"THE TRAIL": Reflections on the movie

Jasmin Jandreau in "The Trail"

It took me a while to realize that “The Trail” (2013) was not realistic, but rather a conflation of “Pilgrim’s Progress” with “The Little Prince.”  It was not until the very end when the story was tied off with a quote from the Book of Luke that it came right out and admitted that everything was metaphor, a classic Christian “trope” for life.  “The Loneliest Planet”, about the couple backpacking across Georgia, was the same trope but in realistic terms, though it was in a place most people don’t know, a little country between Turkey and Russia.  It could have been Oregon, or the Rockies, or Scotland.

The trail in this film is in woods, second-growth, with snow and a farm wagon rigged for migration with hoops and tent sheet.  A woman is stranded there by a mysterious attack, which is a realistic but unseen part, and then tries to walk to some safe place.  In a while a little Indian boy joins her.  They have no food except one small fish, some flour and a handful of beans.  There are no proper blankets.  She has no knife but finally realizes she can start fires with spectacles. The boy says nothing but often is a guide.

In an echo of the trip along the trail, the actual computer streaming of the film kept breaking down and telling me the film was not available.  “Go away -- watch something else.”  Maybe it was an atheist hacker.  But I discovered that if I left and then resumed, I could get another ten minutes before it shut off again, so that’s how I watched, jerking along. When I went to IMDB. the reviewers were all expecting authentic Western history and threw fits over the anachronisms.  Zippers!  Ghastly!   Even the Great Falls Tribune reviewer sounded puzzled.  Without knowing the major canons of our culture (Bible, Shakespeare, Kerouac) it’s not possible to pick up an author’s metaphors.  Somehow, people scorn Bible tales.

Richard Flanagan

The newest prize winning “big” book, “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” uses a canon NOT from “our” culture but from Japan.  Luckily the reviewer for the Economist is nimble enough to coach us:  “The title is a clue. “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” is the English name for “Oku no Hosomichi”, a prose-and-verse epic by an 18th-century Japanese poet, Matsuo Basho, about a dangerous and lonely journey on foot into the heart of Edo-period Japan. Most Japanese can recite one line: “Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”

Trails and paths and roads -- some built, some simply worn by feet, some not even dirt but rather water as in a river, or a beach going along the water’s verge.  There’s the galactic path across the sky (I can actually see the Milky Way from my backyard).  The Whoop-Up trail runs nearby, followed by whiskey traders, including the founders of towns like our county seat.   There are cat paths across my yard.  One arm of the cat path goes north to an unoccupied red house and one goes south and then veers west to an abandoned old church building.  Cat houses.  Lots of sex and resulting kittens.  Luckily they don’t write books.

Whole categories of theology are about the beginning of the path (ontological) and the end (teleological).  It is a characteristic of the Abrahamic religions, particularly Christianity, that it’s all about journeys from one place to another, which DeleuzeGuattari characterize as rhizomatous:  a node or plant that extends a stolon or runner out to the next -- possibly subsidiary -- node or plant.  It’s the basic plan of a brain: neuron with long axon connecting to the next neuron.  The brilliance of the brain is that the connections can form or break according to use and an unused neuron quietly withers.  Culture does that, too.

Archibald Macleish and Christopher Plummer, who played Satan.

Archibald Macleish’s play “J.B.” begins with Satan walking down the aisle to the stage while God’s voice booms, “From whence have you come?”  Satan answers the LORD and says, “From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it.”  I enjoy teasing the cats when they squeeze in through the cat flap by asking if they’ve been going to and fro on the earth.  They say, “Meow.”  At least they’re not redundant.  

The Christian story begins with the trip to Bethlehem and ends with the walk up Golgotha, carrying a cross.  No one jokes much about that.  I didn’t catch the Gospel reference at the end of the movie called “The Trail” except that it’s in Luke, which is a Gospel very much concerned with survival by perseverance when things are tough.  Little old Christianity just starting out and determined to get there.  Whereever that is.

http://watch2day.net/the-trail-2013/   You can watch “The Trail” for free if you can keep the computer from changing the word “trail” to “trial.”  I found it finally by going to Google Images and looking for frames from the movie.  The trailer that is posted at the access to the movie is about some other movie, but it also looks interesting.  I suspect that its title might be “The Trial.”  Googling reveals at least a dozen movies either called “The Trail,” or with “The Trail” in the title, like “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine,” (the 1936 version) an iconic movie in my family.  We were so dedicated to trails that we belonged to the Mazamas, an organization of hikers and mountain climbers.  But our trees were Doug fir.

