In Neil Gaiman's Stardust, the interlude with Captain Alberic of the sky ship Perdita, a period the narrator describes as "one of the happiest" of the hero Tristan's life, lasts a mere eight pages of the 300 odd page novel.  In the film adaptation, the passage is expanded to provide copious space for Robert De Niro's remarkable performance as a cross-dressing sky pirate.  Instead of Alberic, he becomes Captain Shakespeare, and instead of a secret member of the fellowship, an organization that aids and propels Tristan toward his destiny, De Niro is a ruthless pirate who rules his crew with an iron hand and tosses his captives over the sky ship's gunrails to their dooms.  At least on the surface.

The conceit of the Shakespeare character is that what he appears to be on the outside is the opposite of what he truly is inside.  In private, he is a caring, effeminate transvestite.  The inner man is revealed in a memorable scene, perhaps the most memorable of the movie, in which De Niro prances and preens with a feather boa in front of a mirror, an aria playing in the background.

The scene is a looking glass homage to De Niro's performance as Travis Bickle, taut with muscles, pistols ejecting from his homemade arm holsters, repeatedly asking of his reflection, "You talkin' to me?"  Bookends of an amazing career, the violent inner man of Taxi Driver, hinted at before the film's conclusion only by a frightening inner monologue,  becomes the public face of Captain Shakespeare, while Travis Bickle's shy and gentle public face inverts and blooms in Shakespeare's lace and taffeta dance routine.

Both roles play on the popular notion that there is an inner man, in each of us, who hides beneath a mask that conforms to society's expectations.  But is there really?  Contemporary cognitive philosophy suggests that the inner man is simply an illusion and vestige left over from folk-psychological notions of the soul.  It's incorrigible persistence is due, among other things, to the fact that we assume our public faces are false, and that consequently there must be something behind it.  Continental philosophers like Michel Foucault similarly reject the notion of a deep truth beneath our masks, and recommend, in its place, a shallow depth psychology that simply reveals more masks beneath the masks we commonly wear. 

Pascal, the pre-eminent philosopher of the personal, suggested that "the heart has its reasons, that reason does not know,"  to which the modern world might reply that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.  That obscure object of desire, the human heart, constantly escapes our epistemic grasp because, perhaps, it does not exist.  Perhaps.

The heart is a mystery and it is of the nature of mysteries that to reveal them is to destroy them.  We hide mysteries within puzzles and labyrinths, and in dark places, in order to preserve their character as mysteries.  What would we do if we actually captured the Loch Ness Monster, or the Yeti, or Bigfoot in a cage?  They would become mere objects of understanding, at that point, and ruin the aspect that makes them interesting -- that the blurry photos may be fake, that the convoluted theories my be pipe-dreams.  It is the gap between theory and understanding that gives each of these mysteries their power to fascinate.  Even more prosaic mysteries, such as the Giant Squid (of which we have captured film and tentacles) and the true identity of Shakespeare, share this peculiar quality.  Obscurity and doubt quicken the blood.

In Eric Rohmer's Claire's Knee, Jerome (who shares an amazing resemblance to Ron Silver, the liberal actor with a regular role on The West Wing who in 2004 became the spokesman for a movement called Democrats for Bush), the womanizing protagonist, passes time flirting with one sister by discussing his desire for the other, Claire.  He explains that it is not sexual gratification that he desires from Claire, which, as a man of the world, he has discovered serves only to destroy the desire he feels.  Instead, he has arrived at a new formula, a new object of the heart, that provides him a mystery which will not be destroyed once it is fulfilled.  He substitutes the natural object of male sexual attraction with another target.  Jerome maneuvers and positions himself throughout the film in order to achieve his ultimate desire, to place a hand on Claire's knee.

In 2001, President Bush made a remarkable statement about looking into Russian president Vladimir Putin's "heart and soul" and deciding that they could work together.  The statement was remarkable not only in how wrong it turned out to be, but also in how peculiarly it was formulated.  He used the metaphor of the heart in a somewhat archaic manner, or perhaps a folk-psychological manner, that seemed inappropriate to its context.  Is this what high-level politics is about?  We expect interrelations between world leaders to be Machiavellian affairs of manipulation and strategic interests, and President Bush suddenly proposed that this was the wrong model; that instead it was actually about getting to know each other, and coming to see the inner persons behind the political masks.

In 2008, however, the metaphor of the heart appears again as voters and pundits alike attempt to peer into the souls of the presidential candidates and attempt to evaluate their inner natures.  The main stumbling block to Hillary Clinton's campaign, it appears, is that people do not know who she really is, and in not knowing her, aren't sure that they can trust her.  Mitt Romney is currently going through the same doubts about his character, and the bugaboo of political character, flip-flopping, is beginning to be associated with his political pronouncements.  Can we vote for these people when we do not know their hearts?

