“Jumping the Line”
by
Mikhail Bulgakov
There was a line outside the Moscow Criminal Investigations Department.
“Oh. . . Geez . . . all this waiting and waiting!”
“Even here there’s a line!”
“What can you do? Do you happen to be a bookkeeper, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Nope, I’m a cashier.”
“Did you come to get arrested?”
“Yeah, what else!”
“That’s good. So how much were you caught with, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Three thousand smackers.”
“That’s nothing, young man. You’ll just get a year. But if you take your heartfelt repentance into consideration . . . and the fact that the Bolshevik Anniversary is coming up . . . so, all in all, you’ll do three months, and then, the sweet bird of freedom!”
“You sure? You’re comforting me no end. I was already real desperate. Yesterday I went to see a lawyer, and he scared the living daylights out of me–the article, he tells me, is such that you won’t get away with less than two years’ hard labor.
“Pure twaddle, young man! Trust my experience. Hey, you there! Where do you think you’re going? Get back in line!”
“Citizens! Let me pass! I filched some official money! My con- science is biting me!”
“Everyone’s conscience is biting them! You’re not the only one!”
“I squandered the entire holdings of the Moscow Agrarian Industry Store in drink!” a low voice kept mumbling.
“Quite a fellow, aren’t you! You’ll pay for it now! You’ll never see the light of day again!”
“That’s not true! What if I’m ignorant? And not educated? And there are hereditary social conditions, huh? And my previous con- viction? And being an alcoholic?”
“How come they put you, an alcoholic, in charge of the wine store?”
“I did warn them!”
“Hey you! Where do you think you’re going?”
“Citizen Officer! I am tortured by remorse!”
“Hey, stop pushing! I’m tortured too!”
“Excuse me! I’ve been waiting here since ten in the morning to get arrested!”
“Just give me your last name, place of employment, amount!”
“Fioletov, Misha, tortured by remorseful conscience!”
“How much?”
“In Makrettrest–two hundred smackers.”
“Sidorchuk! Process this Fioletov!”
“May I take my toothbrush with me?”
“You may! And you, what was the amount?”
“Seven people.”
“A family?”
“Exactly.”
“And how much was it you took?”
“Two hundted in cash, a robe, a watch and some candlesticks.”
“I don’t get it. An official’s robe?”
“What do you mean? Us guys don’t deal with officials. It was a private family. Shtippelman.”
“You’re Shtippelman?”
“Me? No!”
“Then what’s Shtippelman got to do with it?”
“What he’s got to do with it is we knifed him. I’m reporting seven people: his wife, five children and their granny.”
“Sidorchuk! Kakhrushin! Take preventive measures! Now!”
“Excuse me, Citizen Officer! Why is this man getting preferential treatment?”
“Please, citizens! Be conscientious! this man is a murderer!”
“Big deal! You’re telling us he’s a big shot or something? For all you know I might have blown up a state institution!”
“This is an outrage! Bureaucracy! We will complain!”
Translated from Russian by Anneta Greenlee and published in the Fall ’98 issue of Conjunctions—read more Bulgakov stories there.
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My photographs, I used a lot, but I used them as a teaching tool, and they really worked wonderfully,in a sense. Let’s suppose you’re trying to get the students to understand what [Immanuel] Kant meant when he said that the aesthetic experience is not mediated by concepts. Okay, show them a photograph of a floor of an abandoned building—I used to go into all of these abandoned buildings—that’s been sitting abandoned for years, and there are all these pigeons flying around, and they’ve layered the floor with guano, pigeon shit. Huge warehouses, light coming in shining off this, and it’s gorgeous. So you take a picture, which looks like—you know how with aluminum foil, when you crumple it up and then smooth it out again you have all these little lines and it shines and stuff? That’s what it looks like. So you show them a slide. “Oh, boy,” they say. Then you say, “It’s pigeon shit.” Concept. Bing! And I used to take pictures of dog deposits and bird shit, especially during the season when there was lots of huckleberries, some berries that would stain it, and sometimes it would be quite nice, and I’d use things like this, so they’d see it right away, they’d understand that there are names for things, forbidden them to see, and to get them used to seeing, because they’ll never have an aesthetic experience until they can do that. So I used a lot of it, and some of it would have been okay to put in along with an essay as an illustration, but not as “Look at this as a photograph.”
William H. Gass, in a 2013 interview with Rain Taxi.
1. Noah continues director Darren Aronofsky’s streak of making films that I will never watch more than once.
2. (The film is new on DVD &c.; I dutifully missed in the theater).
3. (Although I did see Aronofsky’s first feature Pi in the theater—at my university’s student union. I liked the claustrophobic paranoia of Pi, but the film was also silly, histrionic even, and I did not understand the film’s handling of metaphysics—mostly because the film does not understand its own metaphysical vision).
4. (Noah, for its part, does seem to understand its own metaphysical vision; or, rather, it understands a version of its own metaphysical vision).
5. Aronofsky’s Noah takes place in a post-apocalyptic landscape: Cities are failing, the world is barren, dry, the ground seems to be comprised of basalt and ash. The people in his Prediluvian world use a mishmash of technologies, some of which seem fairly advanced (strip-mining, metallurgy, advanced textiles, etc.)—but these technologies also seem stymied, stuck, abortive last grasps at progress. Noah looks at times like a Mad Max film, or even Hillcoat’s adaptation of The Road.