There are two ways to hike a trail and again my parents differed.  My father was goal directed, summiting mountains, driving to reach some goal before it got dark.  He took risks but never left the plan.  My mother was a wanderer who didn’t stay on the path.  To walk with her was to stop to taste the root of a licorice fern or to make a willow whistle.

One morning at Silver Falls State Park we woke up in our camp trailer and discovered she was missing.  We were the only ones camped there.  In those days it was a safe place.  We kids were small and it was scary, not because we thought she was kidnapped, but because sometimes she got mad at us and it was easy to imagine that she just left.  Until she came down the trail with her empty coffee mug in her hand, a jacket over her long nightgown, muddied up to the knees.  She’d done the entire several-mile loop through the trail that went behind waterfalls.  She said she hadn’t intended to -- just thought she’d wander a little ways but then ended up going around the whole trail -- several miles.

My own life has covered a lot of ground in the realistic sense, but never left this continent and never went very far south.  (Are you kidding?  There are ‘gators down there!)  I was always struggling to get back to the East Slope of the Rockies.  But in a virtual way (not virtuous) I’ve been on perilous trails, always going higher until now I sit in this back bedroom with my head whirling and sliding far, far away.  Not any more realistic than the heroine of “The Trail” in her flimsy print dress sleeping on a sheet in the snow.  (I was relieved for the actress when a cuff of long underwear slipped down through the sleeve of her dress.)  

"The Old North Trail"by Rob Akey

I just got an email from a former student, Robey Clark, asking if I remembered anything about a play in which he was required to kill a puppy that had been hit by a car.  I do.  I wrote the play.  I made the quite realistic puppy out of a Persian Lamb coat I got from Good Will.  The play was called “J’Accuse” and indicted adults for not understanding kids.  Seemingly, it made little impact and yet Robey has devoted his life to helping NA kids get a good education.  It wasn’t because of the play.  It was because he had the capacity to absorb the play and see that it suggested a life-path which he actually followed.  That's the way it works -- when it works.

PS.  If I were teaching these stories in a class, I would add the very powerful Somali film called "Sounds of Sand."  It's a family looking for water that finds mostly death.

THE POEMS OF "GENOCIDE" by Tim Barrus

The management of consciousness is what it means to be human altogether.  When considering poetry, this is the angle of approach that I take:  how is the poet managing his consciousness and how is the reader or hearer’s consciousness affected?  Mrs. Othus, our grade school library teacher who wore a ugly wig but somehow had a husband who was rumored to love her very much, told us our brains were like a field and that thinking wore paths across it where the feet went to and fro.

Many years later when I attended college, the school wanted to pave the muddiest of their campus paths.  There were already paved paths where the students were supposed to go, but they were goat-footed and would not stay on the pre-existing sidewalks.  So the administration simply waited until mud or snow made the student paths obvious and then paved those.   They didn’t like mud.

Poets go on both kinds of paths but there is a kind that tries always to walk on grass, stone, air, to wade in the waterways, to swing from the trees.  Their consciousness wants something new because that’s often where the power is.  And they discover that the forbidden is the most powerful poetry of all, whether it is religious taboo, fenced propriety, or simply deadly.

If one lives a forbidden life, let’s say on a beach somewhere remote, or squatting in a ruined building (there are so many now, esp. in Detroit), or a small town where everyone knows what’s happening and no one wants to rock the boat so they are silent, then true poetry will reflect that.  But who will read it?  How does one get the writing to the reader or listener?  Today we know an answer is electronics, but that does not solve the problem.

Mrs. Othus was a liberal who believed in protocol:  “This is how to take a book off the shelf,” she taught us.  “Slip your fingers in between books -- do not pull from the top of the back of the binding.”  It’s like grabbing a poet by the back of his collar, though these days they tend to wear t-shirts and their books are all paperbacks, maybe hand-sewn.  Mrs. Othus was a BBC type before there was television.  She was strict, almost clerical.  Some students hated her.  She saw something in me and urged me to read “Pilgrim’s Progress,” so I did.  It was the path to destruction, paved with good intentions.  I had lots of those.  Destruction turned out to simply be deconstruction.

In high school Mrs. Tyler was our teacher of American Literature.  We read Whitman and she taught us to admire F.O. Matthiessen.  The high school had a primrose festival in the spring but I never competed so never found the path.  As an adult, I was friends with Mrs. Tyler, retired now, frail as a sparrow and all big eyes, so she bought tickets for theatre and I drove her car.  We saw “Chorus Line,” and a ballet about being gay, which I only thought I understood but she really did.  We didn’t talk about it.  What would have happened if we had?

