Chapter 2: "I'm No Longer Interested in Pedophilia or Incest."
The glass doors of Siebold Hall swung open violently. I wearily staggered across the threshold, the blizzard at my back, pushing past me as it made a spirited venture into the still and lifeless building. I did not mean to throw the doors open as forcefully as I did. It was as though the blizzard itself had put me up to it, used me as its patsy to burgle into the frumpy, rundown building. But the blizzard did not seem impressed with its new surroundings. The howling wind ceased its restless exploration when it took stock of the abandoned halls. The pure, driven snow that had found its way through the door settled uneasily and embarrassed on the ground in a filthy, soiled puddle of slush; the puddle turned its face toward the sterile florescent lights, waiting to evaporate and be put out of its misery.
The blizzard had reminded me what violence, real violence was. The longer I had been enrolled at Raft, the more unreal violence had become to me. I had forgotten that there was such a thing as violence until I had to slog through a blizzard that had tried to efface all of Boston. I forgot that most people in the world resorted to techniques other than a rhetorical argument or a cunning thesis to make a point. I had been afforded the privilege to forget about all that these last four years. Perhaps the only constant reminder of violence on campus was the tame and ramshackle ROTC office on the far side of campus, and even it acted more as a lightning rod for the impotent and short lived outbursts of anti-government sentiment on campus than a truly menacing presence. But when I realized just how late for class I was, I again forgot about the concept of violence; all I worried about was Professor Courtet on the third floor of the building, and presenting the last term paper in the last class of my undergraduate career.
I made my way up the three flights of stairs and found the class. I peered into the room through the glass panel on the door. The professor sat alone. On the table before him sat a Thermos, a mug of coffee, and the school newspaper, The Raft Observer. The professor chuckled to himself as he flipped through the pages. I flattered myself for a moment by imagining that he were amused by the comic strip Jane and I collaborated on for the Observer. I recollected myself quickly though, ashamed to keep him waiting any longer especially since the class had evidently been dismissed already.
I knocked and entered meekly. "Professor Courtet," I began, "I'm here. I am sorry I'm tardy. Where is everyone? Has class ended early?" I looked at my watch. I was over forty minutes late.
The professor jumped to his feet. "Daria! Come in. Sit, sit sit," he exclaimed as he pulled out a chair for me. "How did you make it through the storm? All classes were cancelled yesterday afternoon. The school sent out a mass email, and I posted an announcement on Blackboard. Haven't you checked your email, or Blackboard, or even watched the evening news? They are fearing whiteout conditions. I was already marooned in the building when the storm hit. I didn't have anything to do so I decided to sit in the classroom just in case any students made an appearance, but I never thought any would."
"I guess I've been trapped in my mind for the last few days," I said sheepishly. "I actually disconnect my Internet connection so I wouldn't be tempted to check email, Blackboard, or news web sites while I worked on my paper. All I kept thinking was that I had to be here today to give my presentation. I didn't realize how bad the storm was until I actually left my dorm."
I wasn't surprised that Professor Courtet was in the classroom even though the rest of the campus had been abandoned, given up to the storm. He was infamous for setting up a cot in his office in the adjoining Old Glover building where the humanities professors had their offices. He had probably already been camped out in his office for a few days even before the administration cancelled classes yesterday. My God was he thin. It was like he lived off of coffee. You could measure how many days he had been in his office by how rank his body odor became. Sometimes he smelled like a corpse through his fuzzy, woolen sweater. I imagined him as one of those zombies in a horror film, a member of the living dead who walked the halls of Old Glover and gorged himself on the theorists and academics whose succulent brains sat distilled in his disorderly bookshelf. We undergraduate, though within his ghoulish reach, had nothing to fear since our meager and undernourished flesh and blood fare had little to offer him.