Hillary's heart has become her Achilles heel -- but it is not clear to me that this is a legitimate basis for electing a presidential candidate.  As Gabriel Byrne observes in Miller's Crossing, "Nobody knows anybody.  Not that well."  Which returns us to the problem of the obscure nature of the human heart.

In Jean Cocteau's Thomas L'Imposteur, the hero in the end becomes the character he pretends to be.  This theme is repeated in Roberto Rossellini's Il Generale della Rovere and Akira Kurasawa's Kagemusha, in both of which lowly individuals, a thief in the first instance and a beggar in the second, are forced to impersonate important leaders, and in the process become those leaders, acting more heroically than the people they are pretending to be.  The masks, in each of these cases, become the reality.

It is the rare person who admires Ronald Reagan the man rather than the role he performed as president.  It was his ability to step into the role written for him and play it to the hilt that eventually led to the collapse of the Soviet Union -- not the man that is now being revealed in his published diaries.  Even in Stardust, the film, Captain Shakespeare's crew admit that they always knew that he was a "puff."  But they did not care what he did in his private life.  It was his ability to inspire fear in his crew and accomplish great deeds that they admired -- it was the mask, not the man, that they saluted.

The first test of our presidential candidates has become, "Does she look presidential?" (or, as it is phrased among our elites, "Does he have the gravitas to be president?").  There seems to be recognition, at some level, that we are dealing with appearances rather than essences when it comes to our political candidates.  Why, then, do we absurdly continue to inquire about a candidate's heart, that least knowable and most treacherous of human faculties?  It is the persistent illusion that we can know the hearts of these vaulted beings, or that they even have hearts, which dogs and confounds the American political process.  We should, instead, look to other ways to gratify ourselves with regard to a candidate's worthiness to be president, and her potential to play her role adequately should she assume the mantle of the presidency. 

I have a want, an uncommon want, and once you hear it, you may find it hard not to desire it, also.  I seek neither Hillary's heart -- a fool's errand -- nor her virtue -- a mirage at best --, but a substitute for these which is both more real and more tangible.  I desire an opportunity to know something which few men have known, to possess a secret that few men possess.  I seek not the populist chimera's of the politically naive, nor access to the ports of influence peddled by the politically corrupt.  I want, instead, merely to brush the knee of destiny, and the thought, once planted, will not be dislodged from my imagination.  I want to touch Hillary's knee.

Over the past week my family and I have been playing with an early Christmas present, an XBOX game called Rock Band.  This game one-ups the other popular rock simulation franchise, Guitar Hero, by allowing the player to perform on guitar, drums or with a mic.  A sort of guitar hero meets karaoke, it even allows different players to work together in forming a rock band either over the Internet or in their living room, side-by-side.

I have adopted the guitar as my own instrument for acquiring fame.  I have already mastered Don't Fear the Reaper (no cowbell, unfortunately), Wanted Dead or Alive, Mississippi Queen and Blitzkrieg Bop, at medium difficulty, and am currently rehearsing Suffragette City, which has a wicked A-X-Y riff (XBOX control buttons, naturally, not notes) that I cannot seem to get the hang of.

The game is wonderful, though as I play through I am flabbergasted by the number of songs I do not recognize.  Who are Vagiant, or Anarchy Club, or Crooked X?  There are other groups I know by name, like Weezer, Radiohead, and Foo Fighters, but until now I couldn't have named a song by any of them.   My knowledge of popular music seems to have ended sometime in the late eighties, and there is a decade and a half lacuna following that which I am loathe to fill.  Added to this the great number of metal anthems in this game combined with my ignorance of the Bon Jovi catalogue and the Metallica repertoire (though I do know -- who wouldn't -- Rush's Tom Sawyer and Black Sabbath's Paranoid),  and you may get a sense of the cultural irrelevance that washes over me as each new playlist is thrown onto my screen.

Worse, I believe I threw out my back during the extra points phase of Nine Inch Nails' The Hand That Feeds, and now rest supine, forbidden to play until my back heals or eventually snaps back into place.  How do aging rockers do it?  Keith Richards apparently has fresh blood transfused into his system every few years, but I believe his case is anomalous. 

Playing at being a rock star does have that element of grasping at one's lost youth to it.  Like the elixir imbibed by Richards, rock rhythm and tonal inflections are absorbed by the air-guitarist and, for a brief time, he undergoes a spiritual transmutation -- one that must be accomplished in privacy, of course, lest reality, or perchance an unfortunately placed mirror, dispel the glamour. 

Much of the current literature -- often found in blogs, of course -- discusses video games and virtual worlds as a sort of escapism.  The notion is that the unfulfilled middle-manager may find an emotional outlet for his work-induced frustrations in virtual games such as World of Warcraft, where everyone and anyone has the opportunity to be a hero.

