither and tail off. Whatever it is, Carrère has it.

The book is centered around yoga, or meditation, and what it has meant to Carrère’s life. We follow the thread of this life, stopping here and there for brief intermissions, stray thoughts, and deeply personal revelations. It’s all pushing towards his experience at a 10-day silent yoga retreat.

Leading up to the retreat he recounts how he found himself in the world of yoga and tai chi. He explains the culture and concepts of yoga to a reporter who came to interview him. And he offers one of the most devastatingly powerful responses to those who question and doubt.

“Come and see,” Christ said to those who had heard all sorts of contradictory rumors about him, and that still seems to be the best policy: come and see, with as little prejudice as possible, or at least with an awareness of whatever prejudices you have.

“Come and see…” What a simple and profound concept. Its tendrils stretch far and extend into the many corners of life. For one does not boldly proclaim to “come and see” unless it is worthy. Unless there is an undeniable goodness that can be seen and shown. Or at least that would be my hope and I believe the hope of Carrère.

Would we hate if we saw? Would we judge? We don’t possess the purity of Christ. The same surety in mission and purpose, but still, to live an open life, an honest one, where “come and see” doesn’t terrify or embarrass, that is something.

Yoga is filled with moments, that from seemingly nowhere, fall out of the sky as drops of clarity and flakes of insight. For me, it was “come and see”. Others may find something else that strikes them like a bolt of lightning and leaves them still and reflecting. For there is much here and Carrère ranges far and wide. The only way to discover is to come and see.

Yoga and meditation, a short little book about yoga. That’s how he describes the project. That was the initial concept, but then it becomes so much more. Literary France is thrown into chaos with the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris. Carrère is extracted from his retreat and becomes involved in the aftermath of the tragedy.

As in his own life, this moment seems to break the thread of the novel. It is no longer a quaint little book about yoga. We no longer are seated on the Zafu trying to control our breath, ignoring the burning in our shoulders and back, thoughts uncontrollably fluttering about.

We’re in the midst of a love affair, then depressed. Not just the depression or ennui of most people, but truly and deeply clinically depressed. We’re at the bottom of the well, in the dark, and no way up and out. We wake slowly from the darkness and see a Raoul Dufy painting and inexplicably we, following along with Carrère, are utterly shattered and broken and sad. And the painting begins to represent something more, a point in life, a symbol of all that can go wrong.

Raoul Dufy, The Beach at Sainte-Adresse (1904)

Source

To guide one through the plot of Yoga like Virgil leading Dante through hell is to miss the point entirely. Tragedy strikes, joy is had, hope is lost and hope is found. The details of this journey, so eloquently told, are incidental to the truths surrounding the experiences. It is these elicited thoughts, so singularly one person’s glorious life, that are worth the consideration.

In the end, he questions his 30-year struggle to control and to find peace through the practice of meditation. How far has he really travelled in all this time? The control and the forced detachment is just fighting against oneself, fighting against reality, and fighting against life. By finally realizing this, Carrère is maybe finally able to feel fine. And fine is enough for him.

For he realizes that life is good. One should be happy to be alive. He is happy to be alive. And that yoga is not living. Living is living, and it is good.

Yoga is but one of many things that we use to escape life, to tame life, to control what we can control. Because it is scary to live without these crutches that hold us up. Without these things it is so easy to feel lost, adrift on a raft, subject to the buffeting winds and the moving waves and the dark currents underneath the opaque sea.

Life is really about getting wet, being lost, loving others and diving headfirst into those dark choppy waters because at the bottom we may actually find a life to live.

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You can find a copy of Yoga at Macmillan

Claude Monet, Houses of Parliament, Sunlight Effect, 1903

The Industrial Revolution’s flames burned across Europe starting in the 1760s in Great Britain, reaching broad adoption by the 1840s, and concluding at the dawn of the First World War. Camille Pissarro (1830 - 1903), known as the father of the impressionist movement and Claude Monet (1840 - 1923), the greatest of the impressionist witnessed this rapidly changing world firsthand.

The mechanized pistons and gears that wrought the change from the pastoral to machine driven world of efficiency, was powered by coal. Coal, dark and black, that burns hot and dirty, emitted particulate matter containing mercury, sulfur dioxide, and more into the skies of Third Republic France and Victorian England.

The opening paragraph of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853) provides the words to describe the mise-en-scène.

Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

Dickens speaks more explicitly and could be the first to use the word pollution in an environmental context.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among the green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.

Alongside Dickens’s words were the great Impressionists paintings of such scenes. Fog of that time is reference to Pea-Soup Fog, or London Fog, which we would now know today as smog. It was a phenomenon caused by the burning of coal to heat homes and the coal burned to ignite the capitalistic dreams of industrialists’ factories.

Camille Pissarro, Pont Boieldieu, Rouen, Effect of Fog, 1898

Source

Pissarro, classically trained, father of Impressionism, and practitioner of Neo-Impressionism fills many of his cityscapes with the circular plumy swirls of smoke drifting across the skyline. It’s a sight anathema to our modern sensibilities. A plume of smoke in the air, is a foreign sight for us now. But for Monet and Pissarro it was common and ordinary and part of the landscape. It’s a component of the landscape they didn’t fail to capture and convey.

That blurry, hyper-real sunset effect from these masters is not always what it seems. In some cases it was created by the purity of beauty, the purity of the senses, as in Venice. For that is why I come to Impressionism and its offshoots. It’s the ability to make reality realer than it is. It’s the ability to layer emotion onto sight to create a moment that is truly unforgettable.

