Flicker (71 page)

“Are there any records of this?” I asked.

“Don't we both wish? With illustrations. No such luck, my boy. Most of what we know comes from the persecutors' side. You have to use your imagination to fill in the blanks.”

For the first time I felt one-up on my intimidating mentor. I couldn't resist the temptation. “Actually, I've had some firsthand knowledge of the subject.”

Faustus perked up, looking intensely inquisitive. “Well, hotchacha! Tell me more.”

“I met someone just this last summer who claimed to know a few Cathar sexual techniques. She offers lecture-demonstrations.”

“You must give me the lady's phone number. I may write that book after all. Do you suppose I could scare up a Guggenheim to fund some field work?”

Having hooked Faustus' interest, I took the liberty of boasting. “Her name was Olga Tell. You may remember her.”

“Wasn't there a movie star of that name some while back?”

“The very woman. She lives in Amsterdam now.”

“She must be old as the hills. Older than even me.”

“But still going strong. And very good at what she does.”

Faustus wanted more details about my adventures with Olga, which I obligingly offered. As I chatted away, blushing inwardly for the unexpurgated frankness of my account, I could tell he was coming to see me in a new light. Up till now, he'd assumed I was nothing more than a cinematic aesthete, meaning another pantywaist colleague. All it took to dispel that image was a little man talk.

“Well then, young fella,” Faustus resumed after our brief erotic detour, “you may know better than I what the Albigenses were up to between the sheets. But as you might expect, when rumors of such practices leaked out, the authorities interpreted what they heard as the sin of concupiscence carried to abominable extremes. The Cathars were even willing to countenance homosexuality as a means of birth control. Better to bugger than to beget. That was one of the principal charges against the Templars. And probably it was true. As far back as Sparta, comrades in arms have frequently wound up
in
each other's
arms. The rough love of the barracks hall. Never went in for that sort of thing myself, but it has its place. Some of the best fighters I served with were queer as a Turkish corkscrew.”

All our conversations eventually circled around to war. And that finally proved to be the undoing of our relationship, thanks to a bad miscalculation on my part. But then, Faustus was a hard man to calculate. It was often impossible to tell how seriously he expected to be taken. It was obvious enough that the figure he chose to cut on campus—that of a barbaric throwback waging war against such effete products of civilization as professors—was played with tongue-in-cheek. So much so that one easily lost sight of the deep conviction that stood behind the pretense. But it was there: an old soldier's loyalty to men he had risked death beside. Politically speaking, this made him a sort of John Wayne superpatriot and pretty much of a bullheaded reactionary on most issues. At the same time, he had been among the most outspoken critics of the Vietnam War on our faculty. His stance was a peculiar one. He was always at pains to distance himself from his colleagues and even more so from the students he had openly reviled as long-haired, yellow-bellied bums. Faustus took his stand alongside veterans returned from the fighting, associating himself with their anger and indignation. His allegiance was pledged not to the flag, but to the Order of Merit, which he wore proudly on his lapel and whose honor Vietnam had shredded beyond repair. Nevertheless, I would have thought the opposition we shared to the war might strengthen the tenuous bond between us. As I was soon to learn, I couldn't have been more mistaken.

Toward the end of the American evacuation from Vietnam, a group of my film students decided to organize a campus showing of antiwar movies, student productions gathered from around the country, a sort of “lest-we-forget” festival to landmark the end of a sad chapter in American history. I agreed to act as sponsor and host. Faustus learned about my role in the event and rang me up to ask if he might sit in on a preview screening I was scheduled to see. The request took me by surprise, but of course I agreed. The films turned out to be pretty much what one would expect: mainly newsreel and video compilations edited to play off the windy rhetoric of public leaders against endless footage of battlefield and civilian atrocities. When the lights came up after the show, I caught Faustus just as he was blotting his cheek with a handkerchief. His one good eye was blazing with tears. I
expected some rough but appreciative comment on what was an impassioned if amateurish statement on the war. What I got was a personal attack.

