Astrogator's Logs

For aeons it took us sailing, we never sank,
a thousand times we changed captains.

We never paid account to cataclysms,
we went full ahead, through everything.

And on our mast as eternal lookout
we have the Great Chief, the Sun.

From “The Crazy Ship” by Odysséas Elytis

Image: Sunrise and Orion over the temple of Kukulkan; Chichén Itzá, Yucatán, Mexico (from the NASA APOD; credit and copyright: Stéphane Guisard and UNAM/INAH)

Long ago,
I became astrogator in the arcships.

– the beginning of Spacetime Geodesics

Two publications appeared almost simultaneously: Bull Spec issue 7, which contains my poem Night Patrol; and The Moment of Change, a reprint anthology of speculative feminist poetry edited by Rose Lemberg and published by Aqueduct Press, which contains Spacetime Geodesics and Night Patrol. The cover (shown) is Sister, Brother by Terri Windling.

The anthology contains seventy poems. Some names you may recognize: Ursula Le Guin, Catherynne Valente, Delia Sherman, Amal El-Mohtar, Sonya Taaffe, Jo Walton, Nisi Shawl, J. C. Runolfson, Vandana Singh, Calvin Johnson, Shweta Narayan, Mary Alexander Agner, Theodora Goss, Yoon Ha Lee, Greer Gilman, Claire Cooney, JoSelle Vanderhooft.

In other words, a sky dragon’s hoard.

Last fall I mentioned that my two Bull Spec poems (Spacetime Geodesics and Night Patrol) and one of my dear friend and blog contributor Calvin Johnson (Towards a Feminist Algebra, in Stone Telling) will appear in The Moment of Change, a reprint anthology of speculative feminist poetry, edited by Rose Lemberg and published by Aqueduct Press. The collection will be released in May at Wiscon, with a cover by Terri Windling (shown).

I find it strange that I got four poems published in rapid succession: I consider myself essentially a prose writer.

Dhómna: Lady, Mistress (Latin original: domina – a title given to noblewomen who held a barony in their own right.)

Tradition lies heavy on my people, yet it makes us who we are – for good and ill. One of its greatest champions just left us: Dhómna Samíou, a tireless collector and preserver of folksongs who began to sing them herself in her forties, in a distinctive voice that thrummed like the finest Damascus steel.

Samíou’s parents were working-class refugees from Asia Minor; her father had been a prisoner of war in Turkey after the disastrous war in 1922. Her childhood was spent in abject poverty, in a shack without water or electricity, but also in the strong social net of mutual support that sprang up in such circumstances. Her father and sister died during the German occupation. She might have starved or been killed herself – the shacks were in a neighborhood of Athens famous for its urban resistance, which the Germans punished accordingly. She escaped the roundups because she had started working at twelve, first as a seamstress in a small tailoring establishment, then as a live-in maid in a middle-class home.

The family she worked for heard her sing constantly while she worked, so they brought her to Símon Karás, a famous music teacher and pioneering collector of traditional music. He accepted Samíou into his choir on the spot, stipulating that she should finish high school (a rare feat in that context, particularly for girls). Work in the mornings, music lessons in the afternoons, school in the evenings: that was Samíou’s life for several years. In 1954 she started working in broadcasting under her teacher. National radio (all radio was national then in Hellás) started airing traditional music, as well as making and selling records of it.

As Hellás tried to show it belonged to the First World, traditional music tottered under the onslaught of Western popular music. Samíou, like Karás, could not imagine her people’s culture without it. During her vacations she started going around the country, on her own dime, to identify and record the fast-disappearing authentic versions of folksongs. When she started becoming too independent, Karás slowly removed her from his orbit: despite his initial generosity and crucial formative role in her life, he would not brook a competitor or even a successor – especially a woman.