It provides what other forms cannot. Raw photography without music or feeling or history cannot achieve what Monet, or Pissarro, or what Van Gogh can do in a simple frame. They can tell a story, they can make me nostalgic for something I’ve never experienced. They can pull me back and forth and fill my cup fuller than anything the brutalistic realists can imagine.

Part of this beauty and magic is that the paintings feel alive. They seem to capture movement in the rippling of water, the billowing of smoke, or in the way a shadow falls. This appears as a still image of a moving and changing world that is vibrantly alive. It’s as if we blinked and the paintings appear as the last sight before the closing of eyelids. Then we can imagine, as if opening our eyes again, how the world would continue and how the wind would feel because the branch of a tree is tilted to the left or the puffs of smoke turn horizontal. We can smell the sea and hear the gulls in the harbor purely by the way the reflection of the sun casts itself on the reflective and luminous surface of water so perfectly rendered.

Claude Monet, San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk, 1908

In many cases this gorgeous hazy effect is pollution and the beginning of environmental disaster. The Impressionists weren’t conveying how they felt towards the beauty of the viewscape, but indicating the reality of stifling and choking fog that draped across the sky and descended into the very streets of the city. They gave picture and feeling to pair with Dickens’s words and the rampant respiratory illnesses that plagued the times. They painted with truth beyond truth.

Perhaps their only downfall is that it still remains beautiful and picturesque. They are unable to remove the beauty and feeling and vibrancy from these pictures. They are not gruesome to me, they are not extreme, but subtler stabs at the choking march of industrialism.

What makes these dreary city-scapes so beautiful, when we know them to represent a horrific catalyst toward human degradation through the suffocating poisoned skies. When I look at Waterloo Bridge I can picture Sherlock Holmes stealing across the bridge dressed as a beggar. I can feel Mr. Hyde stalking the dark foggy corners. My own history, my own romantic ideals shrouded by the haze of literature skewing my perspective. But still, there is something pure and unadorned, that makes these paintings beautiful of their own right.

Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight in the Fog, 1903

Source

These metropolitan pictures provide a sharp contrast to the idyllic pastoral and romantic landscapes that characterize so many famous Impressionists and Neo-Impressionist images of the time. While I find beauty in Pont Boieldieu, Rouen, Effect of Fog, 1898 it differs wildly from Landscape at Saint-Charles, Near Gisors, Sunset, 1891. There is a beauty and a purity and clarity to the Landscape when compared to the Rouen fog. Grey’s and dullness of color lacking vibrancy and bordering on the homogenous mark these city-scapes. The sun is removed or shrouded by smoggy clouds. One can feel the depressive moan of factory engines or the blaring horn and churning of trains on a track.

In the natural world the colors are vibrant and differing. Shadows play off the sunset, unmarred by the suffocating smog that filled the urban skies of the period. Leaves and flowers and the quiet calm of peace fill these paintings. We think of long summer days that stretch on as if infinite. We can hear the birds chirping in the trees and we can see the clearness of the sky or the soft warm light of approaching sunset.

Camille Pissarro, Landscape at Saint-Charles, Near Gisors, Sunset, 1891

This contrast in view scape tells the story of the catastrophic air pollution of the era. It shows the costs of progress, the tradeoffs we made as we transitioned from human power to machine power. What they could never have known at the time is that the effects of these foggy cityscapes would result in risk of destruction to these beautiful and quaint plein air captured landscapes.

Pissarro and Monet could have stayed among the haystacks, lilies, country estates, rural villages, and fields. They could have remained in the countryside, following the footsteps of the romantic pastorals. But they did not. They entered the cities and the streets, and painted. They painted the good and the bad. They painted what they saw. They painted the beginning of the environmental catastrophe that infected the choked lungs of a generation.

Camille Pissarro, Sunset, Port of Rouen (Steamboats), 1898

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for the martyrs, who live

Great and constant sufferers, for that is one way to describe a martyr. It lacks the adornment popularly imagined. There are no lions or colosseums in this story. No holy wars. There is only the long and constant suffering of life.

Some suffer more, some suffer less. Some bear pain with grace and dignity while others are destroyed. Some effortlessly float above, never having to face the black hole of despair. What is it that decides these things?

The titular martyr Cyrus Shams has more reason than most to despair of the world. His mother is dead. Her life was pointlessly ended by the United States’ accidental strike on an Iranian commercial airliner. His father, having immigrated to the very same United States, worked as a lowly laborer, who drank himself asleep each night, and seemed to die the moment Cyrus moved out.

Cyrus turns to the stupor of alcohol and drugs to cure his pain. He wallows in beds filled with piss and cigarette ash and sinks into the void of addiction. By some miracle of divine intervention he sobers. He is alive. Yet his despair remains uncured.

It is these passages, scattered throughout the novel, that feel the most well rendered and rooted in realism. It is no surprise that Kaveh Akbar is mirroring his own life, his own addiction, and his own salvation from a death just avoided. It’s a story told many times over: drugs, sex, isolation — yet when done well, it always seems to work. Martyr!, though, has greater ambitions than just this.

We start with Cyrus presented in the third person. Then, the novel quickly explodes its aperture. There are dreams, poems, military communications, excerpted passages from an unfinished novel. Other characters take over. His mother, his father, his uncle, and his best friend sometimes lover. These other viewpoints are conveyed in the first person.