Now I walk direct across the prairie to the horizon and pass the piled or scattered bones of many ideas.  I never take my books off the shelf by their backs because they stack up beside my chair.

I have friends who have lived obscene lives:  Ob (outside) and scene (the stage defined by the pro-scenium) which divides the actors from the audience in the days when every play was a passionate attempt to make the gods stop punishing us, to discover our crimes, to offer sacrificial bribes.  It was a search for justice.

The hydraulics of human bodies is managed by blood which is what supplies the fuel for everything -- including sex -- by providing the molecules of joy and relief, engorging the membranes, carrying the toxics left from former lovers.  The poetry of “Genocide” is the tracing of these trajectories as they plummet through lives of nonconformists, escapees from both school and teachers.  “Schooling” in some contexts is a painful forcing of obedience, using violence.

Education happens all the time on its own terms because it is the way that consciousness manages itself.  It is the way brains grow through time, but one of the things a person learns is that looking over the shoulder does not kill Eurydice, but rather one’s younger self.

i am old

tired now

i want to die

my genocide visions are humble

even squalid i laugh

not bitterly but with

ruinous soul

as honest as the stoic sun.

Those who dare adventures out there on the edge of the world where there are dragons, have not wasted their time, have not been “ordinary.”  (Nothing is worse than being “ordinary.”  Both Mrs. Othus and Mrs. Tyler knew that, but danger kept them quiet.)

“Fucksweet Turbulence”

sunrise somewhere off the venezuelan coast

our boat is old and it leaks

my latino lover this so-called revolutionary. . .

any books just books can get you shot

drug smugglers are fed to sharks in a place where

everyone smuggles something the revolutionaries here

are mainly children when all of your brothers are murdered

you become a revolutionary.

Recently this period in history has been keeping books on atrocity:  how many killed, how much destroyed, where are they, what is their DNA, who claims them, where is the art that used to hang on their walls?

. . . i know slashing

twilight and I want an accounting

of what has been done

a full accounting of every small

insignificant horror because there

is nothing insignificant about

horror the books must be put in perfect

economic shape being mellow and all

There is only one respite, as these stories record.

tears

are interludes the stage

the bed the mystery

you slept on my

chest.

but

genocide

boys

melt

slipping 

away

while

you

hold

them

tightly

genocide

boys reach

with 

tender strength

chests

flared 

into 

manhood 

reaching.

beyond

the 

realm

Water seems to have no paths, but in truth they do.  Differences in temperature, gradients of saline, deep variation in the terrain below the flow, and always the wind -- that metaphor for spirit -- taking one’s boat by its blushing sails.

What possible way can an old woman much more like Mrs. Othus or Mrs. Tyler (except that they ended in lovely apartments in retirement towers where no cats were allowed) ever relate to a renegade guerrilla who shepherds boys across the abyss piled with skulls?  

Yin and Yang can be closer to each other than same to same.  

. . . we 

will never be retired from passion

my cats and I sit in rockers on the 

front porch stoned my cats drink too

much rum we are so alike believing 

that there has to be some deep enigmatic

significance to a collection of sea shells

gathered by boys drunk on sunset

. . .  we are not retired from kisses

Don’t get too excited.  It’s all metaphor.  It’s all words.  We’re merely managing our consciousnesses.  We’re human beings.

(All poetry quotes from "Genocide" by Tim Barrus.)

PATHS AND DOORS

When I think about my life, it becomes obvious that somehow I haven’t come to completion anywhere, or as my mother used to scold me,  “You never FINISH anything!”  She meant my 4-H sewing project.  I finished a lot of essays and stories, but they didn’t count to her.  People in Valier would say I never finish my yard -- quite true.  But I’m not talking about that.   Nor is that about committing to a life of search rather than one devoted to defending one position.  Only in the last half-dozen years have I found anyone who understood -- not out of sameness but out of parallel search.

In interaction with Tim Barrus, who is also a writer, there have been two shared metaphors: the labyrinth or catacomb and the door, the aperture of access, a threshold.  You may have noticed that I used these two in fiction recently:  “The Hall Boy” and the Neanderthal story.  The combined key is a long corridor with doors along the sides.  I dream these, partly because they are so common in mysteries, police procedurals -- the camera trundles along the carpet from one overhead light to the next and the armed gunman shoots from a doorway or around a corner.  Maybe a river with docks along it would work similarly, or even a road with trees along it.  An architectural hybrid between corridor and doorway is the enfilade, doors lined up so a person can walk through them in a straight line.