When the junta came, Samíou was given tenure at her job but couldn’t stomach the repression. She resigned at 43 with no safety net. At that crucial moment, Dionyssis Savvópoulos – the iconoclastic, obscenely talented enfant terrible of Hellenic music – invited her to appear in his politically and artistically daring events. That launched her career as a singer of the songs she had so lovingly found and fought to save. After the junta fell, national television commissioned Samíou to do Musical Travel, a documentary series about traditional music that is considered a classic, the foundation for all subsequent such works. Below is a part celebrating Épiros, my mother’s part of the world.

Samíou worked with all the virtuoso singers and players (usually informally taught), whether famous or obscure, who carried the songs that run in our blood. She traveled all over the world to give these songs and players an audience – not only to the diaspora communities, who drank them like water in the desert, but to non-Hellenes as well, who realized for the first time that Hellenic folk music was not just the bouzouki they heard in tourist traps. She received a huge number of honors and prestigious commissions. Yet she never behaved like a celebrity, never lost her deep connections to things that mattered or her common touch.

Samíou continued singing, teaching, recording and archiving tirelessly till her death. Others shared her love of traditional music and the effort to keep it a living, breathing concern but her knowledge, thoroughness and exactitude were unparalleled. She was a national treasure, a towering presence.

May the earth lie lightly upon you, Dhómna Samíou, Mistress of Songs.

Videos: two famous folksongs – First, Háidho from Épiros; singer/tambourine, Mánthos Stavrópoulos; clarinet, Konstantínos Neofótistos; violin, Konstantínos Saadedín; lutes, Stávros Saadedín & Napoléon Tzihás. Second, Samíou sings Tzivaéri mou (My Treasure) from the Dodecanese.

These stones that sink into the years, how far will they drag me?
The sea, the sea, who will manage to drain it dry?
I see the hands beckon each dawn to the vulture and the hawk
bound as I am to the rock that pain has made mine,
I see the trees breathe the black serenity of the dead
and then the smiles, frozen in place, of the statues.

– Ghiórghos Seféris, Mythistórema, Part 20

Like many other cultures, mine has funerary customs that are thinly disguised pagan rites.  One of them is the mnemósyno: forty days after someone’s death, friends and family get together to reminisce.  It has been that long since the death of filmmaker Theódhoros Angelópoulos, whose work I found flawed yet deeply compelling.  So this is my mnemósyno for him.

Angelópoulos, killed at 76 in a completely preventable accident while filming the final installment of his latest trilogy, was a director’s director.  If you don’t know his name, don’t rush to download his films from Torrent or Hulu.  He requires enormous patience and dedication: his films are long (several reach four hours) and he was famous/notorious for unbroken takes that last more than ten minutes and include unapologetic dead time.  He was not the only Hellenic director to become internationally famous (Koúndhouros, Kakoyánnis and Ghavrás are familiar names, to non-Americans at least) but he was the one who stayed steadily in the limelight, piling up awards like kilims.

Fellow directors and film critics likened Angelópoulos to Antonioni and Kurosawa, but his true siblings are Tarkovsky and Malick.  The three share many attributes: they are masters of oneiric images drenched with nostalgia for lost Edens.  Their characters are semi-abstract symbols, their dialogues vestigial: the poetry resides in their stunning images, often coupled with equally haunting music.  All three have a powerful affinity for water, and they often use specific colors as emotional or mythical signifiers (for example, the rare flashes of red in Angelópoulos’ The Weeping Meadow; in one instance the color appears on an unraveling scarf that serves as Ariáthne’s thread between two long-persecuted illicit lovers at the moment they part for the final time).  Their best films (Malick’s New World, Angelópoulos’ Odysseus’ Gaze) are hypnotic, otherworldly.  When their inspiration flickers, their works become ponderous, pretentious to the point of parody – and they have not one atom of humor between them.