The staccato nature of the differing sections of prose is ambitious. So are the subjects that it grapples with. Addiction, sobriety, immigration, isolation, death, homosexuality, meaning, and purpose, and more. Martyr! sprawls like a nineteenth century Russian novel. It tries so much. It doesn’t always succeed, but in the trying it should be applauded.

Kaveh Akbar chooses to shift perspectives. To seat us more intimately with the others through the use of first person. Cyrus feels close, but is held more detached by the choice of the traditional third person. What drove this choice? Why are we functionally more removed from Cyrus than his mother Raya? Cyrus is the protagonist, shouldn’t we be deeply centered on his journey?

In some ways this choice makes sense. In others, it feels like a wayward decision. I’m oddly reminded of the 2009 film Watchmen, where some threads of that story are told in the traditional manner, and others utilize narration. In the case of Marytr!, the choice of narration brings us closer to the more complicated and challenging characters in the story.

However, we spend less time with these others. Yet, with less story, and at a quicker pace, the first-person perspective allows us to grow close to them. In particular, Raya is the more magnetic, the more complex, and the more interesting of all the characters. One could argue that the novel should really be her story.

I longed for more of Raya. Once she entered the text, Cyrus’s self-centered repeated fixations felt rather annoying and dull. We’re all narcissistic, but like Zee, I became exasperated with this schtick. And unlike Zee, I wasn’t in love with him.

Cyrus believes his mother to be a martyr and becomes possessed with the idea that death should have meaning. But can, and should, dying mean anything? Isn’t living the more important, the more challenging? For everyone wants to feel like life has meaning. It’s a simple and universal idea.

What does meaning in death even resemble? Jesus Christ represents the most famous death in the history of the world. His death was only important because he is believed to have conquered and defeated it by rising alive after three days in a tomb. The death of Archduke Franz Ferdinand kicked off the start of World War I. War was already inevitable, and his death lit the match. Is that how he wanted to be remembered; was that a death with meaning?

Death can illuminate a life, a person, but it cannot define worth. Would Martin Luther King Jr. be remembered the way he is for merely dying? No, he is remembered for the way he lived, for the way he believed and acted while breathing.

The novel’s insistence with this focus on death, with characters facing and heading towards suicide frustrates. Is an important death all that important? The modern American life is pushed far from death, far from the reality of what it might be. And so, without saying it, we all move forward and pass our time never truly believing that death is near, or that it will come at all. This removal from the reality of death has created an outsized obsession and fixation and abhorrence for this natural process.

Eventually, Cyrus learns of an art installation in New York City called Death Speak. An Iranian artist named Orkideh has decided to live out her remaining days cloistered among the white walls of a museum speaking to strangers. Cyrus sees this as a noble act… as important. It feels as if she is calling to him. So he and Zee decide to travel to New York so Cyrus can meet and learn from this Martyr.

This death and martyrdom of the novel feels selfish and self-important. Cyrus can analyze his own life, remain fixated on his parent’s deaths, but cannot see the chance at life in front of him. The artist Orkideh decides to make her death into an artistic statement unaware or unsympathetic to how it will impact those around her. A Martyr in this way is a selfish person, a person who does not know enough about life to risk the chance at actual living. Yet the novel seems to glamorize and condone such actions.

Cyrus’s obsession remains, and he insists that he wants to die. That it is good for him to die. Zee grows angry at Cyrus and can no longer tolerate his absurd and selfish attitude. The story finally pushes back on Cyrus’s main thesis.

Zee loves Cyrus. He loves him in a forlorn and hopeful way. In a way where he just wants Cyrus to see him, to truly see him just once. Instead Cyrus cannot see past himself.

“Have you ever felt like that? Do you have any idea what I’m even talking about?”

Zee walks out and leaves in silence. My mind immediately jumped to the idea that he intends to kill himself to show Cyrus how he feels, to show him the truth of what Cyrus’s misguided poetic hypothesis really means. The split felt irrevocable and Zee, broken.

Later, in what we understand to be Cyrus’s dream Ali Shams and Rumi hang out outside a nightclub. Ali isn’t fully ready to enter, he’s happy to be outside, just outside the afterlife as Kaveh Akbar imagines it. At one point Ali turns and recognizes Cyrus’s friend Zee. He puts his arm around Zee and they walk into the nightclub together.

To me this is confirmation that Zee is no longer among the living, but has passed through the thin veil of life into what constitutes the after. For why else mention his presence with Ali and Rumi. What purpose is there in this revelation, unless only to indicate Cyrus’s unconscious life.

Cyrus had been visiting Orkideh and we learn that she is his mother — somehow he knew. The woman on the plane was her lover, swapped out to escape the tyrannical Iran so they could start a new life together. There are many threads we could pull on Raya/Orkideh’s story, but in the end she selfishly decides to end her life the night before what was set to be a meaningful conversation with Cyrus.

Zee calls him and they meet in the park outside the museum. Clouds swirl, trumpets sound, and Zee becomes a voice of knowing and calm. The tone shifts to the saccharine and something has changed. Either this is an extreme version of magical realism, or they are both dead in one way or another, ended their lives, unable to continue to live in the world.

“It won’t be long now”, said Zee.

Tears fall, an orange bright sky blazes overhead, and birds sing in the air. They join together and the world feels good and warm and right. They are gone, taken away from reality and suffering and brought up into whatever heaven is in store for them.

Depending on how one may interpret the ending, three main characters have taken their lives. Their ends occur as high drama, suicide is treated lightly, and they find themselves freed from all their pain. But there are those who remain, who continue to face living.

