Sunday Morning! “The Solar Circus” by Gustave Khan
This time of year always feels a little magical and flukish, the day’s stories all written by Mad Libs. I go to serve food in the park to elderly people and get invited to an open bar charity event with some friends afterwards. It turns out to be a launch for a marijuana company, or maybe the performance of a string quartet called “Protestra”: they play orchestral music at protests, I think. It was a nice afternoon with friends. I ate great quantities of cheese and brought home a “gift bag” of pot gummies, though I’m not what you’d call an aficionado. No matter. Things happen and happenings accumulate.
What I mean is life is radiant. And a little sad. At least, there’s a gentle sadness in its DNA, below the level of hearing, a soft hum. There are so many things to do and they outnumber the time allotted. At this age, every new endeavor adds life to my days, while raising the question if it’s not a “little late.” On a lark, I wrote a play for an acting coworker recently. I’ve booked a literary bar for a reading and made a poster, and recast it because now he can’t do it. I’m hoping not to lose much money. Now, imagine it’s actually good. Why it could be a whole new “calling” for me! I’ve already been through quite a few. Next year, I’ll be 50. There’s only so many springtimes ahead.
I wrote a play and made a poster.
See, there’s a longstanding tension between thought and action. Or, at least, there’s a longstanding belief in that tension. To a great extent, I think this probably dates to the rise of industry. Certainly, Hamlet, that great overthinker, predates the Industrial Revolution by more than a century and a half, but it’s really in the industrial era that we start seeing story after story about “men of thought” contrasted with men of action. The former are pale and enervated, locked in bedrooms and libraries merely thinking about life; while the latter are brash and daring, and more than a little bullying and destructive. Shakespeare was, in so many things, a little ahead of his time.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the literary landscape is covered with the enervated bodies of dissolute decadents and aesthetes. This week, I read about one such wastrel’s attempt at a jailbreak. The Solar Circus by Gustav Kahn, first published in 1898, has been called the “forgotten masterpiece of French Symbolist literature.” I took it as a prank on the sort of books about men who retreat into an isolated world of aesthetic contemplation that were somewhat common in France after Romanticism and before Modernism: think À rebours (Against Nature) by Huysmans. or Voyage autour de ma chambre by Xavier de Maistre. Kahn turns all of that on its head.
Gustave Khan via wikicommons
The main character here, Count Franz, is prematurely aged by his reluctance to leave his castle and participate in life in any real way. His macho brother, Otto, bemoans that Franz has “filled his skull with nonsense and never even learned to ride a horse, or fire a rifle.” He’d like to marry the woman that Franz spurned, get the weakling out of the picture and claim the castle for himself. It’s a scenario we’ve read dozens of times. Usually, it ends with the aesthete humiliated and/or dead.
In this case, however, the acid kicks in.
A traveling circus catches Franz’s attention, particularly its beautiful star Lorely, the Solar Queen. Fallen in love, he decides to run away and join the circus, as it travels through France and England. The writing turns very purple and psychedelic; Kahn was remembered as an innovator of free verse poetry, and entire chunks of text could more easily read as poesy than prose. At times, of course, this can become exhausting. But isn’t that what it’s like to fall in love for the first time? Doesn’t the world become more poetic and vivid? A little baroque? Here’s a sample, almost at random:
There’s something a little ironic about using this style to describe someone throwing himself into the world: the actual world isn’t really this vivid, but it can seem that way in the mind. Symbolism charts the proliferating associations that our mind draws- it describes mental processes in this story about a man fleeing his thoughts for the world. And coming right back, it seems. The world isn’t like this, but it should be. Count Franz is throwing himself not into life, but a dream of life.
Love is this way too: exuberant and vulnerable, and a little delusional. Franz lives great adventures with Lorely, but those of us with a bit more “life experience” will recognize it’s not likely to last; the timid dreamer with an old soul and a weak constitution is not likely to hold onto the radiant beauty momentarily charmed by his worshipful devotion to her. The dream will have to end. The circus will move on. And he will return to his books and gloom, one way or another.
Well, perhaps my thoughts have taken a morbid cast lately. This is especially strange because I’m in New York in spring; everything you can imagine is in bloom, and many you couldn’t imagine in a million years. There is so much. Just so much. Attention must be paid. Now. Before the circus leaves town.
And so, my friends, what are YOU paying attention to this weekend?