Angelópoulos had an additional burden that nevertheless enriched his art: the heavy pieces of beautiful but broken statuary that are the Hellenic legacy.  Unlike Malick and Tarkovsky, he’s intensely political and his films are palimpsests of myth and history.  Scenes often start in one epoch to dissolve into another – and they are inhabited by characters who are simultaneously everyday people and ancestral archetypes that cast long shadows.  His films can be appreciated entirely as aesthetic achievements but for those who know Hellás they are full of echoes and ghosts.  His lost Edens are not the innocence of childhood nor prelapsarian wilderness; they’re the lost homes and historic opportunities of his people.  His wanderers do not seek to find themselves; they seek once-safe harbors now guarded by fog and barbed wire.

As one example, The Travelling Players at first glance is a slice of life: it depicts the precarious, picaresque existence of a group of wandering actors who go through the provinces in the forties and fifties, playing a pastoral potboiler.  However, the film has at least two more layers: the actors, who are an extended family, reenact the tragedy of the Atreides.  They also bear witness to the Nazi occupation, the resistance to it, and the devastating civil war that followed it.  As another example, Odysseus’ Gaze is the story of a Hellene emigré filmmaker’s quest to discover a lost reel by the Manakis brothers, photographers who pioneered film art in the Balkans and recorded everyday life across ethnicities.  It is also an elliptic, allusive odyssey through the region’s past (a time of deep-rooted diaspora communities, extinguished since by resurgent nationalisms) as well as its fragmented present, including the brutal war that dissolved Yugoslavia.

Angelópoulos was sure of himself to the point of obsession and self-indulgent hubris but this certainty also gave him the focus and bravery of those who have an overarching vision.  Some of his films were made during the time of the military junta.  He gave the censors false scripts and shot in remote locations, counting on his crew and the locals not to betray him.  He used well-known international actors in his later films (Marcelo Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, Bruno Ganz, Michel Piccoli, Harvey Keitel, Maia Morgenstern, Irène Jacob, Willem Defoe) but kept them under iron control.  They were never allowed star flourishes, and he was demanding to the point of tyranny on the set.  Like all self-absorbed geniuses, he attracted talented, loyal partners who became near-lifetime collaborators: his cinematographer, Ghiórghos Arvanítis – the Nykvist to his Bergman; his music director, Eléni Karaíndhrou, her fey, melancholy pieces as distinctive as his film techniques.

I’ve seen most of Angelópoulos’ films.  I liked some far more than others, but each contained moments that transported me, that made the hairs rise on my arms: the red-sailed boats in The Hunters, floating by like swans to the heart-stopping strains of Elytis’/Theodhorákis’ Blood of Love; the mounted brigand rising into view at the Soúnion temple in Meghaléxandhros, wreathed in the molten gold of sunrise and the arabesques of Chrysanthos’ voice; the mother in The Weeping Meadow, as young as Michelangelo’s Pietá Mary or Sofoklés’ Antighóne, talking to her two dead sons who fought on opposite sides in the civil war; the brief but searing soliloquy of Thanássis Véngos, the Hellenic Chaplin, in Odysseus’ Gaze.  Angelópoulos eschewed the locales most people associate visually with Hellás.  He preferred the beautiful, forbidding north, snow, mist, bare trees, black waters, slate roofs glistening with rain.  That is my mother’s part of the world, very different from my father’s sunny Aegean but just as much what makes us – me – who we are as a people.

The films of Angelópoulos were an umbilical that nourished me, a spirit home.  The world is a poorer place without his idiosyncratic art, despite the stone-heavy hand he put on his creations.

Their souls became one with the oars and the oarlocks
with the solemn face of the prow
with the rudder’s wake
with the water that shattered their image.
The companions died one by one,
with lowered eyes.  Their oars
mark the place where they sleep on the shore.

No one remembers them.  Justice.

– Ghiórghos Seféris, Mythistórema, Part 5

Images: Theódhoros Angelópoulos; Harvey Keitel in Odysseus’ Gaze; “Get up, get up, my sweet boy…” — Eléni (Alexándhra Aidhíni) in The Weeping Meadow.

