An Intersection of Opposites

Gentle firmness; unyielding gentleness

When I wrote about Marilyn Monroe I described her life as “an electrifying intersection of opposites…power and vulnerability—powerful vulnerability”. I want to explore that thought/feeling here because it is mysterious to me; something inchoate, profoundly compelling but hard to define as an idea expressed in words. I feel that Monroe embodied it with playful sophistication in her screen persona, but this “it” is multifarious, and can appear in many forms, raw or sophisticated, masculine, feminine, human and non: I want to share some especially beautiful evocations of this “it” that I’ve seen in stories, a novel and a sci-fi movie from the 80s. I think they are so beautiful that they have meaning even out of context, or with minimal context. They are all very different, but I hope you will enjoy the eccentric throughline.

Invitation To A Beheading (Nabokov’s eighth novel), is about a human being named Cincinnatus trapped in a grotesque society of willfully faux humans, a “hastily assembled and painted world;” he is sentenced to death for “gnostical turpitude,” that is for having too much vexing human substance that cannot be instantly understood. When his toupeed jailer visits him with a giant live moth that he intends to feed to a gloomy spider (which turns out to be a toy), the moth escapes and terrifies the hitherto monotonously weird guard, who flees. Cincinnatus finds the beautiful moth, “its visionary wings spread in solemn invulnerable torpor;” he is unable to refrain from touching “the hoary ridge near the base of the right wing, then the ridge of the left one.” He thinks: “What gentle firmness! What unyielding gentleness!” The lines are a mere parenthetical but years later I remembered them above everything else in the novel (which is full of memorable lines.) Right after 9/11, I opened the book to find the lines because of the feeling I had on watching an amateur video of the attack in which seagulls flew unconcernedly between the camera and the collapsing towers. I read the whole section and was heartened.

Nabokov used the word “invulnerable” to describe the moth in repose. Literally that isn’t accurate. I don’t think he meant it literally. I think he meant that the moth is an expression of an invulnerable something housed in a tiny, vulnerable being. I felt that something present in the random appearance of the gulls—poignant and heart-breaking at a moment of disastrously clashing human power.

So that has nothing evident to do with Marilyn Monroe, but this next one is closer, if it matters. “This” being a section from Vandals, a story by the great Canadian writer Alice Munro, published in a 1994 collection titled Open Secrets.

Alice Munro

I can’t post the story because it isn’t free online (though if you are a New Yorker subscriber you can read it here) so I will have to summarize. The narrative takes place over a period of perhaps ten years and is masterfully structured in its entwining of past/present and its close third-person point of view. It begins with an elderly woman (Bea) writing a rambling affectionate letter to Liza, a “born again” young woman she casually nurtured as a child. The letter references the death of Liza’s brother and Bea’s common-law husband, an acerbic, reclusive taxidermist named Ladner; its chatty colloquial tone exquisitely deepens as Bea shares a dream about smiling people at a gardening store distributing brightly colored plastic bags of bones which some people joyfully toss in the air. Bea thinks she’s been given Ladner’s bones but the bag feels too light and someone asks her “Oh did you get the little girl?” This opening is followed by a deft sketch of Bea’s life of love affairs (which are essentially what she lives for), ending in her relationship with Ladner. The narrative then switches to Liza’s point of view; she and her husband Warren are traveling to Ladner’s isolated cabin, supposedly to make sure that the water has been shut off—but Liza is motivated by something very different, something that at first seems to make no sense.

In this most germane section, Liza is a child (of about nine). She lives with her father and brother (her mother is deceased) in a rural area across the road from Bea and Ladner. Ladner’s taxidermy projects fascinate Liza and her brother but when Bea arrives, Liza comes to idealize the feminine older woman:

Bea was standing on the bank of the pond, in her Japanese kimono. Liza was already swimming. She called to Bea, “Come on in, come in!” Ladner was working on the far side of the pond, cutting reeds and clearing the weeds that clogged the water. Kenny was supposed to be helping him. Liza thought, Like a family.

Bea dropped her kimono and stood in her yellow, silky bathing suit. She was a small woman with dark hair, lightly grayed, falling heavily around her shoulders. Her eyebrows were thick and dark and their arched shape, like the sweet, sulky shape of her mouth, entreated kindness and consolation. The sun had covered her with dim freckles, and she was just a bit too soft all over. When she lowered her chin, little pouches collected along her jaw and under her eyes. She was prey to little pouches and sags, dents and ripples in the skin or flesh, sunbursts of tiny purplish veins, faint discolorations in the hollows. And it was in fact this collection of flaws, this shadowy damage, that Liza especially loved. Also she loved the dampness that was often to be seen in Bea’s eyes, the tremor and teasing and playful pleading in Bea’s voice, its huskiness and artificiality. Bea was not measured or judged by Liza in the way that other people were. But this did not mean that Liza’s love for Bea was easy or restful—her love was one of expectation, but she did not know what it was that she expected. (pp 286-287; Open Secrets)

