Les miroirs feraient bien de réfléchir davantage

[sovay]

My favorite character in Cocteau's Orphée (1949) was never the poet himself or even María Casares' spellbinding Princesse with her face like harsh white marble and her black leather gloves, but Heurtebise, Death's chauffeur, the sympathetic but not sad-sack love-suicide who falls for Eurydice while his mistress is coming through the mirror every night to watch Orphée sleep. I watched the movie with lesser_celery this afternoon for the first time since September 2009 (when it screened at the Brattle, my first time seeing it on a big screen, and Michael McAfee told me afterward about an upcoming show he thought I'd like) and I still like him. I can recognize the actor now from other roles: the risky lover in Le notti di Cabiria (1957), the superintendant of police in Le samouraï (1967). I don't remember him from Z (1969), but I admit I was distracted by Jean-Louis Trintignant. François Périer was just my age when the film was made. Heurtebise identifies himself as a student. It took John to point out to me that he's not much to look at, especially against the hard bronze Narcissus-planes of Jean Marais: but his frustration with the poet is the audience's, practically dragging Orphée by the hand into the blasted ruins of the underworld to rescue a woman who doesn't deserve to be a casualty of the mutual obsession of Orphée and his Death. (John also confirms that I am not groundlessly slash-goggling Eurydice and Aglaonice. I feel vaguely justified about that.) I think I find the numbers station of the underworld even more poignant now, knowing how many fewer remain in our world. The simplest of special effects in this movie is still my favorite, time running backward with the film—all but Heurtebise, Vergil-guiding Orphée out of death. Into ordinariness. Death and her aide turn away into whatever comes beyond the courts of hell. I noticed the first time around that the opening titles are constellations; the one-word end title, too. Even if I have to map them myself, I like the idea of Casares and Périer in the stars.

My poem "Cuneiform Toast" has been accepted by Mythic Delirium. It takes its name from the earrings by elisem; its subject is Ereškigal's prime minister, the courier of the Mesopotamian underworld, Namtar. (His mother's name is Mardula'anki, by the way.) The connection is not lost on me. I have never been able to figure out why this archetype, but I'm glad I finally got a tribute to this particular figuration out of my head.

I was turned down tonight by a housing situation I had rather desperately wanted. I wrote this post anyway, because I had been planning on it since I left the house. Then I had to rewrite it, because the internet ate it: the evening has been like that. I suspect I will stop talking about my apartment searches in public; it serves no purpose and feels superstitiously like asking to be hurt (and I can't find that amazing bag B. gave me my Hittite sun disk wrapped in, covered in more stopper-blue eyes than I'd ever seen on plastic before). Comments on this subject not desired. Have a really neat article by Gemma Files on the ways in which media criticism has changed even within her professional lifetime. cucumberseed has asked me to write about monsters and John for something fireproof. I am going to try to sleep, or shower, or something.

Comments

[sovay]

What are numbers stations?

A phenomenon on shortwave radio of stations whose broadcasts consist most often of strings or groups of numbers (hence the name) recited by human or synthesized voices, although verbal or musical phrases and messages in Morse code are also known to occur. They are not strictly English-language; I don't even believe they're mostly English-language. They've been around since right after World War II. (I've heard claims as far back as World War I, which I find less convincing, but I will admit I have not looked at the data for myself.) The thing about numbers stations is that, as far as I know, no one has ever been able to confirm what they're for, but the widespread belief is that they're used by intelligence services of various countries broadcasting to agents in the field: keys for deciphering a one-time pad. There are entire radio enthusiast cultures that study the transmissions of these stations, trying to crack their codes or pinpoint the signals or just listen in. They are dying out, but they have a fascinating persistence in a post-Cold War era. I learned "The Lincolnshire Poacher" from the singing of John Roberts and Tony Barrand (and later the setting by Benjamin Britten, which is what I sang at the MS benefit concert in October and reprised in December at the synagogue in Newton), but derspatchel knew the song because the first couple of bars were for decades the interval signal of a station supposed to be run by British Intelligence out of an RAF base on Akrotiri. It only ceased transmitting in 2008.

Orphée in Cocteau's film eavesdrops on transmissions from the underworld, using the radio in the Princesse's car to tune in to the frequency Death and her kind use to communicate among themselves. Their brief, surrealistic phrases (L'oiseau chante avec ses doigts, un seul verre d'eau éclaire le monde—The bird sings with its fingers, a single glass of water lights up the world), repeated and interspersed with groups of numbers, are very much in the style of numbers stations; Cocteau himself identified them with coded broadcasts made by the Resistance during World War II. The movie was probably my first exposure to the phenomenon.

un seul verre d'eau éclaire le monde

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

This whole comment is surreal and wonderful, the French phrase most of all, but the whole comment.

Now that I have your explanation, I realize I've heard of the phenomenon of numbers stations before, but not so wonderfully nor so elegiacally as this.

from as far away
as the land of death,
transmissions
as intimate and alien
as grief and loss
gleaned from the air
by all lonely things
and all who mourn

[sovay]

This whole comment is surreal and wonderful, the French phrase most of all, but the whole comment.

I didn't even have to make any of it up.

as intimate and alien
as grief and loss

Eight lines; send it to inkscrawl.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I am not sure if it sings without your comment, but I'll send it anyway.

[sovay]

I am not sure if it sings without your comment, but I'll send it anyway.

I think it sings. If you are worried, you can make one of Cocteau's lines its title.

It's a good movie for sparking off of—see Adrienne Rich's "I Dream I'm the Death of Orpheus," mentioned above. "Radio Banquo" came out of thinking about Macbeth, but I can't imagine there's not some of Cocteau's autre monde shortwave in there.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

At first I thought to append a portion of your comment, but in the end I decided to use the beautiful line un seul verre d'eau éclaire le monde for the title and let it stand or fall with that.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

And yes, with "Radio Banquo"

Thanks for the link to the Adrienne Rich poem, too. Wonderful.

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

I'd heard of numbers stations before, but never that term. Thanks, both.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

Oh, I never realized Death's radio was broadcasting code -- I just thought that's what radio broadcasts from the otherworld *all* sound like.

[selidor]

Now I want an additional reality where a Soviet astronomer noticed the optical pulsar in the Crab nebula in the 1950s. Numbers stations are the strange backhanded result of this discovery going sideways through a military hierarchy: they are trying to talk to pulsars.

[sovay]

Numbers stations are the strange backhanded result of this discovery going sideways through a military hierarchy: they are trying to talk to pulsars.

If you write it, I'll read it.