Life will pull you under if you let it and grind you to fine dust. I decided to steal a moment away from the usual cares while the mild weather lasted. Yesterday, Mr. Snacho and I went walking through The Great Meadows marsh in Concord at sunset – which was also moonrise, as the moon was one day before full. The sky and the water held rainbow colors; the land was infinite shades of brown and gray, deep in hibernation.

We’ve gone to that marsh in all seasons and it has never ceased to be wondrous, despite its obvious domestication. Once we chanced upon an enormous ebony and golden fuzzy caterpillar hurrying on its way to more food that would let it become a moth. We’ve seen all kinds of birds, from chickadees to hawks, as well as the occasional terrapin. I keep hoping that one day we’ll catch a glimpse of the elusive river otters, or the beavers from the lodge that peeks through the reeds.

This time, in the glass-calm water I detected a wake of two nostrils that eventually resolved into a muskrat busily fluffing its pelt. In the middle distance we spied three swans alongside the duck and goose flotillas. And we saw something incredibly beautiful across the sky, the contrast heightened by the bare branches. It coincidentally appeared in NASA’s picture of the day, so I discovered its lay name: the Belt of Venus.

Normally, the earth’s shadow below the reflected reddened sunlight is darker than the sky above. But yesterday, for some reason the shadow was a lovely shade of teal. While it lasted, it felt like we walked inside a shimmering opal pendant.

Whenever I see such beauty, I float on it and dream: what marvels like this will we see if we ever walk under strange skies?

My moon, faraway and alone,
sleepless and tireless, you hung on the balcony.
Come, my shipmistress, come to my window.

– from an old popular Hellenic song

Photos of Great Meadows: Peter Cassidy

My poem Mirror Twin just appeared in Stone Telling 6. It is a twin in more ways than one: it is the mate/prequel to Spacetime Geodesics, which appeared earlier this year in Bull Spec 6.

Eleni Tsami generously gave me permission to use a black-and-white version of her haunting Spaceborn (to the right — click on the image to see a larger version) as the accompanying art, and the editors of Stone Telling granted my wish. As is customary in that venue, there is also a recording of me reciting the poem. The opening lines:

Starship navigators live
by renunciation and arrogance.

Happy Solstice!

My brief, stark story, Though the Moon Be Still as Bright, is the lead in the latest issue of Cabinet des Fées, Erzebet Yellowboy’s labor of skill and love. Better yet, immediately following it is Christine Lucas’ On Marble Threshing Floors, a story of the Byzantine Amazon Maximó whom I mentioned in my essay about the Akritiká folksongs in the first issue of Stone Telling.

Erzebet discusses these connections in her introductory editorial to the issue. And wonderfully perceptive reviews have appeared for my essays and poetry in Stone Telling.

From Jessica Wick, co-editor of Goblin Fruit, in her review of Stone Telling 1:

“By far and away my favourite nonfiction piece was “A (Mail)coat of Many Colors: The Songs of the Byzantine Border Guards.” I can’t even pretend detachment. It was just cool. Athena Andreadis places the area’s folk-songs into regional context, history context, into context (again!) against similar Western traditions, and she ties the whole thing into the transformative (and preservative) nature of borderlands. My imagination — and my interest — are both certainly captive, and just as I reached the end of the article and was thinking, Man, I’d really like to hear some of this sung aloud, what should the article provide but some audio of Nikos Ksilouris singing a Cretan rendition of the Death of Diyenis. And, man, let me say again: Cool.“

From SF/F critic Sam “Eithin” in his review of Stone Telling 2:

“This poem calls up strong echoes of classical Greek hero tales, with its bitter, proud, bronze-voiced evocations of flame, ruin, and exile, but the issue’s focus on women and the ties between women makes it a particularly interesting read. It’s an away poem, looking back but resolutely orienting itself forward; remembering, but never regretting a choice.”

