Slow (revised)

 

There’s a small village center that is reached by a winding road and a bike path from the house we are staying in. The center hosts a grocery store and a pharmacy. Voila, all the modern cons one needs! So I walked to it today to supply a few of our deficiencies (hamburger buns, tomato sauce, fries) and as I was trucking back with the sack the phrase “I come from Alabama. A fur piece” came into my head and I realized – I really did not do justice to slow, in my little post on slow that I am appending. Bela Tarr is one thing. Faulkner is another. Although both tells stories of protagonists who are prisoners of the rural idiocy.

Faulkner is a man of binaries: black/white, male/female. Not for him gender, or intersectionality. Instead, he has sex, he had race, and he has the cave-in of those binaries – the mulattoization that encroaches on the post-Confederate order and was there in the pre-Confederate order, motherfuckers!

Of sex, he has one exemplary fast woman: Temple Drake. Who emerges from a fast car wrecked by her drunken date to a race away from the rapist she recognized from the first glance: Popeye. She is fast and he is faster.

He also has one exemplary slow woman, a woman whose slowness is a force far exceeding her “sex” – which is how Faulkner and his characters classify her: Lena Grove. Lena is slow of speech, with that deep country Alabama accent, and slow of realization, and firm in her resolution. It is a combination that makes her slowness more than sufficient to match Joe Christmas, whose quickness is so baffled that it becomes his tragedy.

Faulkner sets up the match between slow and fast from the very beginning. This is Lena serenely hunting down the man who is father to her as yet unborn child: “backrolling now behind her a long monotonous succession of peaceful and undeviating changes from day to dark and dark to day again, through which she advanced in identical and anonymous and deliberate wagons as through a succession of creakwheeled and limpeared avatars, like something moving forever and without progress across an urn.”

This is slow not just as a tempo on a spectrum, but a tempo that projects its own force, or forcefield, one in which other people, caught unknowing in their own tempos, are however briefly extracted. If I were to find an equivalent in mythology, it would be Sati, Daksa’s daughter, Siva’s wife, to whose story Calasso devotes a part of Ka. This is how she talks to Siva.

“But does devotion bring us release?” insisted Sati. “Devotion helps,” said Siva, less and less interested. “Devotion to you doesn’t satisfy me,” said Sati. “You don’t need it. You are me. That is knowledge. Just three words,” said Siva. “And who are you?” said Sati, suddenly gentle, eying her lover. “I am that,” said Siva. “What is that?” Sati insisted, like an obstinate child. “That which tells us we’re talking…”

It is not that Faulkner had these legends in mind when he has Lena escape from her room by a window precisely eight times, or has Joe Christmas, that mulatto, that breaker of the official racial binary, take on different names as he travels. But slowness and devotion make their claims in, so to speak, the subsoil of the text.

We have come a fur piece.

And to this I attach the slow post. Here.

One of my favorite sequences in one of my fave films, Bella Tarr’s Satanstango, concerns the village doctor. We watch him get drunk in his home, fall down in an apparent stupor, and then get up – after which comes the sequence, which consists of nothing more than him walking to the village inn to get more liquor. The thing about it is, the camera follows him in real time. Since he is old, obese, and intoxicated, that means that the camera watches him make an at most quarter mile jog in about fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes! When I first saw this, I couldn’t believe it – I couldn’t believe Tarr would dare an audience to basically install itself in the speed and sensibility of one of the members of the slow cohort of the population – those users of walkers, those hobblers down sidewalks or the aisles of grocery stores, those old or impaired. Normally, we’d get a bit of slow hobbling and cut then to the doctor approaching the inn. We’d get in other words what we expect in the terms of the speedy cohort, the ones with cars, the ones who run, the ones who stride, walking their dogs, or over the beach, radiating the get it now ethos.

I’ve had my experience with slowness. When I had a minor operation on my leg, I was a limper, a crutch-goer. Once, as an afteraffect of a bad case of pneumonia, I would get out of breath after a pitifully small number of paces. However, I viewed these as mere accidents to my essential gait.

Paris is a city with a considerable population of the elderly, stubbornly clinging to apartments that, as any economist will tell you, tongue hanging out, should be put up on the free market and bought by anonymous tycoons with money laundered through Cyprus. But France, shamelessly, supports its non-use population, and so here we are: on sidewalks behind old men and women going at their own pace to whereever. I stride past them, full of pluck, but somewhere in me I know that this pace is coming for me, and sooner rather than later.

The doctor in Satanstango lives in a village where, aside from a few cars and tractors, the fastest things are dogs and horses. Not a metropole. The slow life in the metropole puts one, perhaps, in the margins, or in the subculture. But what is a major city without a subculture? In the country, especially the country night in the sticks traversed by our out of breath doctor, there’s a less kind spirit. Lamed horses are shot, cows and bulls are only allowed a certain age before they are trucked away and driven up the chute. And surely some give a slow doctor appraising looks. Yet the whole village has a sense of itself as slow, against a faster world.

This is not, I think, my fate. In my imagination, though, I do dip into it. This vacation, I am experiencing the suspended animation of a quasi-country house. Slowness for a time. But not too much time. One of my favorite sequences in one of my fave films, Bella Tarr’s Satanstango, concerns the village doctor. We watch him get drunk in his home, fall down in an apparent stupor, and then get up – after which comes the sequence, which consists of nothing more than him walking to the village inn to get more liquor.  The thing about it is, the camera follows him in real time. Since he is old, obese, and intoxicated, that means that the camera watches him make an at most quarter mile jog in about fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes! When I first saw this, I couldn’t believe it – I couldn’t believe Tarr would dare an audience to basically install itself in the speed and sensibility of one of the members of the slow cohort of the population – those users of walkers, those hobblers down sidewalks or the aisles of grocery stores, those old or impaired. Normally, we’d get a bit of slow hobbling and cut then to the doctor approaching the inn. We’d get in other words what we expect in the terms of the speedy cohort, the ones with cars, the ones who run, the ones who stride, walking their dogs, or over the beach, radiating the get it now ethos.

I’ve had my experience with slowness. When I had a minor operation on my leg, I was a limper, a crutch-goer. Once, as an afteraffect of a bad case of pneumonia, I would get out of breath after a pitifully small number of paces. However, I viewed these as mere accidents to my essential gait.

Paris is a city with a considerable population of the elderly, stubbornly clinging to apartments that, as any economist will tell you, tongue hanging out, should be put up on the free market and bought by anonymous tycoons with money laundered through Cyprus. But France, shamelessly, supports its non-use population, and so here we are: on sidewalks behind old men and women going at their own pace to whereever. I stride past them, full of pluck, but somewhere in me I know that this pace is coming for me, and sooner rather than later. 

The doctor in Satanstango lives in a village where, aside from a few cars and tractors, the fastest things are dogs and horses. Not a metropole. The slow life in the metropole puts one, perhaps, in the margins, or in the subculture. But what is a major city without a subculture? In the country, especially the country night in the sticks traversed by our out of breath doctor, there’s a less kind spirit. Lamed horses are shot, cows and bulls are only allowed a certain age before they are trucked away and driven up the chute. And surely some give a slow doctor appraising looks. Yet the whole village has a sense of itself as slow, against a faster world.

This is not, I think, my fate. In my imagination, though, I do dip into it. This vacation, I am experiencing the suspended animation of a quasi-country house. Slowness for a time. But not too much time.