He was very generous with his time though. I would often peer through the glass panel of his office to see him inside, sitting at his desk, wearing a pair of beat up Sony headphones with only a patch of the original foam padding left on the speakers. I would knock, and he would never hear me. Long ago I had lost any sense of taboo going into his office unacknowledged. I would tap him on the shoulder before he turned around. He was always overjoyed to see me, like a bedridden geriatric who receives a visitor. Without waiting for me to ask, he would begin to talk about the piece he was listening to, usually Elgar. I told him that I had always thought of Eglar's music as the blindly unapologetic soundtrack of Empire, of course without ever really listening to any of it. He granted me that Elgar's music had at times been the soundtrack of Empire but forgave Elgar because at the end of his days Elgar realized that the Empire had some apologizing to do. But my God how thin he had become.
"Are you all right?" he said as he brushed the last of the snow off of my coat and hat, "You look ghastly. Here, have a cup." He used his sleeve to wipe the rim of his coffee mug and poured me some coffee from his thermos. He handed me my mug as he placed the thermos back on the desk. The coffee sloshing within the thermos echoed as though from a deep cavern.
I did not realize it until then, but I must have been a mess. My face was flushed and chapped from the cold. Marching through the storm had only aggravated the sweating and fever from my flu. My eyes betrayed my sleep deprivation, and I was out of breath from running up three flights of stairs to reach the classroom. As I sipped the coffee, I instinctively took out my new pack of cigarettes and tore open the cellophane top. It was not until I looked up at Professor Courtet's surprised face that I remembered where I was.
"Go ahead," he said, encouragingly. "We own the building, at least for today."
"You haven't seen anyone else today?" I asked.
"Only Professor Lassen," he said. "I saw him around two hours ago. Poor Gerald. Noreen is leaving him."
"Professor Lassen," I murmured. I had taken a course on Scandinavian history with him. That was what had led me to Professor Courtet's course on Ingmar Bergman.
"His stint here is up," Professor Courtet went on, "and she refuses to move with him to his next position in Indiana. I feel sorry for him, but I can't say I blame her. I've met her before. She is a charming woman, a real lady, not like us academic types. We're like hobos with books in our bindles, really, hopping the nearest freight train to God knows where."
I lit my cigarette and took a drag. He offered me the empty coffee mug as an ashtray. After I took a few puffs, he spoke again. "As long as you're here, would you like to present your seminar paper?"
"I have nothing, Professor," I confessed.
"I was so interested in your topic: incest and pedophilia in Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly and The Silence."
"I thought that they would be intriguing subjects as well, but I now realize that I have no appetite for them: I've never understood my sister, and I have no patience for children. No, I've changed my mind. I'm no longer interested in pedophilia or incest."
"Well, they are acquired tastes," he chuckled. "Stay in academia long enough and you won't be able to get enough of them. So what have you decided to write about? Oh, and may I have one?" he asked and motioned with his hand, taking a puff on a phantom cigarette.
I handed him one and lit it for him. He was probably approaching his forties, but still had a boyish face. He could sympathize with Professor Lassen. He too had survived a separation from his wife two years ago, during my sophomore year. His wife suspected him of infidelity with a coed or some other faculty member. She could not understand where he was spending his nights. When he tried to explain his whereabouts, she could not believe that he camped out in his office, that he worked late into the night and resented losing even the hour it would take him to drive home.
During the divorce proceedings, I always made a point of visiting him whenever I was in Old Glover. The divorce stole something from him, but he was so serene through it all. He had the confident air of an aristocrat for whom perseverance was easy because it was his birthright to never fail. Or perhaps his serenity was more like the eerie self-containment of an autistic child. Whatever it was, you could tell that he was going to survive the proceedings because he knew that when the property was divided, his wife's lawyers would not ask for his diplomas. My God, he had grown thin since his wife left him.
"I was thinking about The Virgin Spring." I paused.
"Good," he said and patiently waited for me to continue.
The Virgin Spring. Professor Courtet had shown the film early in the semester, and I had not given it a second thought it since. It had seemed so simplistic when I had first seen it. But on the way over to Siebold Hall, I could not get it out of my mind.
I was silent for a moment more.
"Well, if I remember correctly, you were not impressed by the film. You made that perfectly clear in class discussion. Too much hocus pocus and high opera histrionics for your taste," Professor Courtet reminded me.