When I first read this back in the 90s, the passage struck me as so erotic that I momentarily forgot Liza’s age. Although Bea is no longer young or beautiful there is something so sensual and adoring in the gaze that it seems that of a lover. The way the “camera” lingers on Bea’s standing pose by the water, followed by the discarding of her covering garment, followed by a long static visual actually made me think “Marilyn Monroe.” The innocent vulnerability of the natural body, the “playful pleading,” the “huskiness and artificiality”—these qualities don’t manifest in middle-aged Bea the way they do in immortal Marilyn. But they are there, and the combination of beauty and “damage,” the freighted adoration it inspires, all strengthened my association. The passage is erotic—emotionally erotic, the oceanic eroticism of maternal love and the need for it. (A need/longing associated with the foster child, Norma Jean.) What Liza is responding to is the softness of mother, the power of forgiving softness, of love that cherishes even flaws, freedom from the strictures of perfect form; a power that meets vulnerability as equal.

But Liza isn’t the only one looking and the texture of the scene is about to get complicated. Bea breaks her compelling stillness when she enters the water, squealing girlishly, and Ladner responds with pantomimed contempt, mocking her by prancing about, “doing what she was doing but in a sillier, uglier way.”

This was thrilling and shocking. Liza’s face was trembling with her need to laugh. Part of her wanted to make Ladner stop, to stop at once, before the damage was done, and part of her longed for that very damage, the damage Ladner could do, the ripping open, the final delight of it.

A lot for a little girl to get her head around; Liza will be suspended between these reactions perhaps for the rest of her life. And that’s just part of it; the story is profound and multifaceted and about too many things for me to get into here. But that brief description of a woman beheld by a girl for one long moment is an entry to the depth of it, this blending of opposites.

The Origin of the Birds, by the Italian writer Italo Calvino (1923-1985), is available online:

The Origin of the Birds

…so I hope you read it (it’s only fourteen pages in book form!) because it’s delightful and because it’s tough to summarize adequately. It is part of a larger work called “Cosmicomics;” Qfwfq, the palindromic protagonist, has been around literally forever, appearing in other stories as an amoeba, an atom, a mollusk, an amphibian, a dinosaur, a farmer—please forgive me if I’m not getting the sequence right. In Origin, Qfwfq relates how birds suddenly appeared in his world, to the “festive amazement” of some and the consternation of others, because “the existence of birds knocked our traditional way of thinking into a cocked hat.” It turns out that those consternated are in some way right; the birds are messengers from a world of impossibly formed beings, rejected forms, monsters in fact—their presence now means that the world of monsters and nonmonsters is for a moment blurred. During this moment Qfwfq crosses over to the other side, is isolated from his world and plunged into a place that is “rejected, unuseable, lost,” in some way distorted in proportion or combination—yet beautiful, “if one could recognize it.” His very definition of self is threatened by the weirdness, but he follows the birds who still guide him to…an enormous egg which houses the secret heart of monstrosity, “a different beauty…and yet ours, the most ours thing of our world...without which our world would always have lacked something.”

This different beauty is a feminine creature named Or and Qfwfq immediately falls in love. He assumes she is being held prisoner, and gallantly offers to rescue her; soon they are fleeing, with armies of birds in hot pursuit, most coolly rendered. “To tell the story I should somehow describe what Or was like; and I can’t. Imagine a figure somehow towering over mine, but which I somehow hide and protect…in the next cartoons Or is seen flying among the clouds, with my head peeping out from her bosom.” You know what I’m going to say: here it is again, in comic-book form. Something totally vulnerable, yet hugely powerful, finally much more powerful than the narrator who is about to be dropped on his ass.

Birds seems in one aspect like a whimsical Adam-and-Eve story, “Adam” in this case being the one who hungers for too much knowledge and violates the sacred mystery, resulting in his expulsion from a potential perfect union. His stories and representations are futile or just inadequate—comic drawings compared to a bigger reality.

Now to go completely off-track but not really.

Scanners is an old-school sci-fi film made by Canadian David Cronenberg in 1981. The plot is complicated but standard for the genre: artificially, accidentally created “scanners” can read minds and computers, drive normal people crazy and destroy their bodies from inside out—among other things. The story is about power, control, the sinister nature of corporations, familial betrayal and, basically, good vs. evil as embodied by the gentle Cameron Vale vs. the alpha scanner, Darryl Revok. The movie ends with Revok’s capture of Vale and his female partner who is made to “sleep” in the next room while Revok first tries to persuade Vale to join him, then moves to destroy him. I came across some online debate, circa 2009, about what actually happens next (Movie Chat) but to me it looks like Vale wins with some kind of psychic Jujitsu—or as the guy I saw it with back in ‘82 put it, by “going full Jesus on him.” This could really be seen as some kind of romantic masochistic BS—and maybe it is. I’m not sure. But it is still thrilling, this moment of maximum power and maximum vulnerability; it is why I remembered the movie all this time.

My former boyfriend’s Jesus comment was a bit flippant, but not entirely. Jesus being the OG of ultimate power and total vulnerability, joined.