I am not sure that this quite captures the phenomenon, however.  With Rock Band, the goal is not so much to escape one's reality but rather to participate in a different one -- more of a pull than a push, so to speak.  Plotinus, though in a different context, spoke of it as a hypostatic union; a union between oneself and a more perfect version of oneself; something that has the character of fulfilling one's nature rather than erasing it.

Such is my feeling when playing air-guitar on the XBOX.  I don't want to be someone else, but instead simply want to release an aspect of myself that requires lowering the bar a bit, through technology, and closing the gap between myself and the gods of rock and roll.  Surely this is the origin of all technology since Nimrod's tower, brought down by Jehovah for its impertinence.  Technology lifts us up, giving us health and the promise of immortality through medicine, cleverness through information technology, courage through online role-playing, and happiness through pharmacology.  Technology removes our frailties, leaving us as we were meant to be before the fall: young and immortal.

Speaking of growing old, I attended a Bob Dylan concert a few months ago.  Bob has been going through a bit of a revival, his U.S. tour coinciding with a documentary by Martin Scorsese and even a feature length biopic.  I have not been able to find an adequate way to write about the event, which I and my companions walked out of.  To say that Dylan couldn't sing seems to be missing the point, since this charge has always been leveled against him.  And to say that I did not like the new style he was playing also makes me sound like those who criticized Bob for going electric back in the day.

I might draw the contrast between Bob and Elvis Costello, who opened for him.  Elvis played several songs solo, both old and new, only changing guitars on occasion to fit the piece.  He was the Elvis I imagined, comfortable on stage, able to work the audience, singing in his off-key way to perfection.  He was the archetype of the solo college musician, fitting complex lyrics into a structured form meant to invoke interlaced feelings of sympathy and alienation -- the alienation of the artist -- in his audience.  Like a great beast, the audience responded to his coaxing, and he guided us through a peculiar journey and then deposited us gently when his set was over.

According to Jung, archetypes recur across cultures, and we seek them out, attempting to fill the recesses established in our minds.  Most of all we seek heroes, not because we seek to be heroes ourselves, necessarily, but because we have an inchoate sense that there must always be heroes.  Shakespeare provided heroes, sometimes twisted, sometimes broken, but heroes nonetheless, on the stage.  The modern rock star transforms himself to fulfill this role established for him.  The form required for the hero changes over time, and changes with context; Dylan was always able to adapt to these changing roles.  He served as a cipher, reflecting the image that people required of him.

The Scorsese documentary, built around a ten hour interview with Dylan, portrays a man who sees none of the depth in his own lyrics that others impute to them.  Perhaps he is simply being playful.  He discusses a radio interview in which the host asks Dylan whether -- actually, insists that -- A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall is about nuclear ash and the madness of nuclear proliferation, to which Dylan responds that the song is about rain, which is sometimes heavy, you know. 

Again and again, however, Dylan was able to capture the spirit of his times, several times, and people found in his lyrics answers to their questions and anxieties.  My favorite Dylan album is Desire, which is a combination of electric protest songs and wild fantasies, all within a cowboy motif.  I can't say what questions he answers for me in this, but I do know that I return to it again and again, and it puts me in a happy place.

According to Giambattista Vico, the 18th century Neapolitan philologist, the secret of metaphor is that it is not based on similarity, but rather on identity.  The secret of the hero is not that he makes himself resemble the classic hero.  He becomes that hero, transforming himself as needed, internally, until identity is achieved.  "The true war chief ... is the Godfrey that Torquato Tasso imagines; and all the chiefs who do not conform throughout to Godfrey are not true chiefs of war" as Vico said.

Dylan accomplished something similar, adopting the argot of protest singers like Pete Seeger when this was required of him.  As the times changed, he transformed himself again into the rebellious Bob, with dark glasses and an attitude, indifferent to the complaints about his going electric and "selling out," when in fact his ear was simply better attuned than that of those around him.  The Desire period marked him as a reclusive genius, when that was the thing to be.  In the 80's and 90's, he identified himself with the Christian revival, while his music turned bluesy in a time when we wanted heroes whose rough voices where inhabited by old wisdom and hard-earned experience.

The new Dylan (which is your favorite Dylan?) doesn't speak to me, however.  He has a sort of be-bop band in conservative zoot-suits accompanying him, and the music matches the look.  The music is pleasant enough, punctuated by Bob's gravelly voice hammering out quick phrases like "dondenktwysanizalri" or "juzlikawama."  But what it means, and who Bob Dylan represents, is unclear to me.  I hold out the possibility that he is simply ahead of the curve once again -- but what sort of culture requires a hero who is mostly pleasant and barely comprehensible?  Is this the zeitgeist of the 00's?