"I wasn't impressed at the time," I agreed. "It was all too simplistic. The characters were so one dimensional, like a bunch of cartoons. What reason would I have to care about cartoon characters? The father, Tore, promises to build a church in the memory of his daughter, Karin, after he feels remorse for taking revenge on the goatherds who rape and murder her. I felt that in some ways he was more than justified in what he did. He probably got more justice going vigilante on them than he would have gotten by dialing 911 and waiting for the medieval constabulary force to show up. Ok, sure the part when the water miraculously sprung up under the head of Karin's corpse after Tore vows to build the church was cool; I mean, it must have been a special effect at the cutting edge of 1960s technology, but on the whole, the film just didn't seem any more complex than the 13th century medieval ballad it was based on."
"Oh, a harsh assessment!" Professor Courtet winced, as though he were the target of my disapproval. "So the question becomes: why write your seminar paper, and more importantly, base your final grade on it?" he challenged.
"Because, it is a simple film, but simplicity and complexity are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps Bergman suspected that it would be passed off as some sort of superficial religious tract because of its surface themes and imagery, that the spring that wells up under Karin's head is a straightforward symbol of Lutheran Grace, or God's sign that he is well pleased with Tore's promise."
"So what it is?" he asked
"Communion."
"Communion with a capitol 'C' in the Christian sense, or lower case "c" in terms of the community's collective loss and consolation?"
"Both," I retorted cryptically, "And that's Bergman's point. It's all about a society in flux, both the medieval Sweden that is the film's setting and Bergman's contemporary Sweden. The film is set in a time when the feudal lords were trying to wean their people away from the teat of the Norse pantheon and toward the solid food diet of Christianity, away from scattered polytheism and toward a more centralized and theologically coherent monotheism. The timing of the film's production is baffling: he seems to endorse Sweden's nascent Christian movement just as Sweden hurdles into postwar secularity. It could be taken at its face value as a delicious piece of irony: at the film's conclusion, Bergman depicts Tore's promise to build the Church as the symbol of Christianity's ultimate triumph over paganism. Only, the audience would think about the churches in their own community and realize that the very churches of "brick and mortal" that Tore built were emptying out, just like the church Pastor Tomas officiates over in the opening scenes of Winter Light". I snubbed out my cigarette against the side of Professor Courtet's mug and tossed the stub inside.
"Good association," he said, "so is this the thesis of your essay, the dramatic irony of Tore's final prayer?"
"No," I went on, "I don't think that's what Bergman was going for. Bergman was no fan of the Christianity, but he wasn't mocking it. He wasn't laughing at Tore's pretensions of building something immortal and fixed. Bergman knew that even if the 20th century congregation at Tore's Church dwindled to zero and the Church were pulled down and an Ikea put in its place that Christianity had already introduced the central and fixed discourse in Western civilization. He understood the neurosis that the Pale Galilean could produce in both the pious and secular mind, and he was living proof that both could coexist in the same psyche."
"So is that what the Church symbolizes, sort of the first fix of Christianity that forces Swedes to chase the dragon down through the centuries before checking themselves into the rehab clinic of social democratic secularism?"
"A lot like that," I agreed, "And like any addict will tell you, you need to substitute one addiction with another. If praying to God and waiting for miracles no longer had any appeal for postwar Swedes, Bergman wanted to point the way to something new, but something inescapably rooted in the old."
"And he does this in The Virgin Spring?"
"Exactly."
"So what is he getting at?"
"It's tough to say, but the clues are rooted in two images: Tore felling the birch tree, and his appeal to God after the revenge on the goatherds."
I waited for a moment. Would I have time to visit Jane after class? She shouldn't be left alone tonight; maybe I can drive her home, my home even, hers being so lonely especially now, if she doesn't want to stay at BFAC. Quiet there now, home. Quinn not coming back for the summer, living with her boyfriend from State; mom and dad could use a third in the house to keep them company; they're strangers to each other, really. Let's see, hop T: the Red Line to the Green just as I have a million times. Of course if the storm keeps up it might make things difficult. Nothing worse than getting lost in a whiteout. Easy to do. I glance outside, cold winter light through the spirited blizzard. Just as persistent as when I left my dorm, no signs of letting up. I am calling her no matter what. I would just have wait. Bergman first.
