So Little Souls

Rather than watch the farce of the State of the Union speech, we went to screen Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 film, Barry Lyndon. Kubrick made this film after A Clockwork Orange (1971) and before The Shining (1981). Barry Lyndon played in 35mm format in the small art house, the newly renovated Trylon Microcinema, in Minneapolis.  The theater, small and intimate, was filled with others who preferred significance and meaning to farce and meaninglessness. Kubrick’s adaptation of Thackeray’s early 19^th century novel portrays the rottenness that sits at the center of the British social and political world and the corruption that ensures of the Irish Redmond Barry who gains entrance to this aristocracy though warfare, deceit and senseless violence to which the corrupt ruling powers promulgate and to which they remain blind because Barry’s exploits mirror their arrogance and unscrupulousness.  The epilogue of the film notes that the events portrayed took place during the reign of George III against which the American colonies revolted and established their independence.  I suppose one could say that thus is an empire lost, but I think Kubrick had more in mind than to advocate for an enlightened colonization in this indictment of the insidious corrupt nature of the landed leisure classes, the government occupied by such venal leaders and its sycophants, and the seductive attractiveness of these debased ethics (is that an oxymoron?) to the desires of the poorer and worker classes for the ease of the rich.
     I know there was greater artistry and truth in this film than in Trump’s pompous, self-serving and deceitful speech that was applauded by a Republican audience of toadies and unprincipled Senators and Representatives. And I was reminded (again and still) of Tristram Shandy. Tristram demands that his coach be ready to leave at 4:00am and cautions that if it is late “I’ll raise a clatter in the house, shall wake the dead.” I think he needs to get an early start because he has vowed not to shave his beard until he reaches Paris, and obviously he is anxious to be rid of his facial growth. He is chastised for waking a whole family with his clatter by a young woman, and  in the explanation for his overexcited order, desiring not to “make mysteries of nothing,” Tristram offers a plain rationale: he attributes his demand to the desire to shave because he had vowed not to shave his bear until he reached Paris! Tristram adds that to make a mystery of nothing is the work of a ‘cold cautiousness of a little soul. This comment leads Tristram to speculate on the size of souls. Lessius, Tristram notes, says that eight hundred thousand million souls to the third power (I think—I’m not good at math or its languages!) could fit into the area of a Dutch mile: about 4.4 English miles. Ribbera avers that “no less a space than one or two hundred Italian miles multiplied into itself, will be sufficient to hold” the same number. Tristram notes that souls must be of lesser size for Ribbera than for Lessius, and Tristram comments upon the continued shrinking size of souls extending even to the present. He bemoans the fact that even now the size of the soul has shrunk, “And next winter we shall find them less again; and so if we go on from little to less, and from less to nothing, I hesitate not one moment to affirm that in half a century, at this rate, we shall have no souls at all.”
     But perhaps I might suggest that instead of souls, the actual existence of which I have some doubt, I offer a very Jewish ethic that instead of the actual presence of a ‘soul,’ our characters are define by our responsibility to the care of the widow, the orphan and the stranger in our midst because once we were strangers; the fulfillment of our obligation for me takes the place of the more Christian concept of the soul. Tristram laments that the presence of souls is fast disappearing: attend to what happens to Redmond Barry over the course of Barry Lyndon. Note the littleness of the souls of everyone with whom he comes in contact. The corruption is deep.
     In the House of Representatives last evening I think there were few souls at all and certainly not one in the body of Trump. The newspapers daily depict the absence of souls in our government, and how its actions lead the souls of the people to shrivel and die.