These deaths are only too softly repudiated in the final coda. For that can be the only point of the closing pages. A moment of life, a happiness that Sang Linh, a character introduced late, remembers. The subtlety falls flat compared to the bombastic transfiguration of Cyrus and Zee.

The opening line, the very beginning of the story, martyrs who live… provides a key to the entire novel. Because I believe that is what Kaveh Akbar is saying. He is showing the selfishness and the pain of Raya, Ali, Cyrus, and Zee, but we end with Sang Linh. She lived with great suffering and great joy, but she lived all the same and did not give herself up.

And in the end, it is those who live, who suffer and still live, that matter.

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You can find a copy of Martyr! at Penguin Random House

A dinner… a conversation, it’s a simple conceit, yet done entirely without convention, and has never been matched. It speaks in the lucid intellectual way we all wish we could or would communicate with one another. My Dinner with Andre should be experienced and then shared across the burning embers of a fire, over drinks, and whatever else brings us together in communion with each other,

This is a film that has the unique ability to speak truth plainly. It speaks so profoundly that it can convey years of ennui in a few short moments. It offers one of the most poignant and damning quotes I’ve ever grappled with.

…and all I thought about was art and music. Now I’m 36 and all I think about is money.

So how does one speak about or write about a film that is not a film? It’s a captured conversation, a written dialogue… expressed in the way we wish we spoke. It’s a conversation that feels so real, and so true to late nights, and dinners, and too much wine, full of changing topics that flit between one profound moment and another. It never stops to take in the scenes but continues to propel forward with such fervor because we have so much to say and so little time, and the night is ending and we feel we could burst with all that is within us.

It transcends the idea of form and becomes a play… a film… a book, all in one, yet not quite singular. It is more about words than the images. There is almost no image beyond a face expressing feeling. But it is the faces of André Gregory and Wallace Shawn that are etched in the mind. Normal, real faces you may encounter at the grocery store. Faces and punctuation that bring words to life. Faces that mesmerize us into a tranced state.

The first half of the film is dominated by the fabulist story of André’s existential crisis. It feels like an extended John Cheever short story or the place J.D. Salinger would have reached if he continued on in the vein of Hapworth 16, 1924. While deeply compelling, the film comes more alive in the second half as it delves into the philosophical and profound.

My Dinner with Andre conveys so many ideas in so short a time. There are so many anabranching patterns and streams of thought one could follow and get lost in. The ideas are timeless and even more relevant in the now.

One of the core ideas is that of a Buddhist mindfulness. Mindfulness has been coopted by the wellness and self-help communities to an extent that the idea has almost lost all meaning. Are we capable of truly seeing ourselves and our world versus seeing what we want to see or what we’ve been programmed to see? It remains an enduring idea.

I don’t... I don’t think we’re even aware

of ourselves or our own reaction to things.

We...We’re just going around all day

like unconcious machines...

André is concerned about the decoupled consciousness. That everything in life has become habitual, planned, and performed. Authenticity has disappeared. We cannot be true with ourselves and with each other. We have become automatons. These arguments are more relevant than ever and are loudly tackled in Paul Kingsnorth’s 2026 book Against the Machine.

Kingsnorth argues we are pure materialists, disenchanted with the natural world, controlled by technology and our lust for power, wealth, and growth. Technological advances don’t always lead to human flourishing, in reality they often lead to consolidated power and wealth for the oligarchical ruling class.

During the 45 years that separate us and the film, André must have appeared insane to some viewers. A sensationalist, a hippie, a conspiracy theorist. World-wide unconscious brainwashing to control and extract money from the masses is an extreme proposition. Yet, it doesn’t feel so very far from the truth.

...that creates this boredom

that we see in the world now...

...may very well be a self-perpetuating,

unconscious form of brainwashing...

...created by a world totalitarian government

based on money...

...and that all of this is much more dangerous

than one thinks...

Kingsnorth’s ideas are echoes of André and Wally’s impassioned threads of conversation. The failed promise of the religion of science to make everything better. Or the particularly unique discussion on the merits of the electric blanket. How this piece of technology is just another form separating us from the reality of the world. It dampens and softens feeling and perception. It represents a degree of comfort that damages something within us.

I think how salmon are sensitive to their riverine environment. If the water is too warm and lacking in oxygen, they cannot survive. If it is too cold, nutrients are limited and they cannot grow big and strong. The composition and persistence of the river bottom affects if they can spawn and if their eggs can survive. We are also animals living on planet earth. We are similarly affected by changes to our environments. Yet how these changes affect us are more opaque. We are not only concerned with the simple physical act of survival. But are haunted by the emotional, the spiritual, the mental, the human.

This blessed consciousness of humanity is at the core of what My Dinner with Andre is about.

Wally follows André through this maze of intellectual argument. He pushes him forward and asks simple questions. He represents a more standard viewpoint, more of an everyman who hadn’t travelled to the desert to eat sand. And as the conversation furthers and deepens he pushes back unable to accept these definitive assertions.

I mean... I mean,

I know what you’re talking about...

...but I don’t really know

what you’re talking about.

And in some ways I agree with Wally and think that a simple life of comfort and work can exist. For life is hard enough without needing to be truly present in every moment. But I also hear what André says and fear the dark forces in this world disconnecting us from actual living. And I do wonder what could be possible within our souls and between each other if we could exist unfettered.

It’s like the question The Matrix asks, does the nature of reality matter if we are happy? Does it matter if we are batteries fueling some terrible machine? It is what Wally wonders and doubts the importance of. His world of plays and quiet nights with his girlfriend are enough for him. In some ways he doesn’t care about more than that.