It’s just a metaphor for living through time with periodic contexts that might be jobs or classrooms or marriages or towns.  When I was reviewing the Western art mags, I used to keep track of two kinds of paintings:  those of doors or gates and those of cafes.  There would be a half-dozen of each in most issues and they were often very beautiful.  

There’s a Russian movie from the Fifties called “The Cranes Are Flying.”  It’s about world war and in it a girl goes back from work to her family’s apartment, rushes up flights of stairs, throws open the door and there is . . . nothing.  Bombed-out space, many floors up, distant from all other buildings.  She witnessed no violence, heard no explosion, and now had no family.  All she did was open a door, as usual, and stand there trying to understand.

George MacDonald, English Universalist minister who wrote fairy tales to feed his children, had a basic construct in his stories: the castle on a hill full of coal mines.  The castle itself is a labyrinth of rooms and a winding staircase (a rising labyrinth); the many complex tunnels are like an ant-hill underneath it.  They echo, one is the reflection of the other.  The stories are “The Princess and the Goblin,” “The Princess and Curdie,” and they never end because to end the story is to end the labyrinth which is actually an income stream.

“Peer Gynt” is another version featuring sea voyages, Morocco, lunacy, thieves and trolls.

What is necessary is not the goal but the comparing of burrowing dark against constructed lighted places.  This is very deep in us, so it is hard to think about.  It must go back to the first small mammals learning that safety is always achieved by digging into and under the earth and whatever is piled onto it, while the first small birds were learning to leap and glide, then flap and dive.  Some seabirds can live for years without ever touching the land.  Tennessee Williams often spoke of birds who had only wings, no feet at all and no need for them, never “grounded.”  Mammal-me loves the rara-avis-other.  Bats, of course, inhabit both worlds.

My understanding of life was changed, once again, when I saw a YouTube vid of the axon of a neuron worming its way through the brain tissue in search of the place it needs to connect -- they say that tip is using something like smell: molecular cues.  This is not at all like the stacked-up boxes of cells that we used to believe in.  Knowledge as the contents of drawers and books is one thing: knowledge as seeking, smelling, moving -- that’s different.  Verb-based.  A trip.  The connectome: a road map to a story.

But one mustn’t become so focused on the goal that the side compartments are passed up or entered, then forgotten.  Alvina Krause, the legendary acting teacher I’ve been remembering on blogs, only slipped up once.  She said she had gotten word that one of her students had a good role in a Broadway play.  “He MADE it!” she exulted.  Maybe because she never was an actor herself, she forgets that being in the first play is a threshold -- oh, yes! -- but then life will present a whole sequence of new thresholds.  The play can’t run forever.  Being cast in this one won’t mean being cast in the next one.  A remarkable performance will mean that next time the performance must be equal or better.  And yet there is no better lighted space than the stage.

When one graduates, some people will tell you that this is not the end but merely the beginning.  They’re right.  The end will be only when the trip is over and the alma mater stops asking for donations.  The Middle-Eastern religions: Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, all think in terms of beginnings and ends.  Some apply these mainly to individuals (birth and death) and some think in terms of nations or “cultures” (founding and final fall).  Our scientists get preoccupied with how the universe began and how it will end.  The Asian religions are more concerned with just being, participating in the great rolling wave of existence.  Yet once they took it into their heads to conquer others in order to guarantee their longevity, they were the most merciless, relentless, destructive of all.

My movie last night was about Jane Goodall:  “Jane’s Journey.”  (Streams on Netflix.)  It’s about her life, how simply it started and then expanded until now it’s about the whole world.  Many of the shots were of Jane walking a well-worn path and sitting down with the chimps, just being with them.  Their reactions range from mock-rage to pretending not to notice.  She speaks calmly about her first husband, a photographer who made her work famous but who was so possessive and jealous that the marriage wouldn’t work.  Then her second husband, also very jealous and intent on limiting her, died of cancer.  The third “man” was her son who had a hard time separating from her, resented her work and also wanted her for only himself but by trying NOT to be like her.  

The movie, towards the end, shows “Grub” the son reconciled and collaborating with his mother to protect a wild but calm hippo pool where a local family has protected and addressed the animals for decades, believing they are ancestors -- which they are in the broadest sense, of course.  Few animals are as ugly and potentially deadly.  In the pool we see only their ears, eyes, and nostrils above the water -- ugly, alien, wary.  Among them float filamentous white flowers so delicate they could be spun of glass.  Sublime.  But they aren’t going anywhere.  Pretty soon Jane and the others went on up the path.