Even though I’m a feral loner, I’m not immune to the motivating power of recognition. Which brings me to my last piece of news: Two poems of mine were accepted in Bull Spec. They will appear in their summer and fall issue. Perhaps Rose Lemberg, the editor of Stone Telling, was right when she told me, “The wilderness is populated by nomads who happen to greatly enjoy your clanging cymbal.” Although I must put away my shaman’s drum for a while — grant deadlines are looming.

Images: 1st, Before the Desolation, by Heather D. Oliver — a portrayal that echoes in Though the Moon…. 2nd, small wooden ship, the Cyclades, Hellas.

In line with end-of-the-world prophecies linked to Maya calendars, there’s sudden noise on the Internet that Betelgeuse (the bright red star that marks Orion’s left shoulder) will become a supernova in 2012. The segue is that this will first give us Tattooine-like sunsets, then singe earth and all upon it.

Betelgeuse is a gas-shrouded red supergiant of about 20 solar masses whose circumference would extend to Jupiter and whose hydrogen fuel has run out. This does mean that its days are numbered and its end will be spectacular: when it explodes, it will be visible in broad daylight and will cast shadows as strong as those of the full moon. However, it’s easy to find out that Betelgeuse is about 600 light years away. So it’s not close enough to harm us (the radius for harm is 25 ly or less).  Furthermore, if the explosion becomes visible to us in 2012, the event actually happened sometime around 1400 CE. A more in-depth search also reveals that the star’s axis does not point in the direction of Earth, precluding a potentially lethal directed gamma ray burst.

Betelgeuse is a runaway: it started life as a hot blue star in the prolific stellar nursery around Orion’s belt. This region, which includes the famous nebula that forms the middle “star” of Orion’s sword, is still giving birth to new stars. So after Betelgeuse has dwindled to a neutron cinder, it may have a successor. But its death will change the shape of perhaps the best-known constellation – a reminder that in our universe everything is born and will die.

Adrienne Rich wrote her elegiac poem Orion before many details about Betelgeuse became known. Yet she knew more and said it far better than the apocalypse pornographers of the Internets:

Far back when I went zig-zagging
through tamarack pastures
you were my genius, you
my cast-iron Viking, my helmed
lion-heart king in prison.
Years later now you’re young

my fierce half-brother, staring
down from that simplified west
your breast open, your belt dragged down
by an oldfashioned thing, a sword
the last bravado you won’t give over
though it weighs you down as you stride

and the stars in it are dim
and maybe have stopped burning.
But you burn, and I know it;
as I throw back my head to take you in
an old transfusion happens again:
divine astronomy is nothing to it.
//
Pity is not your forte.
Calmly you ache up there
pinned aloft in your crow’s nest,
my speechless pirate!
You take it all for granted
and when I look you back

it’s with a starlike eye
shooting its cold and egotistical spear
where it can do least damage.
Breathe deep! No hurt, no pardon
out here in the cold with you
you with your back to the wall.

Images: Top, data-congruent rendering of Betelgeuse (ESO, L. Calçada); Bottom, Orion (Hubble ESA, Akira Fujii)

Stone Telling Issue 2 went live this morning. As I said in an earlier entry, this magazine is the brain- and heart-child of Rose Lemberg who wished to elicit and showcase poetry that crosses boundaries. I’m triply represented in the latest issue by a poem, an essay and participation to the contributor round-table.

The focus of issue 2 is the chains that sustain us even as they bind us.  My dear friend Francesca Forrest has a deeply affecting poem in it, The Old Clothes Golem, amid a dozen equally stunning others.

I originally wrote my poem, Mid-Journey, in Greek. It is about feral loners like me who walk between worlds. The Greek text is there alongside my English translation, and there is also an mp3 file of me reciting it in the original.

My essay is about Sapfó, the Tenth Muse, the Blackbird of Lésvos. She has been different things to different people, so I thought I’d write about who she really was — and why she deserves her immortality.

Stone Telling magazine went live this morning. As I said in an earlier entry, it is the brain- and heart-child of Rose Lemberg who wished to elicit and showcase poetry that crosses boundaries. It contains an introduction by Rose, fourteen poems, three non-fiction articles and a round-table contributor interview.