We all have these created little worlds of comfort. A small circle of peace to shield us from the vicissitudes of life and fate. Most days, I just wanted to crawl into my own little world, which is often a book, and forget about the wider world that is filled with pain, and doubt, and worry. Why would we want to live mindful and present in a world like that?

But I can’t quite do that. I can’t quiet the questioning and wondering and the wishing for more. Because I do feel like there is a more present and better reality that somehow maybe someday I can unlock.

Wally and André hover above me like benign angels, neither offering heaven or hell, but different paths and approaches to life. Different lines of questioning. Some days I listen to Wally and I crawl into my cave and gather my loved ones around and feel happy for the life we have built together. For the small things, like a glass of wine with friends, a hug from my children, a shared joke with my wife. The world of film and fiction to bury my head into.

Other days André reaches down and pulls me forth. I go to war with the world. I seek answers to questions. I battle with my thoughts. I try to find ways to make it better, because it must be able to be better. There must be more.

The conversation of the film continues and it weaves back and forth between the both of them like music or dance. We can hear the sound of clinking glasses and clattering forks and knives of a restaurant. I can almost smell the dark fruit of red wine swirling around my glass as I listen to my two angels above me.

Then the camera zooms out and the restaurant is empty, reflecting the feeling of unnumbered real nights and the swirling of awareness descends, ending the communion of spirits sewn together in harmony for that briefest of time and then it’s time to go home.

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Currently, you can stream this film on HBO and you can read the script here.

Perfection is a millennial fever dream. A death rattle for the naive hope in a borderless digital life. The generation who came of age during “Yes We Can”, the subsidized internet economy, and a belief in the inevitability of liberal Western ideals sweeping like a tsunami across the globe will feel seen by this novel. It may not be in the way they want to be seen.

Perfection is an interesting idea. What does it actually mean? It is without flaw, satisfies all requirements, meets the ideal standard. The requirements and standards are that which we make up and create. They are the vision we have for our lives. The story we want to tell about ourselves.

The generation who battled through the screeching sound of a modem connecting to access AOL instant messenger only to be booted off by their mother on the phone are the first with the ability to broadcast that vision of perfection into the world on their own terms. Magazines, commercials, and billboards controlled by corporations and editors used to tell us what we wanted. With the Web 2.0 and the rise of blogs and Facebook and Instagram we could enter into a collective consciousness and tell each other what perfection should look like.

What’s more, the perfection shown didn’t have to be real. It just needed to look real. We just needed to be able to show and tell others that ours was an ideal life. It didn’t need to be true, it didn’t need to feel true. It just needed to photograph well. That is the place and point in which Vincenzo Latronico begins his playful and biting picture of perfection.

The novel opens in a perfectly manicured apartment indicating a curated life lived with “taste”. The denizens of the apartment are Anna and Tom. They work as digital creatives who left provincial Southern Europe for an exciting and importantly cheap life in trendy East Berlin.

Anna and Tom are caricature before they are character. Floating above in third person we are provided glimpses of the thoughts and feeling of them, they, their, Anna and Tom. They are not personal, but abstracted and “they” encapsulate an entire generation’s hope and malaise.

The choice of perspective and tone is a brilliant achievement. Reading outside of the dominant first person narrative can feel foreign at first. Yet, it provides a freshness that breathes life into the story. The register of Perfection is propulsive and works for the story. When he notes their perfected music taste and affinity for the indie gods of the time:

They would listen to LCD Soundsystem and Animal Collective on repeat on their headphones.

Or when discussing their sex life

Anna had been curious about rimming but Tom was too self- conscious. He wasn’t crazy about blowjobs, but he did like to be choked just before coming, which Anna found a bit scary.

There is a rhythm to this prose that works its way into the reader.

The impersonal, slightly aloof approach to story matches that of their lives. They exist online through comments and posts and pictures. Their personal relationships are impersonal. No one is given a name, no one is called out. We just hear of the similarly expatriated friends and the gallery openings where they converge. People come and go, the world is transitionary.

This matches the impersonality of modern life. Neighbors are unknown, family is far away. We live accountable to no one. We walk streets with strangers, we pick out perfectly ripe avocados next to strangers. Anything else can be directly ordered from the comfort of our beds. We don’t need others. Dinner companions, museum friends, running club - transactional relationships tailor fit to purpose. It’s all the single-serving friends of Fight Club.

Anna and Tom are removed from their world by a thin layer of protective coating. Just as we are removed from the narrative by the broad and impersonal approach to third person. In this way the novel truly excels. It uses the way it tells the story to further tell the story. It’s an example of the best kind of storytelling.

As with all of us, they find themselves drawn into the all-consuming world of social media. They react to shitposters and begin to moralize and litigate opinions and commented speech. They are enraged. This false sheen of a world becomes their reality. Of course they always have timely correct opinions in the culture wars.

Somehow they become obsessed with the same things as their friends. Plants or high end cooking dominates their lives. It’s a hobby and obsession. What was its genesis and why did it require so many niche purchases?

Here, using the sparsest of statements Latronico touches upon a vein of genius. How can we trust the idea of a cultural consciousness? Is a trend really just an advertising campaign? The idea makes me question my own reality. And it should make us all question the trends that drive us, the reason why we develop hobbies. Hobbies which, of course involve some key purchases that are usually justified as an investment in ourselves rather than the vapid consumerism we all condemn. I mean that’s why we all suddenly find ourselves thrifting. It’s a questioning and a world I would prefer not to occupy, yet here we are.

