Since spatch's schedule blocks him from joining my birthday observed this weekend when my niece will be in town, it was important to him to take me somewhere nice on the day itself, and after some reconfiguration of plans based on parameters of pain, sleep, and sunset and some obstruction from construction and accidents on Route 2, we managed somewhere very nice indeed.

( Panoramas two-thirds sky and one-third land. )

We did not make it to the originally proposed bookstore: it was fine. We drove home down looping roads close-lined first with trees and then with malls as we made our way back from the Pioneer Valley into MetroWest. Fog drifted once across the highway from the marshes we were driving over. I looked for further meteors out the window through the least light-polluted hills and meadows, but saw mostly that I could still have read by the eighty-five-percent moon. It was a lot of time in the car and all worth it, an inland gift. It was, for everything going on in my life and outside of it, a good birthday.

Most of the Draconids we saw tonight were short flashes like Morse in the mind of the dragon, but even through the faint haze and the half-sky shine of the harvest moon just past, we saw two true long-tailed fireballs like dragon-stars, streaking through Lyra and Boötes. Their radiant stands in Eltanin and Rastaban, the dragon's eyes. Meteors, too, feel like a gift for an erev birthday. I still dream one will earth itself in a field while I am watching.

He said, I'm just out of hospital,
but I'm still flying.
—H.D., "R.A.F." (1941)

I had a lot of help—I was that sort of chap.
—Margery Allingham, The China Governess (1962)

Northbound and once again rear-facing for all the good that selecting my seat in advance did me, I watched the trees start to change beyond the gravel-span of the tracks from late southerly green to the occasional bright lick of Halloween leaves, as if the train were coming in to autumn. spatch met me at the station with a roast beef sandwich. Hestia sniffed me all over intently and then licked my nose: I was acceptable despite a week in the company of other cat. I spent the rest of the night in a sort of liquescent state and reconstituted myself this afternoon just enough for a doctor's appointment, after which I promptly decohered for several hours again.

It was such a good trip. It was low-key, which was literally what the doctors ordered. I sat on a bench with my godchild and watched him sketch in his lesser notebook. I slept into the afternoon and no one cared that I often napped after just about any exertion from a walk around the block to dinner out at a Balkan market that served me a pljeskavica that it was doing its best to be bigger than my head and the first can of Schweppes Bitter Lemon I have seen in a store for years. I ate several species of fancy tinned fish. I did not manage to get to a museum with selkie, but all things considered it may have been even better that we spent so much time just hanging out, mostly on the couch where one night my godchild came down to impart weird medical facts before returning to bed. Because he's reading it in English class, I left the first two lines of the Odyssey written for him on the refrigerator in dry-erase marker and Homeric Greek. I took many fewer photos than usual, but have my favorite: my godson, the Star.



I did not get a picture somewhere in Connecticut of the old fender pier of a swing bridge so overgrown with trees and brush, it had become an oak-trussed island, like the prow of a ship burial, but it was the best thing I saw on the return train. Changes in circumstances still being assimilated, but at least I was somewhere loving when they hit.

The sheer lamination of meta in the source material must have attracted Orson Welles to The Immortal Story (1968): a story about the failure of the creation of a story. Perhaps to cap the parallel, it should have remained, like so many of its writer-director's projects before and after, unfinished, but instead it was the last non-documentary feature he completed in his life, a lyrical, theatrical, troubling curio around which the rest of a projected anthology of adaptations never materialized, stranding it like a chip from a mosaic of dream. The 58 minutes it clocks in at are at once ethereal and formal, so sensorially precise, what they detail cannot be real. If I had heard of it before last week, appropriately I had forgotten.