Among the poems is my dear friend Calvin Johnson’s eloquent and thought-provoking Towards a Feminist Algebra. Among the articles is A (Mail)coat of Many Colors, my discussion of the songs of the Akrítai, the Byzantine border guards — poetry of a time, place and language that is virtually unknown in the Anglophone world.

Yet Hellenes still sing these songs… and they still reverberate in the popular imagination in subtle but powerful ways. As the accompanying image shows, Antoine Fuqua’s Sarmatian border guards in Roman England hearken back to the Akrítai of Byzantine Anatolia. Too, real amazons lived and fought in the lands of the Akrítai — a liminal zone where all kinds of boundaries were crossed and history survived as tales and songs.

The poems in Stone Telling open wondrous windows to the world. And if that is not the best purpose of poetry, what is?

Image: Left, the Byzantine warrior saint Merkourios, a Scythian by birth (fresco by Manuíl Pansélinos, Mt. Athos, 1360 AD); right, Ioan Gruffudd as a Sarmatian border guard in Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur.

On September 15, editor/writer Rose Lemberg is launching Stone Telling, an online magazine of speculative poetry.  The inaugural issue will contain poems by Ursula Le Guin and Calvin Johnson.  It will also contain an essay by me about songs of the Akrítai — the Byzantine border guards.  An Akritikón sung by the famous Cretan singer and lyre player Nikos Ksilouris will accompany the essay.

Image: the cover for issue 1 of Stone Telling; Friendship (1906) by Mikalojus Konstantinas Chiurlionis

After my second article about Cameron’s Avatar, a young British media critic who occasionally visited my blog accused me of snobbery.  He stated that my points about entertainment like Avatar went past aesthetics and “devolved into” political and moral pronouncements about people who like what he considers lowbrow art (he assumes I share his definition of lowbrow, of which more anon).  He further opined that classes of artful brows are just peer pressure.  Hence Cameron is as good as Ozu unless you “drip with disdain” for the hoi polloi.

In the article that started this discussion I primarily discussed biological drives.  I posited that certain types of entertainment arouse the fight-or-flight response and repeated immersion in them can lead to PTSD pathology, including mob-like behavior.  The argument that art is ever devoid of politics and (at least implicit) moral judgments is either naïve or disingenuous and my critic doesn’t strike me as the former. I suspect that his cultural background, awash in class distinctions and reverberations of colonialism, may partly explain his viewpoint.  Even more fundamentally, however, I think his definition of lowbrow art differs so much from mine that we are really discussing orthogonal concepts.

So I’m taking this opportunity to articulate my art classification scheme.  To give you the punchline first, my definitions have to do with the artist’s attitude towards her/his medium and audience and with the complexity and layering of the artwork’s content, rather than its accessibility.  In my book, lazy shallow art is low, whether it’s in barns or galleries.  What makes Avatar low art is not its popularity, but its conceptual crudity and its contempt for its sources and its viewers’ intelligence.

A common if usually implicit assumption is that quality and popularity are mutually exclusive.  Hence, “lowbrow” is often considered synonymous with mass appeal: bestsellers, platinum albums, blockbuster films.  Yet you can have wildly popular art that is light years away from least common denominations.  Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose comes immediately to mind; so do Alvin Ailey Dance Theater and flamenco; Peter Gabriel and Dire Straits (including their groundbreaking MTV videos); RPG games like Gabriel Knight, Myst and Syberia; and shows about nature or archaeological findings (as accessible “reality TV” as you can get) – or, for that matter, the cordon bleu-quality food you can buy cheaply in corner stores of any French or Italian provincial town.

My admittedly idiosyncratic definition comes from a cultural upbringing that makes no rigid high/low distinctions.  Hellenes still read Homer and watch Eurypides and Aristophanes for entertainment.  To use a parallel from my critic’s culture, Shakespeare and Dickens were not highbrow in their eras.  People of all classes watched Elizabethan plays in open-air theaters and Dickens’ serialized novels were the Victorian equivalents of soap operas.  Too, a lot of poetry, including that of Nobel-prize winners, has been set to compulsively singable music by Hellene popular composers – and the songs are sung across Hellas independently of social stratum.