Eventually their life in Berlin isn’t enough. The story has grown old. It doesn’t match how they believe they should feel. So they become what we would define as digital nomads. Correcting fonts, and making posts from afar, their uncomfortable and hectic life appears desirable. They are of the jet-setting class, they live and work where they want. They do what they want. But why do they feel so hollow inside?

In Berlin, the suntanned posts remind them of how great the seaside or hotel or whatever was. When away they can only think of how dingy the hotel is or how bad the food tastes, and wasn’t it better in Berlin? They fall into the nostalgic trap of remembrance. The bad eventually fades away and all we can remember is the good. The good is even better when it’s encapsulated by the perfect post. Don’t we all look and feel better when nibbling at escargot and sipping Chablis? Never mind the fact that we hate our lives and continue to fight with our partner and wonder if somehow and somewhere we made a fateful mistake.

Perfection takes aim at all these modern trappings. It makes fun of the hollow idea of perfection as defined by the blitz of images on tiny screens that become as true as true life. I read this novel in one glorious reading punctuated by a glass or two of champagne. It consumed me and pulled me into its world. Its merits, and the threads it pulls on, are many.

At the end of the day if our lives look perfect then why shouldn’t they feel perfect?

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You can find a wonderful copy of Perfection at The New York Review Books (My current favorite publisher… if you couldn’t tell.)

The film opens in the dark of night in the intimacy of a family in a car. A husband and wife, she dressed in a hijab, sit in the front seat. In the back their young daughter springs to life dancing and singing to a modern-sounding pop song. The father asks the daughter to be quiet lest they disturb anyone. It’s a dark night without streetlights and she mentions he makes her be careful at home, even though they don’t have neighbors or see people. It’s a small bit of dialogue, but it feels important. Are they hiding? If so, what are they hiding from?

The vehicle jumps and crunches against something, the whine of a dog is heard. They stop and the daughter starts crying. The man speaks almost as if pleading, it was just an accident.

The vehicle is damaged and sputters and stops. With luck they are near some sort of mechanic’s shop and a man agrees to help the family. Another is inside, distracted and on the phone. Something changes when he hears the voice of the husband (Eghbal) speaking and asking a question. He (Vahid) conceals his voice and face and responds. Our point of view shifts, the family drives away, and we stay with Vahid who follows close behind.

As the perspective shifts one becomes cognizant of the filmmaking and storytelling. Why make a change now? What importance does it have? These are the types of questions that can only be answered or revealed at the end of a film, yet they are worth making note of while on the journey. It’s one of the reasons why films of quality are worth a second viewing or review. It’s one of the many things I enjoy about the art of filmmaking. Choice, defined by what we hear or what we see, combined with the written dialogue, is what makes film special and worth considering.

Here, those choices and decisions are made by Jafar Panahi, a filmmaker I knew by name, but had never spent any time with. Instead my only experience with Iranian filmmaking has been through Asghar Farhadi and Abbas Kiarostami. Not that I’m versed in either’s full filmography. What’s interesting about Panahi is that in many ways he’s known, and especially by me, for his political life.

Jafar Panahi has been in and out of Iranian prison due to the political nature of his cinema. In 2010 he was given a 6 year sentence and banned from making films for 20 years. A ban famously flouted in This is Not a Film as he continued his craft amidst appealing and fighting legal battles with the Iranian government. Even now he is under threat. It Was Just an Accident was secretly filmed in Iran. In a strange act of courage, Panahi has returned to his home country. An active warrant for arrest hangs above his head. With the current chaos of war, his fate remains unknown.

It can be enlightening to understand the background of a filmmaker when approaching their work. I don’t always feel it is important, but when the film is political or socially bent, the background provides a platform for how to approach it. Though, It Was Just An Accident stands as such a powerful act of storytelling that it can eschew the scaffolding of context.

It’s an age-old debate and discussion - the art and the artist. Can we, and should we, separate them? Or, are they inextricably linked? I don’t have an answer to the question, and with Panahi it’s an easier discussion. He’s not a monster, guilty of terrible acts of hate or oppression. He is the oppressed and hated. He is the artist fighting for freedom of expression and uses his art to highlight real acts of savagery and injustice. I think the art should be able to stand on its own without the artist. It’s only then, when it has transcended, and is worth consideration, debate, and spilled ink - should we pause to interrogate further.

Back in the world of the film, in Vahid’s point of view, we see him inexplicably jumping Eghbal on the street and wrestling him into the back of his van. He drives out into the barren wastes of the desert - presumably outside of Tehran. Here he digs a grave and casts Eghbal into it and begins the act of burying him alive. He screams at him and we learn that Vahid was once a captive and he remembers Eghbal, under a different name, as his questioner, his torturer, an agent of evil. Yet… Vahid has doubt. He’s not quite sure, and he cannot kill without knowing. And so Eghbal is wrapped back into the trunk in the back of the van. Vahid has doubt, but he has not given up on justice.

Vahid reaches out to old contacts, to those who were similarly tortured and manipulated and ruined as individuals. He finds himself a band of the similarly tortured. A photographer rebuilding her life (Shiva), a couple on the verge of their wedding day - the wife disturbed and forever altered by what happened to her, and finally a loose cannon hell bent on vengeance and destruction, lacking scruples and ready to act (Hamid). The grouping of these characters feels timeless, as if I’ve seen it before, yet cannot locate from where. It’s almost reminiscent of the odd group bumbling through the forest together in the eternal The Seventh Seal.