“Every draft-dodging son of a bitch responsible for this bad-mouthing tripe ought to be court-martialed and hung by his thumbs,” were his first words. Followed, before I could catch my breath, by, “And
you
right alongside of them, sonny.”

Surely he was joking? He wasn't. He meant it. I didn't have to ask for an explanation; it came blasting at me. “When it comes to war, there're those that have the right to criticize, and those that don't. You don't. Not when it makes all the victimized kids who got suckered into this fiasco look like homicidal maniacs. It was a dirty war, sure. But that isn't on their heads.” I was struggling to agree and disagree all at once, but he wasn't giving me the chance to do either. “We never got around to discussing the matter, but exactly what is it
you
were doing during the war, my lad? Suffering out a student deferment?”

I decided to let him assume the answer was a simple yes. The truth wouldn't have bridged the gap that was suddenly opening between us. Might as well let him think I was a draft dodger. If he found out it was my role in inflicting Chipsey Goldenstone's flagrant penis upon the public that had kept me out of war, he might reach for his broadsword.

That was the last I saw of Faustus. Even if we hadn't clashed over the war, it might have been months before I could have consulted with him again. A few weeks later, word reached me that the old fellow had undergone a triple bypass, another in a long series. He was expected to be laid up indefinitely. I sent a card and a note; neither was acknowledged. Too bad. For all our differences, he had a kind of rough, warriorly dignity that commanded respect. If anybody could ever convince me that
Sands of Iwo Jima
was a better war movie than
Grand Illusion
(a point we had argued) it would have been Faustus. But that was as far as he could follow me in the discussion of film. And just now I needed to go a lot farther. I was down to the last missing link in my study of the Cathars, the question that had trailed me home from Zurich.
Why movies?
How was I to account for the peculiar association of the orphans with the art of film?

Brother Justin called the movies “a new form of prophecy … appropriate to our time.” Was that all there was to it: that movies
were a popular art, that they reached so many more people than literature did? And—if it was a Castle film (or maybe one day a Simon Dunkle film)—reached those people with more impact?

For a time, I settled for that simple explanation, though with increasing reservations. Something in me wanted to believe there was a deeper connection between the orphans and the movies. But I might never have guessed what it was without help from the most unexpected of all sources.

One day a package arrived at my office at school. The return address told me it was from Le Bureau National des Successions Nonreclamées in Paris, which meant precisely nothing to me. It was lavishly decorated with all manner of official stamps and labels. The U.S. Customs Service had done me the favor of examining it, leaving the outside wrapping in tatters. The Film Studies department secretary had to sign two French-English forms before it could be delivered.

There was a letter taped to the outside of the parcel. In ponderous French bureaucratese, someone whose signature I couldn't read regretfully informed me that Karl-Heinz Rosenzweig was, as of some three months earlier, deceased. He had died still an inmate of the Lyons asylum where I'd visited him. More cheerily, the letter went on to say that as the mad old man's executor, I was herewith in receipt of all his worldly goods—to wit, this parcel, which held a cardboard box about as large as a medium-sized suitcase.

This was totally ridiculous. How could I possibly be Rosenzweig's executor? An attachment to the letter answered my question. It reminded me that the document I'd hastily signed as I left the asylum included an agreement to serve in that capacity if nobody else turned up. Nobody had. The box was all mine. Lucky me.

With less than no enthusiasm I clipped the tape that held the parcel together. From inside a faint, but distinctly evil smell escaped. Had something died in there? At first, the contents seemed to be wrapped in old rags. Then I realized that the old rags
were
the contents. The dead priest's clothes, too poorly laundered to dilute the pervasive odor of urine. (Hadn't I told them,
no clothes?)
There was a pair of well-worn and equally noisome shoes, a pair of eyeglasses with one lens gone, pens, pencils, a rosary, a lower denture, a few photographs.