Along similar (lack of) demarcations, there are no bestsellers or blockbusters in Hellas.  Books are printed in small runs and are not warehoused or pulped.  As a result, editors take chances on unknown authors but spend nothing on PR, and people aren’t trained to restrict their reading to genres.  Nor are films split between hothouse esoterics distributed solely to hoity-toity boutique venues versus “crowd-pleasers” shown in every mall (besides, Hellas doesn’t have malls – it has small shopping courtyards).  Finally, we live literally on top of several breathtaking, radically different past cultures, from Minoan to Byzantine. So our sensibilities tend to the syncretic.

Most cultures, if not terminally debased, have art woven integrally into the lives of their people. Folk art and craft are often extraordinarily sophisticated both in style and content: clothing, jewelry, utensils, instruments, furniture, dwellings, gardens, cooking, painting, dance, music can all be high art – yet they are part of daily life, not exhibited on museum walls or opulent stagings for the few.  This is important not only in itself, but also because such art was/is created disproportionately by women.  In such settings, artists/artisans are often political and moral forces to be reckoned with: builders and smiths, storytellers and bards.  In some nations they are honored as living monuments that preserve and transmit cultural knowledge.

A perfect example of my definition of high art is the Oscar-nominated The Secret of Kells.  It uses traditional 2-D techniques and is completely accessible – what my critic would call solidly bourgeois middlebrow.  Yet it engages and stimulates many levels of thought and emotion at once.  You can focus on enjoying individual aspects: the story teaches real history, since it’s based closely on what we know about the journey of the Kells manuscript from Iona; the conflict is not the usual tussle between monochromatic good and bad guys, but instead highlights the struggle between two versions of good (like Miyazaki’s Mononoke Hime – or Sophocles’ Antigone); the nuanced interactions explore the interplay between Paganism and Christianity, myth and history, imagination and discipline, nature and culture; the style incorporates both Celtic curvilinear forms (in the style of the Book of Kells as well as its Jugendstil descendants) and the tense, jagged shapes used in such graphic novels as The Crow or Sin City.

Put together, the film becomes Gesamtkunstwerk at the level of Wagner’s Nibelungen cycle or Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy: a total, totally absorbing work of art that delights and also exercises the senses, the cortical emotions, the intellect – and achieves this feat without loudly advertising its intent or, for that matter, its artsiness.  Unlike the incessant trumpetings about the groundbreaking technique or “socially relevant” content of Avatar, The Secret of Kells came and left quietly.  Then again, art of this caliber doesn’t need to shriek for recognition or classification.  Its quiet but sure voice is potent enough:

Images and links: kilim rug (Konya, late 19th century); kohiki tokuri sake flask and guinomi sake cup by Kondo Seiko (Niigata, contemporary); poster for Tomm Moore’s The Secret of Kells; Aisling sings magic into Pangur Bán (who has her own lovely story) in The Secret of Kells.

Note: If you visit the comments section, you will find that this review drew the attention of the Kells screenwriter Fabrice Ziolkowski and its US distributor Eric Beckman. Additionally, its principal director, Tomm Moore, linked to the HuffPo version of the review from his blog.

The articles prompted by Avatar:
Avatar: Jar Jar Binks Meets Pocahontas
Lab Rat Cinema: Monetizing the Reptile Brain

Related articles:
Being Part of Everyone’s Furniture: Appropriate Away
The Hyacinth among the Roses: The Minoan Civilization

by Athena Andreadis

Scoured by wind, she crouches,
all eyes, dark hollows, throat pulse.

He rises from the bed of shards,
skinned knees, flayed heart.

After such thirst, they’ll drink
from a mirage — or from a poisoned well.