Like my back, my plastic XBOX Stratocaster has also given out.  After only a few hours of playing, the strummer is now mushy, and I am unable to get through the rapid 12 note riffs that seem to infest all the metal songs currently on my playlist like little roaches.  I have gone online and found a fix that requires me to remove the back of the guitar (there are 20 odd screws, and I am grateful for the gift of a Christmas past: a power drill with bit attachments) and than reset a tension bar inside the guitar mechanism, but this seems to only work for about five hours before the strummer becomes mushy again.  Apparently there is a known problem with the early Rock Band Stratocasters, and Activision is allowing people to send their bad guitars in for a replacement.  Since I am currently in a state of rock star disability, I think I may take advantage of this, and with luck by the time my guitar is healed, my back will be, too.

Every family has its peculiar Christmas traditions.  My family's holiday traditions are strongly influenced by a linguistic dispute back in A.D. 1054, one consequence of which is that we celebrate Christmas on January 7th, 13 days after almost everyone else we know does so.  This has its virtues and its vices.  One of the vices is that we clean up on holiday shopping, since we are afforded an extra 13 days to pick up last minute presents, which gets us well into the time zone of post-holiday sales.  Another is that we always wait until a period somewhere between December 23rd and December 26th to buy our Christmas tree.  We typically are able to pick up our trees for a song, and last year were even able to get a tall frosty spruce without even singing.

This history of vice has finally caught up with us, for this year, as we stalked forlornly through the suburbs of Atlanta, no Christmas trees were to be found.  Lacking foresight or preparation, we have found ourselves in the midst of a cut-tree shortage.  And what is a belated Christmas without a cut-tree shedding in the living room?

We are now in the position of pondering the unthinkable.  Should we purchase an artificial tree this year (currently fifty-percent off at Target)?  The thought fills us with a certain degree of inexplicable horror.  Perhaps this is owing to an uncanny wariness about the prospects of surrendering to technology, in some way.  While not tree-huggers, as such, we have a fondness for natural beauty, and there are few things so beautiful as a tree pruned over a year to produce the correct aesthetic form, then cut down, transported, and eventually deposited in one's living room where it is affectionately adorned with trinkets and lighting.

Another potential source for the uneasiness my wife and I are experiencing is an association of these ersatz arboreals with memories of our childhoods in the late 70's and early 80's, which are festooned with cigarette smoke, various kinds of loaf for dinner, checkered suits, polyester shirts and, of course, artificial trees.  Is this the kind of life we want for our own children?

In the end, we have opted to get a three-foot, bright pink, pre-lit artificial tree.  Our thinking is that this tree will not offend so greatly if it knows its place and does not put forward pretensions of being real.

The linguistic ambiguity alluded to above has led to other traditions.  For instance, in Appalachia there are still people who cleave to the custom that on the midnight before January 6th, animals participate in a miracle in which they all hold concourse.  Briefly granted the opportunity to speak, all creatures great and small can be heard praying quietly and, one would imagine, discussing the events of the past year.  The significance of January 6th comes from the fact that the Church of England was late to adopt the Gregorian calendar, which changed the way leap years are calculated, and consequently so was America late.  Thus at the time that the Appalachian Mountains were first settled by English emigrants, the discrepancy between the Gregorian calendar and the Julian calendar was about 12 days (the gap, as mentioned above, has grown to 13 days in recent years).  The mystery of the talking animals revolves around a holiday that was once celebrated on January 6th , but is celebrated no more -- that is, Christmas.

According to this site, there is a similar tradition in Italy, itself.  On the day of the Epiphany, which commemorates the day the three magi brought gifts to the baby Jesus, the animals speak.

Italians believe that animals can talk on the night of Epiphany so owners feed them well. Fountains and rivers in Calabria run with olive oil and wine and everything turns briefly into something to eat: the walls into ricotta, the bedposts into sausages, and the sheets into lasagna.

The Epiphany is celebrated in Rome on January 6th of the Gregorian calendar.  It is possible, however, that even in Italy, older traditions have persisted under a different guise, and that the traditions of Old Christmas (as it is called in Appalachia) have simply refused to migrate 12 days back into December, and are now celebrated under a new name.  Such is the way that linguistic ambiguities give rise to ambiguities in custom, and ambiguities in custom give rise to anxiety over what to display in one's living room, and when.

As translated by Lady Charlotte Guest, excerpted from Robert Graves's The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth:

Discover what it is:

The strong creature from before the Flood

Without flesh, without bone,

Without vein, without blood,

Without head, without feet ...

In field, in forest...

Without hand, without foot.

It is also as wide

As the surface of the earth,

And it was not born,

Nor was it seen ...

 

[Answer: Ventus]

 

Song

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear,
No where
Lives a woman true and fair.

If thou find'st one, let me know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet do not, I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet,
Though she were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two, or three.

--John Donne