"The image of Tore wrestling with the birch tree is the opening sequence in Tore's ritual purification and preparation for his battle with the goatherds. He isn't just some guy who is taking out his anger on a tree. Alone, he grapples with the birch sapling against a desolate, lonely landscape. It is an ambiguous image, in one sense pagan: man struggling with the natural world. To pagans, nature was alive and teeming with hostile spirits and gods who would bring a man low for jollies. But it is also Christian: Tore struggling against the fate an inscrutable God has destined for him.
"One final possibility is that it is an existential image. Tore does not just wrestle with God, or sprits, but he is alone wrestling with his grief. What does it matter if there are spirits, gods, or God or none of the above? They cannot answer why his daughter was raped and murdered, and if they came to him with an answer Tore would tell them where to stick it. What is real to Tore at that moment is his grief, and he is isolated by it."
Jane too alone. Jane's grief. All alone in her dorm: an ugly, forsaken landscape. No way to make sense of her loss either. We'd uproot that tree together if I were there.
"After his ritual purification, Tore kills all three goatherds: the two older ones who actually committed the crime, but Tore's brutality against the third and youngest goatherd is immediately felt to be an injustice. Though he was a witness and bystander to the crime, he was not a participant. In fact, during the rape scene, the audience is placed in the same uncomfortable, voyeuristic position as the youngest goatherd; we are meant to identify and associate with him as a witness to the crime, and perhaps we are also meant to subconsciously share his fear of Tore's reprisal. The youngest goatherd, a victim of Tore's wrath, is ironically as much an innocent victim of this blood feud as Karin. The blood feud is at first the personal concern of the people involved, but eventually the vendettas become so destructive that they pollute the whole community. It is no longer a feud between private parties, but a monster, a Thing with a life of its own."
"So what is Bergman's answer to this proverbial cycle of violence?" Professor Courtet asked.
I had not thought this far ahead. I sat back for a moment before I said something that surprised even me. "The answer he had was love." I had not expected to say that. If the high school me had heard what the college me had said that she would have laughed, or worse, she would have felt deeply betrayed. In any case, she would have said something devilishly cynical. College Daria only lit another cigarette.
"Love?" he asked. His response was mixed with incredulity and interest.
"Love," I asserted weakly, not that I knew exactly where I was going with this myself. "Love, not in the sense that Tore comes to love the goatherds, or Tore learns to love God in asking His forgiveness." I paused again. For a moment, College Daria wanted to laugh alongside High School Daria at my preposterousness. I began again. "It's Tore's final prayer. The prayer creates the common ground needed for the rest of the damaged household to grieve." I kept going, wildly careening from thought to thought: "His struggles with the birch tree and his revenge on the three goatherds are solitary acts done to bring about justice for the community and closure for himself. He deals with the goatherds the way his ancestors would have: with swift and merciless revenge. But this only engenders more insoluble contamination, not the reconciliation he was aiming for. The old customs hold no answers for him, but then again neither does Christianity. He does not know what to do with his corrosive sin or poisonous grief. In anguish he falls to his knees and cries out to God that he does not understand Him. He does not understand how He could allow the goatherds to rape and murder his only child, or how He could allow him, Tore, to murder the youngest goatherd in cold blood. His only consolation is that they are all a part of a transcendent, meaningful design. But though there is Providence in the fall of a sparrow, he will never understand why the sparrow, his daughter, falls. Even so, he agrees to walk in faith."
"Why?"
"I don't know." I admitted, "But I don't think that Tore knows why either. He says something like that, that he doesn't know why he has to follow God, but he knows no other way to live, no other way to be reconciled to his own hands."
"That smacks of Kierkegaard," said Professor Courtet thoughtfully, "having faith in God not because this will lead us closer to knowing His will, but having faith precisely because His unknowable design is the only thing that can suture our suffering and fragmented logic."