The screenplay by Welles from the 1958 Isak Dinesen novella preserves its nest of narratives sometimes down to the word, even as it chronicles how slipperily they can twist away from even the most controlling teller. Late in the nineteenth century of tea-trading Macao, the autocratically self-made Mr. Clay (Welles) has become obsessed with a story he heard long ago on his passage to China, of a penniless sailor hired by a childless old man to service his beautiful young wife for a fee of five guineas. It is not the titillation of this scenario that occupies his gout-ridden hours in the great house that belonged originally to the partner he ruined over the miserly debt of three hundred guineas, which may be the stuff of scandal to the European colony but for the aged merchant is merely one more sum in the million-dollar litany of his own ledgers read nightly back to him by his head clerk Elishama Levinsky (Roger Coggio). It is its unreality, which so offends this man of closed accounts and futures only in the sense of investments that he determines to render this maritime legend fact: "People should only record things which have already happened." Unmarried himself, he will arrange for the union of a woman procured for the role of the wife and a sailor authentically solicited from the docksides, wined and dined, proffered the traditional piece of gold and brought to the candlelit bride-bed "in order that one sailor in the world will be able to tell it from beginning to end as it actually happened to him." They will engender between them not a child, but a true history. The defeat of this project will be apparent to anyone with half a head for story. The tale of the lucky sailor has its own reality to which historical truth is irrelevant, its own vitality of the oral tradition which is predicated on exactly the fact that it can be told by any man on the sea as if it happened to him because it never did. It is known across ships, it lives on them, it replicates itself through the reception of travelers from London to Singapore. It can never be made to happen for scare-quotes real because in the narratological sense which eludes the literal-minded god-game of Mr. Clay, it happened the first time it was told. The most he can achieve with his mortal marionettes is the second order of a reenactment, inescapably aware of its own script—Welles doesn't need to force the further metatext of capturing this stagecraft of bodies on film, it shimmers under the surface of the production like the ironies inherent in Dinesen, the pitfalls of collective art. "You move at my bidding," Mr. Clay crows at the hymeneal scene, directorially prepared to oversee its consummation until the curtains like a furious proscenium are jerked closed in his face. "You're two young, strong and lusty jumping-jacks in this old hand of mine," but his desire can dictate only the act. The idiosyncrasies of their chemistry, their conversation, their lovemaking and most of all what any of it may mean past the morning remain out of his grasp, these surrogates for his authorial potency whose own histories he seems curiously, adamantly oblivious to. Does he recognize the elegant, embittered Virginie Ducrot (Jeanne Moreau) as the daughter of the man he drove to suicide, now the mistress of another of his clerks after her own tumultuous sexual adventure at sea? Can he hear more than fantasized frustration in the reticence of his choice "catch out of the harbor of Macao," the ragged yet quietly independent Paul Velling (Norman Eshley), shipwrecked a silent, solitary year? It seemed not to register with him when Elishama alluded to a flight from Poland before reading from the amulet of the prophet Isaiah which is his one remnant of a trauma-drowned childhood. All these true stories lie within his reach and he disregards them, hellbent on masterminding the simulacrum of a meme, perhaps because in his greed for realism he prefers the roles to the actors, more likely because it has never occurred to him to listen. It is left to the other principals of this chamber fable to share themselves through their stories, their silences, their songs, their lies, a cat's cradle of relationships at once foreclosed and facilitated by the moves of the tale which from the start is unraveling beyond its boughten bounds. "No man in the world can take a story which people have invented and told and make it happen . . . One way or another, this story will be the end of Mr. Clay."

Of this folkloric quartet, I am predictably fascinated by Elishama, effectively the stage manager of this devil's comedy who explains his complicity in it with a sort of corporate stoicism: "I'm in Mr. Clay's employ. I cannot take on work anywhere but with him." With his Dickensian wire-rims and slicked-ink hair, he looks a familiarly servile figure in his coat as pen-black as his eyes, his hands so often folded as if with his hat in them, pale-faced as a horn-shell. The film flags his Jewishness long before he introduces himself by name, but any threat of caricature blows off with the wry courtesy with which he contradicts his master as to the nature of the story which he heard so many more times in the tempest-tossed travels that led him to Macao, and the longer the film spends with him thereafter, the more enigmatically he will emerge as a small man of substance, disillusioned, ironical, not without compassion, not even old for the concentrated fatalism of his scant room by the company's godown, "things not yet to be recounted which moved, like big deep-water fish, in the depths of his dark mind." Dispatched on a pimp's errand, he approaches it without excuse; the straw of his sober pork-pie hat is a concession to the climate, but it lends a dapper silent clown's dignity to the implacable matter-of-factness with which he waits for Virginie to realize that, like himself, she is infinitely purchasable by the mad rich men of the world. "I suppose that nobody could insult you even if they tried," she appraises him challengingly, meaning it to, like the slap in the face she gave him for delivering his master's proposition. With the same grave lightness as if taking it as a compliment, Elishama replies, "Why should I let them?" The executor of his employer's whims, he makes at the same time a strange, tacit confederate for his chosen heroine, so unfailingly respectful of her person rented for the three hundred guineas of her father's final debt—instructed to offer her a hundred, he in fact brought the correct amount—that when she begins to disrobe vehemently in front of him, the haste with which he gets the door slammed between them is the clumsiest we have seen this self-contained man, his faintest compression of reluctance as he reopens it at her call as good as another character's monologue. Paul he deals with as an impersonal factotum, but to Virginie he reveals his own stark, poignant history, hears out in turn her fears of reentering the house of her childhood, play-acting the seventeen-year-old innocent she has not been since the night of an earthquake in Japan. Her table is scattered with a time-stained deck of Tarot, but it is Elishama who foretells like the pattern in a shawl or a bottom line of figures the fatal conclusion of Mr. Clay's desire. He alone discerns that her real price is revenge. In our one direct insight into his interiority, we were assured by the intermittent narrator that he "might well have been a highly dangerous person except that ambition, desire in any form had been washed and bleached and burnt out of him," but he does not seem all that much more innocuous in its absence, a dispassion that should not be mistaken for weakness. From the right, unpredictable angles, his sharp-lined, heat-sweating face is more beautiful than the tall young sailor's in its aureole of angelically fair hair. "I thought you were a small rat out of Mr. Clay's storehouse," Virginie reconsiders him, standing before her still like a question she cannot avoid answering, "et toi—tu es le Juif Errant."