All this I deposited in the nearest wastebasket—except for the rosary, which I kept as a macabre souvenir of one of the modern world's least celebrated thinkers. Finally, there were some books and papers. I recognized the papers as the inscrutable materials Rosenzweig
had brought with him to our one-sided interview. I set these aside for later examination. As for the books, there were eight of them in four languages, all old and edged with mold. Three of these, the most yellowed, were in Latin and looked like self-published works done in broken type on cheap paper. The titles had the ponderously obscure look of Rosenzweig's own fulminations: long, rambling, and probably incomprehensible.

There was also a Latin Bible, a German prayer book, a copy of St. Ignatius Loyola's
Spiritual Exercises,
a withered Greek text whose title I couldn't decipher. Finally, there was a slender, well-printed volume in French that had the look of respectable scholarship. It dated from 1956 and bore a title that translated as
The Manichaean Communities in Eastern Anatolia 329–415
A.D.
The author was a priest named E. D. Angelotti, O.P. A Dominican. He had inscribed the book to Rosenzweig, referring to him as “my dear friend Karl, an ally in the Great Cause.” Beneath his signature, Father Angelotti had drawn the little symbol I now recognized as the emblem of Oculus Dei. This was the only book in the Rosenzweig archives I judged worth reading, or at least skimming. A fortunate decision. It made all the difference.

Not that I could have guessed as much at the outset. The style of the work was dry and plodding. Still I persevered, mainly because I'd so often come across references to the Manichees in other works. Like the Cathars who honored them highly, they too were believers in the two gods, for which reason, they'd also suffered persecution at the hands of the church. The book before me was a pedantic little study of some isolated groups of Manichees who had managed to survive longer than most others and had left some documents behind in a few villages of Asia Minor near the Bactrian frontier. It told me nothing I very much cared to know—until toward the end I came upon a section that had been heavily annotated by Rosenzweig. This I read carefully. It turned out to be a revelation.

I learned that the Manichees had once used a peculiar teaching device, a few of which had been found among the remains of the communities under study. It was a little packet of crudely drawn cartoons that could be flicked with the thumb at one side. As the pages riffled by, the cartoons upon them would seem to move.

A flip-book. The most primitive form of moving picture. The oldest example of persistence of vision. Motionless pictures that appear to move because the eye isn't agile enough to catch the gap between
them. Every kid has played with one. They come with Cracker Jack.

Father Angelotti didn't think the Manichees had invented the flipbook; he was certain it had a much older history reaching back as far as the Babylonians. But the Manichees had put this toy to a very serious use. It was the basis of their heretical catechism. They taught that the gap between the pictures symbolizes the abyss which is the dwelling place of evil. Whenever the gap flashes by, in just that fleeting split-second, it is like a crack opening up in the walls of the universe, revealing the great lightless void beyond God's creation. The pictures were said to be “real,” therefore good. The gap between them was said to be the absence of the real, therefore evil. So—flip, flip, flip—the little books pitted good against evil, Being against Nothingness. Riffle the pages, ponder their meaning. And what did the cartoons depict? Two figures, one white, one black. They rush at one another; they clash. Lord of the Light, Lord of the Darkness, forever at war. Just that.

The first movie.

In a footnote, the author mentioned the continued use of flip-books among the Cathars in later centuries. By the time the Inquisition was on the scene, the little device had become an expensive entertainment. Those found carrying one were arrested on suspicion of heresy. Father Angelotti traced these ancient picture shows on down to the time of the Templars, who, he believed, were indeed Cathars. They were said to have invented a sort of magic lantern that could project flip-book images on a screen. The device was used in their secret rites, which were of course denounced by the Church as an obscene display.

So it turned out that my zany pal Sharkey hadn't been far off the mark back in those days when we shared the duties of the projection booth at The Classic. There had indeed been a kind of medieval movies. Perhaps it was no coincidence that an emblem of the old knightly orders—the Maltese cross—had lent its name and shape to the little gear that rests at the heart of every motion-picture projector and there feeds the film through the light box frame by frame, each illuminated frame divided between light and darkness by the bladed shutter, and all timed to trick the laggardly eye into seeing movement where there is no movement.