The emotional intensity conveyed by this group of actors is captivating. It is the anchor that pulls us deeper into the immersive experience of the film. There is verisimilitude to the words spoken and the choices made. They don’t simply serve the plot, but modulate in the sometimes confounding ways that real humanity operates.

The group examines their drugged captive. They feel his peg leg and remember the squeak it used to make as he approached. They remember his boasts of bravery from war. They recount how he made them feel the scars, how he humiliated them and frightened them and hurt them.

Doubt assails them and it is the shadow cast over all proceedings. It is Vahid’s doubt that initially stops the shovel and it is the sliver of doubt that keeps the group from casting final judgment. As in the suffocating jury chamber of 12 Angry Men, the sentence is deferred, decided, and questioned all over again. You can feel the disorientation begin to settle heavily on their shoulders. It echoes the way they are forced to live within an oppressive dictatorship where rights and freedoms are not a given and can be snatched away at any moment.

It is the very reason they have banded together under great risk - to claw back what little stability they can through a self-administered justice. Yet they find themselves in a circular trap beset by the very disorientation, confusion and fear that is imposed upon their souls by the totalitarian regime that remains nameless throughout the duration of the film. It is as if there is no escape from these forces, despite their continued insistence that they cannot operate in the same evil and destructive manner as those in power.

It is only the purity of humanity that saves this merry band from spiraling further into destruction.

The purity of humanity comes from the weeping tears of Eghbal’s daughter calling her missing father’s cellphone and pleading for help… her mother has fainted. Vahid cannot ignore this call, he cannot say no. And so, they pick up the girl and her mother and bring them to the hospital. They stay and take care of the child long enough to learn their captive has a son.

Confronted by the birth of new life and the purity and innocence of a child, the pulsating hate driving the group towards vengeance begins to fade. Hamid and the betrothed leave. Vahid has vowed to finish what he started and Shiva follows him.

In the hills above the city they tie him to a tree and interrogate him further. Eghbal eventually breaks and confesses, but not in the way they expect. He confesses as a cog in the machine. As a man under pressure from his superiors. He confesses to following orders and doing his job.

Emotionally broken and exhausted they leave him there. They don’t have hate strong enough to kill. Though they extracted a confession, there is still doubt. Or, having seen his child and wife they cannot bring themselves to go any further. And so they leave and remain intact human beings, having not given themselves over to the latent darkness that dwells in the hearts of us all.

The film ends the next morning. Vahid turns away from us… but stops moving. He is still and hears a repetitive squeaking approach. He stands unmoving and the camera holds and holds and all we can think of and feel is the squeak and squeak, one after another, unbroken and continuous. Then without turning, it fades to black.

It was an astounding and perfect close. In the core of my being I wanted the camera to turn and reveal the face of the approaching figure. Yet I knew that by not giving us what we wanted the film entered a pantheon of greatness. Was Eghbal the sadistic torturer or wasn't he? It is with this question that It Was Just an Accident enters dialogue with other unknowns in film history. Was Deckard a Replicant, was Inception all a dream?

We know from the beginning that Eghbal and his family are somewhat conservative, his wife dresses in the traditional hijab. Yet his daughter dances to pop music. They appear secretive and concerned with alerting their presence to others, to making themselves known. What does that mean?

Watching the family in the beginning of the film makes me want to think it wasn't him. Yet, perhaps that is the point and the reason for the shifting perspective. Like in The Zone of Interest it becomes more challenging to hate and cast judgement on monsters when we see their lives and the lives of their families - realizing somehow we are still human.

I don’t know the face associated with the squeaking sound approaching Vahid. And that is what makes It Was Just an Accident so brilliant. The face doesn’t matter. The regime has no face. Hate has no face. Oppression hides behind the masks of many. The evil forces that darken our hearts and cause us to hurt each other in unfathomable ways has no face.

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Currently, you can stream this film on Hulu.

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Amid the political turmoil and societal upheaval at the dawn of the 20th century, The Burning of the World tells of one man’s descent into the hell of World War I and his uneasy return to the world he no longer recognized.

The memoir is striking due to the novelistic way it is written. Dialogue is included and we read such passages as “Shh!” whispered Sereghy or Kriegl blushed, hunching his shoulders and putting a finger across his lips. The scenes are rendered picturesque; The sun is low in the sky. Ahead of us, light is thickening at the edge of the forest, turning grey. These flourishes elevate beyond purely the historical into something quite literary and alive. The reader is thrust forward, as if seated next to Béla himself, gently swaying and clattering across the railways of central Europe.

It’s astounding that he could have written in this way given the scholarly assumption that he produced most of this work during his banishment from public and professional life during the communist occupation of the 1950s. Was he a man with the rare blessing of a memory such as this? As with all memoir, the verisimilitude of specific strands of dialogue or the exact timeline of events is assumed to be blurry and hazy, as in autofiction. I have no interest in such academic and historical rigor, though. What truly matters, and what is powerful, is the ability to convey emotion, scene, and place, thus transporting us into memory. Of this, there is no deficiency.

It was a superlative translating and editing process that pulled forth such a work. Peter Zombory-Moldován, his grandson, inherited the forgotten manuscript and through what I can only assume to describe as an act of pure love, ushered it towards publication. One can only wonder how many more words and stories have been lost to the slow decay of time. How many worlds once vibrant and alive have ceased to exist - evaporating into the void.

In this case, the degradation is stayed, highlighting the importance of the simple act of the written word. The power of the diarist and journalist. The power of the artist and the observant. The power of books and story and the shared human experience. I believe this down to the depths of my very being.