It is a stupidly gorgeous film to look at. If Welles had never worked in color before, if he spoke disparagingly of it as an element of film, he knew how to use it: cinnabar-red, malarially gold, boat's-eye blue or the bridal white of mourning, contrasted in such lapidary profusion by DP Willy Kurant that even open-air shots such as the veils of smoke against a dust-lichened wall that bloom across the initial conversation of Elishama and Virginie look as dreamily artificial as the room red-walled as sealing wax and side-splashed with the sheen of a five-guinea coin in which Mr. Clay makes his ritual pitch to Paul. The set decoration by André Piltant fabricates its port of Macao—in Dinesen it was Canton—out of landlocked Chinchón and a handful of its Spanish neighbors through the gloriously stagelike expedient of dressing their balconies and pillars and arcades with lanterns and banners, papering the walls like theatrical flats with signs in Chinese and the occasional Portuguese and stocking the market square with Chinese extras from chestnut-sellers to children at play. The harbor is suggested by nothing more than the ragged tilt of sails, just as the ellipses of the climactic sex act will be explicitized by the chirping of crickets in the equally imaginative sound design of Jean Nény. The score itself is selected from the melancholy solo piano of the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes of Erik Satie. Edited chiefly by Yolande Maurette, the film moves at a pace it is not meant as a disservice to call entrancing, since it isn't a euphemism for glacial, especially when it strolls into handheld camera or breaks itself up in a quick-cut flourish of gossip or conspicuous consumption or the blowing out of candles lensed like calla lilies. Every now and then it can feel caught between its art forms: the greyed and jaundiced streaks of makeup used by Welles for the ailing Mr. Clay would convince even from the front row of a theater, but at the distance of a close-up are obviously paint, all the odder since Moreau's rouge and powder are judiciously in character. If it makes the film feel a little handmade, it's of a piece with the carefully spare props and costumes, an ivory-headed cane, a poppy-colored wrapper, the nacreous whorl of a turban shell, a print of the Empress Eugénie of France. It's too tactile to reduce to a hall of narrative mirrors. After all its talking, it ends with an unheard song.

Because Welles hardly ever met financing without conditions, The Immortal Story was a co-production of the Office de radiodiffusion-télévision française and can in fact be viewed in the alternate cut of Une histoire immortelle, shorter by eight minutes, deeper by a few lines, texturally altered by the revision of voices as well as language—Moreau handled her own ADR in French and English, but Welles was dubbed by Philippe Noiret while Coggio in the French-language version can actually be heard as himself; he has a drily musical, effective voice that runs against his deferential appearance and I prefer it to the lighter dubbing of Warren Mitchell, although the two versions are best viewed in any case as their own movies. I discovered the English-language one on TCM and it turned out to have an entire small collection on the Criterion Channel, but it can be watched on the Internet Archive from its fairy-tale-like opening to its ultimate, perhaps inevitable punch line. "Yes, a comedy. I'd forgotten the word." It would be nice if further little jewel-boxes of Dinesen had followed, but then I'm still bummed that Welles' film of Charles Williams' Dead Calm (1963) once again with Moreau fell apart in the final stages of production. At least, unlike Mr. Clay, he made this one story as real as any performance ever is. This ambition brought to you by my recounted backers at Patreon.

I made landfall chez selkie around three o'clock in the afternoon and my godchild almost instantly wanted to show me the reorganization of his bedroom and take me for a walk as he biked with his familiar in his backpack and for the first time reciprocate in our time-honored ritual of my weightlifting him which I have been doing since he was a lankily small child and it took no effort at all.

( Well, no one except you and me. )

My early birthday present from Selkie is a rare copy of Leib Spizman's Women in the Ghettos (פרויען אין די געטאס ,1946) in timeworn but otherwise astonishingly sound condition plus a Gol/Them sticker which I am using as a bookmark. I have been fed chopped liver and lime-yuzu soda and a variety of proteinaceous snacks. I even managed to doze a little on the train once my seatmate disembarked at New York and left me room to stretch my legs out in. I could have done without lightly hitting my head on a chair likely out of sheer exhaustion, but I plan to get as much sleep out of the windowless pit as I can. As a last grace note of the night, I did not expect to find my flash fiction "Teinds" (2007) listed among Maria Haskins' "A Short Fiction Treasures Special: 2 x 25 Gems from Strange Horizons' Archives." May all of it be some kind of template for the year to come.

I forgot to bring my camera when I left the house to walk around the block this evening, but I saw a white hibiscus growing through a hedge and bees clustered around some brilliantly Halloweenish orange flowers. I have not had my head in the sand despite being under quite a lot of rocks this month, but I am still demoralized that an international friend's postcard could not reach me because of the intimidation theater of the tariffs. Nor am I thrilled that last week I had an unexpectedly bizarre interaction with a medical professional about Tylenol. I am much more cheered by the existence of ghost ponds and the renascent fern, not to mention the eleven-million-year-old asteroid no one knows yet where it hit. The Draconids peak on the eve of my birthday this year. Last week was still too many doctors, but I have hopes of fewer in the week to come. At least I managed for the first time on this new regimen to write about a film.