6. Aronofsky’s Noah is a post-apocalyptic pre-apocalypse film.
7. Aronofsky’s Noah attempts an answer to both Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden and Cain’s murder of Abel.
8. Aronofsky’s Noah foregrounds the radical infanticide at the heart of the flood myth.
9. From A. Samuel Kimball’s The Infanticidal Logic of Evolution and Culture:
. . . when he promises never again to subject the world to such destruction, God memorializes the irreversibility of his massively -cidal violence and binds the future that will transpire to the futurity that will now never come to pass. Indeed, God destroys an infinite number of futures with the respective deaths of the Flood’s victims, for whom the waters of the Flood will never stop flooding, never cease obliterating the future. When he ratifies his promise in the covenant with Noah and his descendants, God inscribes the future reproductivity of the Noahic lineage in the limitless infanticidism of the Flood.
10. Aronofsky’s Noah gains most, if not all, of its moral tension in depicting Noah’s attempt to negate the future reproductivity of the Noahic lineage.
11. Should humanity be allowed to exist after The Flood? is Noah’s (and Noah’s) central question. Aronofsky’s answer to this question is, I think, ultimately ambiguous. While Noah’s own infanticidal violence (an extension of his attempt to prevent his sons from begetting offspring) is suspended (by love!), Aronofsky represents this suspension with ambivalence. Noah, drunk in a cave, invites us to look on his naked failure.
12. Aronofsky’s Noah is most successful as a kind of failed boilerplate color-by-numbers summer-popcorn-big-budget-action flick. It’s just too weird to fully adhere to its formula, but it hangs together by the formula nonetheless, jostling, uneasy.
13. Aronofsky’s Noah features giant fallen angels encased in rock. These golems are probably the signal special effect of the film, and a sore reminder of the pervasive influence of the special effects battle sequences in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings.
14. This was easily my favorite sequence of Noah:
15. (And yet that sequence still suffers from a kind of queasy supernatural cheesiness that infects Aronofsky’s work).
16. After watching the film, I sought reviews, which led me quickly to John Nolte’s paranoid (and unintentionally hilarious) take on the film at the right-wing website Breitbart. Nolte clearly enjoyed the film and he repeatedly praises its techniques, production values, and acting, but condemns it as “blasphemous” in depicting God as “some kind of tree-hugger.” “Aronofsky is the anti-Michelangelo,” Nolte declares, “a master craftsman using his talents to a dishonest and wicked end.” That wicked end is “using the story of Noah to twist Christianity into something it is not…[Noah is] a genius piece of propagandizing that is sure to lead many away from God under the mistaken belief that through left-wing environmentalism they are coming closer to Him.”
Nolte’s strident praise/condemnation is hilarious and hyperbolic.
Does he actually believe that this movie is aesthetically affecting enough to motivate any kind of change in belief?
17. (Reviews like Nolte’s are important to me because they help to remind me of the subjectivity of aesthetic experience. He saw a completely different film (with his completely different eyes) than I did).
18. My favorite Aronofsky film, and the only one that I would consider watching again, is The Fountain. I think that The Fountain might be a kind of precursor film to Noah, a trial-run even, although I have no evidence for this claim.
19. I started this riff with the claim that I have no desire to rewatch Aronofsky’s films, and that Noah continues this pattern. Aronofksy is an auteur, and like most auteurs, I’m sure rewatching his films would enrich an understanding of the themes and problems he’s trying to address. However, I find his films repulsive, by which I mean the opposite of compelling. I have never wanted to exit a fictional world as much as I wanted to escape Requiem for a Dream. I found The Wrestler depressing and empty. I’m afraid if I watch Black Swan again it will turn out that Aronofsky was actually not attempting to make a comedy about psychosis, but was rather actually serious about his melodrama’s tragic scope.
20. Noah isn’t repulsive, but it isn’t great either. Flawed doesn’t even begin to describe the film—yes, it survives its own competing impulses of spectacle-bombast and introspective-character-study, but never synthesizes them. It’s unclear who the film is for. The film resolves in a moment of supposed-uplift, positing “love” –of offspring– as a solution, but it also binds that solution/blessing in the cursing of offspring.
Both of these moments feel wholly inauthentic. In the end, what remains is the bitter aftertaste of Noah’s contempt—and his anxiety at failing to create a utopia devoid of humans.
We are little critters who live in the black earth beneath the desert. The people on Mother Earth can’t imagine such a large expanse of fertile humus lying dozens of meters beneath the boundless desert. Our race has lived here for generations. We have neither eyes nor any olfactory sense. In this large nursery, such apparatus is useless. Our lives are simple, for we merely use our long beaks to dig the earth, eat the nutritious soil, and then excrete it. We live in happiness and harmony because we have abundant resources in our home town. Thus, we can all eat our fill without a dispute arising. At any rate, I’ve never heard of one.
In our spare time, we congregate to recall anecdotes of our forebears. We begin by remembering the oldest of our ancestors and then run through the others. The remembrances are pleasurable, filled with outlandish salty and sweet flavours, as well as some crispy amber – the immemorial turpentine. In our recollections, there is a blank passage that is difficult to describe. Broadly speaking, as one of our elders (the one with the longest beak) was digging the earth, he suddenly crossed the dividing line and vanished in the desert above. He never returned to us. Whenever we remembered this, we fell silent. I sensed that everyone was afraid.
(via.)
Biblioklept 