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We meet Béla on holiday and away from Hungary as tidings of war are breaking across Europe. It was a war that felt both inevitable and impossible to him.

This war seems to me to be like first shudder of cold down a man’s spine.

War in the Austro-Hungary Empire hadn’t been seen in 70 years and seemed truly impossible. He didn’t want to fight, and suspected his Serbian enemies of the same. He was of a class sheltered from struggle and above the seething discontent of this age of isms. Enmeshed in the sophisticated, and intellectual culture of urban Budapest, he was bereft of a reason for war. All the same, he became a reluctant pawn in a battle of nation states. It is illuminating to observe how fragile are the threads that hold our lives together.

Swiftly traveling by train, he left the seaside resort of a world quickly vanishing and returned to Budapest for a few tenuous days. From here, he stayed in no place too long. Garrisoned and outfitted as a ranking officer, he and his men began a grim march toward the eastern front of the oncoming apocalyptic conflict.

They reached the very front of the conflict and artillery rained hellfire down upon them. Life became cheap. Death became normal. It is the hell of war. Béla was left for dead amidst the carnage and wreckage of the Hungarian army. He is injured from shellfire and can barely stand.

Saved by the faithful Jóska, they flee the front and the oncoming Russians. Heaped onto the back of a cart with other wounded and dying he bounced along rutted rural tracks. They were of the last band of limping and gasping wounded, chasing rumors of escape in Lubaczow or Basznia. At this point the Hungarian army is in full rout. They must continue on and reach the last crowded train before the oncoming Russian army.

It’s easy to imagine the horror felt by a defeated and fleeing army. Stumbling, stopping, or slowing meant certain capture and probable death. The last train rises above as a symbol of salvation and hope. Can you make it? Can he make it?

Béla and Jóska, his ever faithful squire, reached the congested train station. Jóska dragged him into a compartment and left in search of provisions. Eventually Béla was deemed unfit for further combat and continued to flee - back to the doorstep of his parents’ home exhausted, injured, caked in blood, and alive. So begins his convalescence. At the hospital he is granted three months leave and while his body quickly heals, the rest of him will take longer.

I didn’t want to hear anything about victory or defeat. Let me live for three months. Let me paint.

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It is upon his return to a world only tangentially affected by the hellish destruction exploding across Europe that the memoir’s truest power shows through. Béla expresses an existential undoing within his soul. It’s an honest account and one that stretches across time and still speaks to us today.

Things could not just go on from where they had left off. I had been an atom in the great throng of Budapest; now, that tie was starting to loosen.

I’m reminded of another Hungarian, the great Magda Szabó, confronting how war and tragedy can forever alter the course of a life in the poignant novel Katalin Street. There, we can see how life could have happened, how it should have happened for the characters. Interrupted by war and death and the inconceivable idea of taking life we see how life actually occurred. It is greyed and darkened and saddened and all that remains is a nostalgia for the former days. What might have been if the evil inside of humankind wasn’t allowed to burst forth and destroy?

In a more intimate way we walk the old roads of nostalgia with Béla. Lost and aimless he wanders the old well-worn ruts of his life seeking meaning, hope, and stability. He isn’t fit for the studio and teaching and sitting down to paint seems impossible at this juncture. He is restless and unsure.

This is the point in the memoir that speaks directly to my own personal feeling of disquietude. To my own ennui, though born of different symptoms. He sneaks into the old coffee house, the old center of culture and cannot stay. It is over for him, it is finished. He must continue to move on, to seek a connection, a home, a place to lay his weary head and rest. War and death and destruction have led to an agitation that he cannot find the answer to.

My own life has not been disrupted by such powerful forces that shook the world of Béla. Yet, the isolation, the screaming silence of modern life has struck its own discord in my life. And the longing, the desiring for what once was, for art, life, freedom, and un-burdened brotherhood of humanity flows within me just as it did in Béla - though we are separated by the onslaught of one hundred years of history.

Instead of the war-torn streets of Budapest, I drive the isolated streets and highways of America - disconnected from place and people. I yearn for the idea of what Béla lost. The café, the public space of dialogue and community. A life of the intellect expressed through painting or writing or speaking. In many ways it was walking the streets of Budapest with Béla, filled with a nostalgia of what I will never have, that birthed the crazy idea of The Cultural Review.

Eventually Budapest was not enough and Béla drove deeper into his past searching for peace in his soul. He visited his uncles but eventually ended up in Lovrana, on the shores of the Adriatic Sea, at the door of the dairy farmer Mauser.

There he walked along the coast and was joined by a friend and spoke of art and war and life and politics and all the things that mattered. It’s a way we all should speak - of the things that matter, of the soul and fate and ideas and art and everything in this vast cosmos that brings us into communion with one another. It was there on the shores of Lovrana that I feel he finally found his peace and came to terms with the changing of everything, with the burning of the world he once knew.

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How to put into words the rupture that had taken place within me? I knew that, until I found the point at which I could reconnect, I would have no peace.

Béla returned from war searching for what never could be found again… searching for a life and society that had expired. In many ways, I am still.

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This memoir is beautifully published by the ever reliable New York Review of Books.

The Cultural Review was born from the desire to seriously engage with literature, film, art, and ideas; and to share the experience with similarly passionate people.

Having longed for the atmosphere and spirit of pre-WWI Vienna coffee houses or that of a 1920s Parisian café I’ve realized it cannot be found and therefore must be created. My hope is that The Cultural Review can be that home.

“If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place”.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

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