Writing your first play near age 50 you are an inspiration. I am just behind you in age. The right amount of worry about our moving fully into old-guy territory soon enough is a moving target IMO. I have always thought that the antidote to despair is action, even about aging. Of course, I am a thinker more than a doer. Your post has given me some fuel to the fire for stuff I should do. If I was in NYC id be the opening of the play!Report
Thanks! I did a play when I was about 23 and it got “mixed reviews,” which sort of made me afraid to do another one. But, then, you get to a certain age and realize you don’t really care about all of that.
And yes, I do encourage anyone who *is* in NYC to come and buy a coke and tip the bartenders, so I don’t owe the full deposit!Report
That is for sure true. This time any art I do is just for me, mostly music and prose in my case. It’d just be a shame to not do it at this point.
I hope this one goes successfully enough, deposit included, that the momentum for writing and producing the next one, if that is the goal, goes full steam ahead. Maybe I’ll be in NYC one day during one of em too!Report
I watched a two episode reminiscence/documentary on the old British working class called Working Britain on YouTube. It is basically the British comedian/drag queen Paul O’Grady giving a very rose-colored glasses look back at the early to mid-20th century British working class life. You can see how a sort of certain Anglophone leftist can idealize this type of working class life. Everything seemed less commercial and more community oriented, entire towns would go on holiday together, kids played on the street watched over by there adults. The Jacobin crowd goes ga-ga over the American equivalent but American working class life was never as communal as the British counterpart.
I think one of the big liberal-left battles going on in the Anglophone world is between the group that wants to make secular upper middle class norms the baseline for conduct, although they would deny this vehemently if pressed about it, and the group that really resents this and wants the more aggressive and earthy working class norms to be the basis of conduct. A lot of the hatred directed at Wokeness from the Left and the Right is basically because it seen as a rather secular upper middle class thing.Report
Oy! The British working class always seemed to me to have more of a conception of themselves as working class, whereas the Americans seem to think they’re suffering through something on the way to something else. There are strange wrinkles to that- I was recently bitched at by a liberal on Twitter for romanticizing labor because the majority of paid work I’ve done has been labor and it’s not all been miserable- in fact, mastery of hard work can, actually, be rewarding. Anyway, saying that was “privileged” somehow. There are liberals on Twitter whose main argument is that everyone else is doing liberalism wrong, as I’m sure you know.
I’ve never read Jacobin. But, I’ve said before that a problem the liberal left is going to have is many of the cultural institutions that are liberal bulwarks- media companies, publishing, higher ed, downtown city cores, party politics, and the professional arts in general- are *also* increasingly out of reach for young people without familial wealth of one kind or another. Every 5-10 years or so, there’s a writer who emerges from the “working class” and it’s a Big Deal because it’s so exceedingly rare. Books about the irritations of academia and MFA programs? Not so rare at all.
So, the small problem for liberals is their institutions are increasingly out-of-touch with people who aren’t from that bougie middle class background- please, no more television shows about assistants to high powered CEOs, or politicians talking about “people who shower before work, and those who shower after work” for at least a few years, okay? But the more serious issue, it seems to me, is that democratic societies simply function better when everyone has a decent shot at the engines of social mobility, even if their parents *aren’t* university department heads or able to pay for their kid’s NYC rent while they do an unpaid internship. At a certain point, you want a majority of people to buy into their society’s narrative, and not think the game is rigged against them.Report
Doing American class analysis is difficult because of the confounding factors of race, geography, and just the sheer amount of American individualism. Like the American working class never did the everybody in the factory goes on holiday together that the British working class seemed to have had until the 1970s. So yeah, the British working class definitely had more of an idea of themselves as a united class than Americans did even if they weren’t that politically radical by European standards. The American working class seems to exist more as solid block in the minds of liberal and leftist middle class activists and intellectuals. I can see why the British working class get romanticized a lot. I’ve been exposed to so much British media that I expect repair people to speak in Cockney when they show up.
On the other blog, a poster theorized that the global growth of the Right could be contributed in part to codes of conduct that were valorized in the past like aggression not being valorized anymore but see as toxic masculinity or something. Basically, a lot of the behavior patterns that the Woke liberals encourage are really the code of conduct of the PMC or secular upper middle class. A lot of the resentment against wine moms is because of this. People who want a harder code of conduct are out of luck.Report