"It's the absurdity Tore must put his trust in," I said, manically trying to find the end to my own thoughts, "and it is the absurdity that will allow him to endure. And even though this is a deeply personal conviction, it is this faith that allows the damaged souls in his household to commune together in grief. It's this absurdity that permits the equally absurd miracle of the spring. It is this absurdity that is all the hope we have in the world."
I finished my cigarette. I tossed the butt into the coffee mug where it joined my first snubbed out butt and Professor Courtet's.
"Good. Very, very good. You have no idea how proud I am of you, Daria," he said, smiling paternally at me. I blushed, or maybe it was my fever that flushed my face. No, it was probably both. Now I understood how Quinn must have felt when she brought over her boyfriend last Thanksgiving to meet the family, how dad gleamed with pride, and mom remembered a time before she had begun to gray, when she had first presented dad to the rest of the Barksdales. I, on the other hand, had brought my boyfriends, all of them: Ingmar Bergman, Tore, Karin, the goatherds, and God home to Professor Courtet's classroom for a dinner of cigarettes and coffee.
I sat back and took a deep breath. I smiled faintly, relieved that my presentation was over. It was already late. The storm had grown jealous for attention and only gotten worse outside. I could call Jane, but I knew by the tone of her voice at the end of our last conversation that she would not answer my call. I would try anyway. The only way she would see me was if I showed up at her dorm and knock until she let me in or I failed to reach her and hypothermia overtook me.
"I had better go, Professor. Thank you again," I said, getting up and shouldering my bag.
"But Daria," he objected, "It's whiteout conditions outside. Are you really going to walk back to your dorm in this blizzard?"
"I'm not going back to my dorm, Professor," I said.
"To your apartment off campus then? That's even more dangerous," he said, worried.
"No, I've got to make it to BFAC tonight," I said. My voice began to quiver, "To a friend I promised to meet."
I needed to get out of there and fast. My favorite book all throughout elementary school was Ramona Quimby, Age 8, and my favorite chapter was the one where Ramona does the most terrible, horrible, dreadful, awful thing and "upchucks" in class. I guess I was, and still am, fixated on ways people can humiliate themselves in front of others. For some reason, I had spent the last half hour talking about Bergman, but at that moment all I could think of was Ramona Quimby, age 8, becoming progressively queasier and queasier, raising her hand, trying to decide whether it was her ethical obligation to wait until her teacher, Mrs. Whaley, granted her permission to go to the bathroom, or whether her right to save face and make a run for the toilet took precedent. She chose duty above honor and was punished for it. At that moment, I knew what Ramona must have felt. I wanted to turn tail and bolt. Run away from Professor Courtet, Siebold Hall, and Raft, catch the T at Davis Square station, the Red Line to the Green Line, and run from Ruggles Station to BFAC and into Jane's arms. I wanted to hold Jane's hand and run with her, run and run until we outran the blizzard, Boston, 9/11, the War, and ourselves. Let President Bush, Dick Cheney and Osama bin Laden chase us if they liked; we would outstrip them and they would have to go back and work on the farm with the rest of the Gitmo detainees as penance.
But I could only stand stock-still. Like Ramona, I could feel my body progressively mutinying against what my mind commanded it to do, my corporeal self revolting against my rational will. My defiant body demanded that my intellect declare self-control a myth: "Dualism is a bagatelle; Descartes was a mythmaker when he went on with that twaddle of the logical, autonomous and embodied self. When his body went kaput and turned into maggot feed, his brain went along with it. For all of your smarty pants talk, it is I who can lay you low when I tell you to go fuck yourself."
My body told me to fuck off, and I collapsed to my knees, being left with no more dignity or volition than the pile of upchuck Ramona Quimby, age 8, expelled onto the floor of Mrs. Whaley's classroom. I turned away from Professor Courtet when he knelt down next to me, afraid of what had come over me. Perhaps he was afraid that my illness and the fatigue of sleepwalking through the blizzard had taken its toll, or maybe he understood that I was like him: a sick soul in a body I had let die, a fellow member of the undead cursed to haunt Siebold Hall.
I wail and I wailed on the floor where my legs had refused to lend me any further support.
"Oh God! Trent!"